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Rain who nails the earth, whose infinite legs nail the earth, whose silver faces touch my faces, I marry you. & open all the windows of my house to hear your million feral whispers of si si sí sí sí
Aracelis Girmay, “Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador,” Kingdom Animalia (via lifeinpoetry)
On this rainy day...
Ingmar Bergman
The Darkest Truth About Love from Hannah Jacobs
Now let’s pretend we do not know any of this
(The most timely reminders)
i feel like i wasn't made for this world. is that possible? are some people just born wrong?
you are of this earth, little calendula. little blooming, blossom of thing. look at how the wind touches you, cradles you. sink your mouth into the morning. feel it — do you know how un-alone you are? this world, man-made and constructed from concrete slabs and steel sheets, with a militaristic government that is slowly working to chip away at our soul-stuff, at what makes us human, what makes us feel — who wants to belong to that so-called world? it is violent and it is grieving and sometimes it’s hard to face but we gotta look at it. we gotta look. buddy — you belong to this earth. to its people. to the colors, to its dancings. to the skirts swinging against our heels. to the laughter around the corner, salsa music by the lakeside. we were made for each other, the whole lot of us. if nothing, if you don’t feel it from anywhere else tonight, let me tell you that i am here. that i support you. that there are people here who understand, and who will always try to understand. do you know how deep the sun sets? how deeply you will feel, one day, settled into yourself? this distance is bridgeable. reach out. reach in. hold your skin close. feel yourself breathe. you were made for this world, for this life, for you. you were made, and i — and so many, so many, so much of this world — we are all so grateful for you being here. oh god i mean it so much. i mean it so, fucking much.
the distance is bridgeable.
I am not interested in what Bourdieu, or Kristeva, has to say about grief. I don’t want a grid, I want arms. I don’t want a theory; I want the poem inside me. I want the poem to unfurl like a thousand monks chanting inside me. I want the poem to skewer me, to catapult me into the clouds. I want to sink into the rhythm of your weeping, I want to say, My grief is turning and I have no way to remain still. I am not interested in feeling by proxy; I go to the hollow when I want to empty, I go to theory when I want to sit with someone else’s thinking, I go to myself when I want to see you.
Sina Queyras, from ‘Water, Water Everywhere’ in MxT (via secretinterference)
Poetry really does have a problem—it isn’t dying, though, just adapting to the destructive forces of modern life, like everything else on the planet. Poetry is the urban coyote of the art world, or maybe an apocalyptic cockroach: It lives a different life now, but it lives and will live on. For thousands, probably tens of thousands of years, poetry served a very clear and important role as the only way to fix language. Poetry pinned the wings of narrative, and helped oral stories and rituals leap from one generation to the next mostly unaltered. Musical rhythms and repetitions embedded in speech were a matter of life and death—rituals brought the herds and the rains and appeased the gods; stories shared warnings and told of our place in the cosmos. For that reason, I think poetry is, maybe not in our DNA, but a part of our epigenetic heritage, let’s say. And it worked—see the striking similarities in the global flood myths as evidence. Or the universal power of a passionate speech. Poetry matters, and has mattered, for a very long time. But this use of poetry has also been under assault for a long time—every piece of technology, from the earliest cuneiform texts to the iPhone video camera, has chipped away at poetry’s original source of value, to the point none of that value is left. The idea of using poetry for communication or commemoration is anachronistic, to say the least. The unindoctrinated, the “people” who don’t (yet) read poetry (as opposed to the “poets” who do) are still stuck with the ancient idea of how poetry is used—and so they find no use for it. Story lives in movies, music in the mp3s, memory in the digital camera. How can poetry compete with any of that? As almost everyone reading this knows, poetry evolves, and has been evolving for centuries—real modern poetry has very little to do with storytelling or record keeping. Instead, it taps into that subconscious, structural, cognitive, inherited, epigenetic (whatever you want to call it) deep history of human culture—from a nursery rhymes’ role in language acquisition to a liturgical play of emotion—and becomes a brief but direct connection from mind to mind. The art of poetry has evolved into the transformative injection of another’s mental state into your own being. I’ve used this analogy many times, but another way to put it is that poetry is magic. A poem is a spell, cast—a string of sounds that, when recited correctly, changes consciousness from one position to another. It’s abracadabra hocus pocusing Bugs Bunny into a bat. I can sense the skepticism from here, 12 hours or days or weeks in the past, so a few examples. In our contributor notes of our current issue, Deborah P. Kolodji explains why she loves haiku: The words of Bashō pop into my head—translated by Lucien Stryk, ‘summer grasses/ all that remains/ of a warrior’s dreams’—and I start to cry. The sadness of the earth, the memories of the fallen, and the words of a seventeenth century poet in Japan all come together in a moment of connection. Separated by centuries and thousands of miles, Bashō and I are in the same place. This is why I love haiku. Just saying those words takes her there, to Bashō’s hut and the grasses, and brings real tears. Poetry can be a mantra, a touchstone. When I’m feeling down, I recite to myself E.E. Cumming’s “Into the Strenuous Briefness”—thinking of the “i do,world” and life as a strenuous briefness, always seems to inspire a strangely joyous resolve. Poetry does this in many ways, though, and it’s always through voice—poetry is the music of speech, but is unique in that the reader is the artist’s instrument. When I read a poem by Robert Frost—even silently to myself—it’s Frost regulating my own breath like a conductor from the grave. When I read a poem about an experience that I don’t know, or maybe even can’t know, suddenly I can, in a way that would never be conveyed outside of art, and never as directly as through the art of poetry. […] The reason why I don’t like most poetry is that I’m only interested in this magic. I don’t care about sound or metaphor or beauty or wit, or any of those elements, unless they work in the service of the magic of the poem. All else is exercise. All else is masturbation. If a poem isn’t transformative, then it has no use for me—and I don’t know why it would have a use for any modern audience. Transformation is hard, though, and most of even what’s published doesn’t really work. Magic is magical; it’s mysterious. An incantation can fail for the slightest and most indeterminate of reasons. Moreover, it’s subjective—we all know art is subjective, but this is why it’s subjective. Even the best of spells won’t work on every demon—but that doesn’t mean we should stop casting them, or exposing their power to those who haven’t experienced the magic yet. So I don’t like most poetry—and I’m sure, if you were being honest, you’d say you don’t like most poetry either. We can admit it; it’s all right.
from “Practical Magic, or Poesiametalalalology,” by Timothy Green, The Best American Poetry (via commovente)
[T]he reality of the poem is a very ghostly one. It doesn’t try for the kind of concreteness that fiction tries for. It doesn’t ask you to imagine a place in detail; it suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.
Mark Strand, in an interview with Wallace Shawn (via weissewiese)
into the strenuous briefness Life: handorgans and April darkness,friends i charge laughing. Into the hair-thin tints of yellow dawn, into the women-coloured twilight i smilingly glide. I into the big vermilion departure swim,sayingly; (Do you think?)the i do,world is probably made of roses & hello: (of solongs and,ashes)
“Into the Strenuous Briefness,” e.e. cummings (via commovente)
Revisiting e.e. cummings is always (too) nostalgic.
A tree in Turkey, adorned with Nazars; charms designed to ward off the ill effects of the evil eye.
The future of poetry is with the poets.
via nevver
What Alice liked about photography were the actions more than the results. She liked opening the back flap of the camera and unrolling the new film by a couple of inches, just enough to catch it in the runner, and thinking that this empty film would soon become something and not knowing what, taking the first few snaps into the void, aiming, focusing, checking her balance, deciding whether to include or exclude pieces of reality as she saw fit, enlarging, distorting.
Paolo Giordano (tr. Shaun Whiteside), from “The Solitude of Prime Numbers” (via weissewiese)
Yes, yes, yes! What I try to explain to others when they ask me about being an analogue photographer - the process as a succession of moments of magic, when your body feels light and the world goes silent.
travellers, by philip larkin
In trains we need not choose our company For all the logic of departure is That recognition is suspended; we Are islanded in unawareness, as Our minds reach out to where we want to be.
But carried thus impersonally on, We hardly see that person opposite Who, if we only knew it, might be one Who, far more than the other waiting at Some distant place, knows our true destination.
via rabbit-light
Jacob Silverman, from ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’: the mantra of the Instagram era
In a digital landscape built on attention and visibility, what matters is not so much the content of your updates but their existing at all. They must be there. Social broadcasts are not communications; they are records of existence and accumulating metadata. Rob Horning, an editor at the New Inquiry, once put it in tautological terms: “The point of being on social media is to produce and amass evidence of being on social media.”
[…]
The achievement of social-media evangelists is to make this urge – the urge to share simply so that others might know you are there, that you are doing this thing, that you are with this person – second nature. This is society’s great phenomenological shift, which, over the last decade, has occurred almost without notice. Now anyone who opts out, or who feels uncomfortable about their participation, begins to feel retrograde, Luddite, uncool. Interiority begins to feel like a prison. The very process of thinking takes on a kind of trajectory: how can this idea be projected outward, towards others? In this environment, interiority, privacy, reserve, introspection – all those inward-looking, quieter elements of consciousness – begin to seem insincere. Sharing is sincerity.
Aries - someday someone will love you so much that they won’t be able to stop themself from waking you up in the morning when you are still sound asleep; someday they’ll love you enough to let you sleep. Taurus - winter is almost over, and soon it will be warm enough for that feeling in your chest to melt away. Gemini - just because someone doesn’t feel the need to show you something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; remember that the next time you feel like prying secrets from someone’s mouth. Cancer - you spend so much of your time pouring yourself out; you deserve to fill yourself with nothing but sunlight and clean air for the rest of your life for all the time you’ve spent giving yourself to other people. Leo - observing yourself is the only way to grow. Virgo - someday someone will be so important to you that you’ll stop trying to play it cool. Libra - there is a mirror in your chest and everyone who loves you sees a part of themselves in you; this can be truthful or it can be a reflection of what they wish were true, so it is up to you if you want to break the mirror or leave it whole. Scorpio - finding a balance between your quiet and your loud feels like it is never-ending, but once you figure out how to stop bouncing from one end of the spectrum to the other, you will know what it’s like to walk away from a conversation without feeling like you were either sucked under or like you overshadowed every other voice. Sagittarius - there is so much going on in your head that you can’t explain to anyone, and I just wish I knew how to explain to you that so many of your problems will be ironed out by time. Capricorn - there are parts of you that aren’t gone, they’re just from versions of yourself that are so far from who you are now that you feel like you’ve lost them; if you look hard enough, you can find them again. Aquarius - scratching the surface is easy; it’s dealing with what you find at your core that will shake you in the right direction. Pisces - go on a long drive and don’t go home until either your mind is less tangled or you’re almost out of gas.
next week’s horoscopes, maria s. (via sweetestsecrets)
may something comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, rain on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes, a kiss, or even me—in my chilly kitchen with my coat on—thinking of you.
Ellen Bass, from Insomnia (via violentwavesofemotion)
Me @ my teachers: Listen. The universe is terrifyingly vast and is full of unexplained darkness which exerts gravitational pull without any visible mass. One day you will not remember today, and one day no one will remember you. One day there will be no one. Every nightmare we have is a glimpse into an alternate universe’s reality. What I’m saying is I didn’t do the homework.
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