curated falsehoods

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[florizels]

What is the holiness of empire? It is to know collapse. Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged.

Anne Carson, Excerpt of

The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide

from

Glass, Irony and God

(via

florizels

)

[lifeinpoetry]

The way to hold on is afterwords so clear.

Anne Carson, from “New Rule,” Men in the Off Hours (via lifeinpoetry)

[brizzlewritesthings]

Imagine: I’m laying in your bed. I’m under your covers, I’m on your pillow. You touch my face softly. Is this the dream or was the time spent apart the dream? Imagine: You press your thumb to my lips. You say the word ‘holy’. Imagine: You recreate my ribcage with your fingers. You teach me a new language with your mouth. You touch me with intention. Imagine: I let you. I uncurl. I am reborn. You’re not God, maybe you are. Maybe this is what the light is. Your hand on my throat. Imagine: I wake up in the same empty bed again. You are many miles away and the moonlight is touching you so softly I could scream. Imagine: I say that the exquisite truth of it is, if you ever did get to touch me, I think I’d die.

Imagine. (via @brizzlewritesthings)

[thoodleoo]

But now among the Lydian women she stands out Just as, when the sun has set, The rosy-fingered moon Surpasses all the stars And her light spreads over The salt-bitter sea And likewise the many-flowered fields.

Sappho, Fragment 96.6-11 (via thoodleoo)

[eligracely]

They kept asking me, ‘What does the poem mean? What does the poem mean?’ And it was frustrating me because poems don’t mean. They suggest. They enact. They provoke.

Richard Siken (via egracely)

[thoodleoo]

I say that someone will remember us even in another time

Sappho, Fragment 147 (Lobel-Page)

[hush-syrup]

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

From Elm by Sylvia Plath (via avvfvl)

[elucubrare]

If the bare trees at the glass were kings really, I would know they bend over in grief, mourning their lost brilliant crowns that they can only watch, not reach as, beneath them, they let go of all color all flash all sway, it would be better, I wouldn’t have to say no they are not kings, they are trees, I know this, and if they bend it is wind only, it is nature, isn’t it also indifference? Passing yesterday the bodies that, wrapped and wrapped, lay sprawled above the steam as it left the vents of my city, I could only fumble for the words (dead lamb, dead lamb) to some song to sing parts of, I gave, but what I gave - is it right to say it helped no one, or can I say I brought lullaby, sealed a thin life, awhile longer, in sleep? What is failure? “Having read how there were such things as orchard lamps for keeping the good fruit, on colder nights, from freezing, I was curious for that kind of heat” go the lines from a poem I never finished. The shorter version is: once, twice, in a difficult time, I have failed you. No poetry corrects this. But does it mean we don’t love? In the last poem of you waking, I am any small bird, unnoticed, above, watching; you are the traveler who can’t know (there is fog, or no stars, a steep dark) that the all but given up for impossible next town is soon, soon. Come. We turn here.

Carl Phillips, “Alba: Failure” (via elucubrare)

[photography-cnl]

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

Sarah Williams,”The Old Astronomer” (via landscape-photo-graphy)

[antigonick]

[Dionysos]. Swoony type, long hair, bedroom eyes, cheeks like wine.

Euripides, Bakkhai (tr. by Anne Carson)

[seelen-suche-deactivated2016060]

Live or die, but don’t poison everything.

Anne Sexton (via words-and-coffee)

[medeae]

I thought/ that pain meant/ I was not loved./ It meant I loved.

Louise Glück, from Ararat (via medeae)

[caveofhypnos-blog]

November — with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes — days full of fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees

L.M. Montgomery, from ‘The Blue Castle’.

[fishinthepalm]

(via caveofhypnos)

[stuffgurlswant]

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

Vivienne Westwood (via stuffgurlswant)

[mercurien]

mary shelley’s reading list for 1815

Do you ever look at your reading habits and think, “damn, these could be just a bit more like those of a genre-codifying Romantic literary prodigy??” 

Of course you do. Why would you not. 

So I was reading a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Florence Marshall the other day & it referred to her “list of books read in 1815″ and, having nothing better to do, I tried to find links for every book she mentioned online (& in roughly contemporary translation because she could read like 4 languages??), most of which are out of copyright. Some of them I couldn’t find anywhere, some of them were so vaguely recorded I couldn’t work out what they referred to, but the ones I could find still comes to about 60 books, some of which are scarily hefty tomes, which she was reading in between having 2 kids and her husband trying to persuade her to get off with his best friend. So tl;dr I love Mary Shelley so much & this might rank somewhere in the list of The Saddest Things I Have Ever Done (which is saying something I guess).

Keep reading

[lifeinpoetry]

i will tremble. i will kiss you. you will tremble. you will move all the earthquakes out of me.

Salma Deera, from “you may be bad but you are loved,” Letters From Medea (via lifeinpoetry)

[harshada]

But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (via missmillay)