Exquisite thought. Untethered feeling.

Anwar. 22. An individual, committed to social justice, inspired and frustrated and impassioned by everything.

[maroonracoon]

girl tries dating the elements

[soracities]

Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra (1924), Letters to Véra (ed. Brian Boyd & trans. Olga Voronin)

[Text ID: “I dreamt of you last night — as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me…”]

[lifeinpoetry]

I glimpse myself in the mirror. I’ve been warned never to stare in a mirror while here. Don’t even ask why, just do it anyway. My gaze a gaping question. Pupils an abyss. The center of an inverse universe, eternal corridor of mirror reflecting deeper into some ancient beginning that is also an always and impossible future staring back. Mouth of a hungry ghost. Narcissus. Bloody

Mary. I want to see—I’m not sure what.

— Ely Shipley, from Some Animal

[bostonpoetryslam]

“What is the United States if not a clot of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?”

— Natalie Diaz, “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You,” from Postcolonial Love Poem

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“There are wildflowers in my desert which take up to twenty years to bloom. The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand Until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them in its copper current, opens them with memory— they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.”

— Natalie Diaz, from “Postcolonial Love Poem,” Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020)

[lifeinpoetry]

“You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.”

— — Etel Adnan, from Shifting the Silence

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“I replace one obsession with another. In this room made for falling—where I carve new ways I fucked up into the trees of that summer. An entire ballet of memories to mutilate.”

— Bob Sykora, from “I Have My First Vision in the Middle of the Night,” The Shore (no. 2, Summer 2019)

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

Sula by Toni Morrison

[lifeinpoetry]

Where are they now that they are even too late to be late? Where is the way home on the map? Where is the goddamn map?

— Mike White, from “The Dead Fathers,” published in The Kenyon Review

[ryebreadgf]

sharon olds / julia de burgos / ikenaga yasunari / toni cadre bambara / zadie smith / alejandra caballero / louise glück / stefan zweig

[luthienne]

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

[luthienne]

Richard Hugo, Essay on Poetic Theory: The Triggering Town

[lifeinpoetry]

but when the day calls i will answer to my name claim it like a fire rushing toward living things i will rise   because there is someone praying for me to remain still

— Kara Jackson, from “i woke up and the day caught me,” published in The Slowdown

[soracities]

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Complete Poems

[Text ID: “(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)”]

[luthienne]

Ingeborg Bachmann, In the Storm of Roses; “Land of Fog” (tr. Mark Anderson)

[luthienne]

“Grief and rage - you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Give me blood and rage and / a heart for horror; teach me to be / tough enough to face this world / still standing. Make a Fury of me.”

Elizabeth Hewer, from “Finding Ariadne” in Wishing for Birds

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Mumford & Sons, “Lover’s Eyes”

“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself,”

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“We, hurt by ourselves, keen / to be hurters and keen / to be hurt back deep inside. / We, like weapons laid / beside anger asleep.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke; “Antistrophes” (tr. Edward Snow)

“…she did not allow herself tears. When she did cry, she would explain her tears in this way: ‘I am not weeping, I am bursting with rage.’”

Gabriella Fiori, from Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

“Isn’t all that rage so ugly? / And isn’t it mine, still? / Good god, isn’t it mine?”

Ashe Vernon, from “Buried,” Not a Girl

Ada Limón, from “The Good Fight”

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

Anne Carson, excerpt of To Compostela

[bostonpoetryslam]

“I am unable to detail a personal history. Merely gesture toward air that circulates around the crux of it.”

— Andrea Rexilius, from New Organism