collecting poetry & quotes @collectingpoetry - Tumblr Blog

[Visual ID: ink illustration of songbirds on tree branches. End ID.]

Hello!

My name is Artie and my pronouns are it/fae/he/they.

This sideblog was made with the purpose of collecting and sharing poems, sort of like a scrapbook.

I welcome and encourage any submissions of poems! Please send them my way, either as an ask or post submission (although if it’s a post submission, I may have to change the format and make it a new post).

I also welcome asks that are discussion-based or questions related to this blog, literature, etc. I am a Creative Writing Major at a liberal arts college that has one of the top undergraduate creative writing programs in the US. I am very passionate about it and love to ramble!

I will tag themes poem title and author of each poem posted (and sometimes specific tags to the context of the poem/poet, such as “#wwi poetry,” for example.

Tags used:

#collecting poetry -> all the poems I post

#theme: ___ -> sometimes I will tag themes in a poem if I remember and have the time/energy

#collectingpoetry #blog intro #pinned info #creative writing #poetry blog #pinned post #pinned intro #intro post #introduction #introductory post #creative writing blog #poetry #poems #poems and poetry

Self Portrait Against Red Wallpaper

by Richard Siken

Close the blinds and kill the birds, I surrender my desire for a logical culmination. I surrender my desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive. Take it or leave it, and for the most part you take it. Not just the idea of it but the ramifications of it. People love to hate themselves, avoiding the necessary recalibrations. Shame comes from vanity. Shame means you're guilty, like the rest of us, but you think you're better than we are. Maybe you are. What would a better me paint? There is no new me, there is no old me, there's just me, the same me, the whole time. Vanity, vanity, forcing your will on the world. Don't try to make a stronger wind, you'll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You want to solve something? Get out of your own way. What's the difference between me and the world? Compartmentalization. The world doesn't know what to do with my love. Because it isn't used to being loved. It's a framework problem. Disheartening? Obviously. I hope it's love. I'm trying really hard to make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severely and slept through all my appointments. I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I'd rather quit. I'd rather be sad. It's too much work. Admirable? Not really. I hate my friends. And when I hate my friends I've failed myself, failed to share my compassion. I shine a light on them of my own making: septic, ugly, the wrong yellow. I mean, maybe it's better if my opponent wins.

Wanting to Die

by Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die, but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love whatever it was, an infection.

What Resembles The Grave But Isn't

by Anne Boyer

Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”

havingapoemwithyou

A not admitting of the wound (1188) by Emily Dickinson

Black Cherries

by W. S. Merwin

Late in May as the light lengthens toward summer the young goldfinches flutter down through the day for the first time to find themselves among fallen petals cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows of the garden beside the old house after a cold spring with no rain not a sound comes from the empty village as I stand eating the black cherries from the loaded branches above me saying to myself Remember this

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There Is the Endlessness

by Michael Bazzett

of time, of course, sliced inwardly; no matter how brief the moment, halve it again, and the endlessness

of change and sea and fire and sky will be stirring once again beneath the leaves, like the toad you once

held as a child, its pale throat pulsing soft as water until it scrabbled and you let it go.

Poem on Air (April)

by Terrance Hayes

Handcuffed in daylight walking through air today the subject imagined a near future where other subjects project a cloud of information overhead. Aptly branded “the halo” this new technology, a wireless implanted cranial device, will project the business (messages, expressions, longings, paths & implicit pathologies) of the customers along with advertisements & light filters they cast over themselves. The word “almost” hovers over lovers almost in love. The day is almost finished. The air is almost air. “Had this device already been invented, I might have a like-minded soul on my walk,” the subject thinks observing the magenta blooming in the magnolia hanging around the park, but the subject is grateful to have private thoughts & recalls how little one can concentrate on a date.

Untitled [“When I was eleven”]

by Linda Gregg

i

When I was eleven I found a private river moving Through the horse’s skull. I carried that thing down The mountain, Watching my small shadow Far away On the other hill. I buried it below my home; In the woods, Under the horrible violet myrtle, Near my father’s creek.

ii

Where I was afraid of something. There are rivers, like doves; wonderful, And your mouth … Tells me, your mouth, How difficult To drink only through the holes in that skull. Forever I will feel the foliage move above me; Will lie near the wet roots And stems, humming On the water My song.

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April Midnight

by Arthur Symons

Side by side through the streets at midnight, Roaming together, Through the tumultuous night of London, In the miraculous April weather.

Roaming together under the gaslight, Day’s work over, How the Spring calls to us, here in the city, Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!

Cool the wind blows, fresh in our faces, Cleansing, entrancing, After the heat and the fumes and the footlights, Where you dance and I watch your dancing.

Good it is to be here together, Good to be roaming, Even in London, even at midnight, Lover-like in a lover’s gloaming.

You the dancer and I the dreamer, Children together, Wandering lost in the night of London, In the miraculous April weather.

Contagion

by Kiki Petrosino

I wake up in my body & it’s worse than a war zone. My smoke-cloud of blood my hair grenade tick tick boom. It’s worse than a war zone when I cruise past your brunch. Just to get bread. Just ordering juice. I open my mouth & the War rolls out, dense as a foghorn. I can’t keep from squeezing my skull. I keep time-traveling back to the noon of my birth. Worse than a war zone that Sunday, that time, when I wept in the War of myself. That’s the first war I knew. It was worse than a war.

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collecting poetry & quotes