Culture Lens

global focus with a local angle. @lakitalki

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Books I read in 2022

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“Home is Where Your Best Friend is” by Mira Jacob https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a41831019/home-is-where-your-best-friend-is/

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On Becoming an American Writer

“If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/19/on-becoming-an-american-writer/

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https://catapult.co/stories/i-sought-a-good-luck-charm-to-write-i-found-my-body-instead-omamori-katie-okamoto?

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During the Impossible Age of Everyone by Ada Limón 1. There are so many people who’ve come before us, arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo. Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them, generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay. I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour. 2. If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears, like how all the cattle run off loudly as you approach. This fence is a good fence, but I doubt my own haywire will hold up to all this blank sky, so open and explicit. I’m like a fence, or a cow, or that word, yonder. 3. There is a slow tractor traffic hollering outside, and I’d like not to be traffic, but the window shaking. Your shoes are piled up with mine, and the heat comes on, makes a simple noise, a dog-yawn. People have done this before, but not us.

Ada Limon

[lakitalki]

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

James Baldwin

https://openspaceofdemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/baldwin-creative-process.pdf

[lakitalki]

So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-morrison

[lakitalki]

Dear P. - Someone will love you many will love

Someone will        love you     many will      love

you         many will brother you   some of these

loves will        bother you   some   will      leave you

one might        haunt   you      hunt you in your

sleep        make you       weep the tearless kind of

weep the         kind of weep   that drowns your

organs     slowly    there are little oars  in your body      

little boats   grab onto them and row and        row

someone will tell you      no       but you won’t   know

he is    right until you have   already        wrung your  

own heart dry    your hands dripping knives    until

you have    already   reached your hands into       his      

body and put them through his        heart     love is

the only thing that       is not    an       argument

[lakitalki]

[lakitalki]

Anytime we write about a topic that makes us feel nervous, it is hard. Anytime we write from a place deep inside us that feels revolutionary ... Anytime we write about something that feels new or different or radical or lays our heart on a plate for any old stranger to feast upon.

Jami Attenberg

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“I think writing is a kind of muscle that’s learning to be flexible. To be flexible, you have to practice stretching. If you haven’t stretched in a while, learning to begin again is tenuous. If you move too fast, with too much force, you lend yourself to injury. To stretch is to take your time with softness.”

— Annika

https://www.annikaizora.com

[lakitalki]

How to by #GloriaAnzaldua #poetry #writing

Free associate or shift

Into automatic writing. Let it all out.

Put the vomit away for a week.

Cut and paste

into some kind of order.

let the presence of the poem find itself.

Discard a word

or add another, let meaning grapple

for its existence

let the words

fight it out in your head,

but if the fight doesn't end

up in your gut,

you don't have a poem.

It's not on paper you create

but in your innards

you always have help

someone or something stands

over your shoulder.

After the fight

you weed out the losers

you move the winners

closer to the light,

you prune, you polish

the remainder

is the soul of the poem

the feeling is the space around it

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

“The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”

—

Audre Lorde – The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

[benuebaby]

Thank you bell hooks for your moving words. For teaching me how to show myself grace, for blessing the world with your divine knowledge and wisdom.

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