Malleable Skin

[zegalba]

Rick Owens autumn/winter 2024

[malleableskin]

A Cedary Fragrance

Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water—

not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy, awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.

*

If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen.

*

For Hirshfield, the decision to go on, to stay present to suffering in a way that permits transformation—and to write poems that can themselves become vessels of transformation—has been just that: a decision. While at Tassajara, she read over the poems she’d written in college. She was shocked to discover that “almost every poem ended with an ellipsis, a trailing off, a disappearing…as if I hadn’t wanted to be alive. Ever since, I’ve been trying to correct that error.” When I asked how, she answered without pause: “By falling in love with the world.”

[malleableskin]

[luthienne]

Gregory Orr, from Poetry as Survival

(transcription below cut)

In a sense, Jacob wrestled with the unfathomable mystery of existence in its darkest form—the mystery of unprovoked violence and evil. A mystery that sought to destroy him but that, when resisted heroically, could be transformed into a sort of blessing. It might seem odd, even offensive to use the word blessing in proximity to the terrors of traumatic violence. But "blessing" itself is a strange word. In French blesser is a verb meaning "to wound." "Blessing" in modern English is the bestowal of spiritual grace and power through a gesture. Often, in the Christian ceremony of baptism, this gesture involves the sprinkling of water on the person. But the original Anglo-Saxon origin of blessing is blestein, which meant "to spatter with blood." The history of the word itself enacts an uncanny overlapping of violence, wounding, and spiritual grace, as if it wishes to hint at some connection deeper than logic can penetrate.

[talestalesof]

Marie Howe, from Magdalene

[talestalesof]

Marie Howe, from Magdalene

[prehistoricmancunt]

“Maybe the desire to make something beautiful/is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”

From ‘Franz Marc’s blue horses’ by Mary Oliver

[typewriter-worries]

You were burned, you were about to burn, you’re still on fire.

Red, White & Royal Blue, Casey McQuinston | Alegoría de la Caridad, Francisco de Zurbarán | Portrait of Saint Augustine, Philippe de Champaigne | Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov tr. Hugh Aplin | Portrait of a Lady on Fire dir. Céline Sciamma | If Not, Winter, Sappho tr. Anne Carson | War of the Foxes, Richard Siken | Figura alegórica de la Caridad, Simon Vouet | Mercy, Andrea Dworkin

[luthienne]

Gregory Orr, from Poetry as Survival

(transcription below cut)

SURELY, WE WOULD be right to say that trauma is, by definition, among the fiercest and most destructive forms disorder can take. Trauma, either on an intimate or a collective scale, has the power to annihilate the self and shred the web of meanings that supports its existence. And yet, the evidence of lyric poetry is equally clear— deep in the recesses of the human spirit, there is some instinct to rebuild the web of meanings with the same quiet determination we witness in the garden spider as it repairs the threads winds and weather have torn.

[beautymyeyes-see]

Ocean Vuong, from Daily Bread, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

[serratedpens]

Jordan Kisner, ‘Oranges’ for The Paris Review

[serratedpens]

Kaveh Akbar, “An Oversight”

[serratedpens]

Sylvia Legris, “My Dear Love,”

[mashamorevna]

“I ache, brilliantly.”

— Adrienne Rich, from The Fact Of A Doorframe; Poems Selected & New, 1950 - 2001: “The Demon Lover” (via etherealcowgirl)

[serratedpens]

Li-Young Lee, “This Hour and What Is Dead”         

[serratedpens]

Li-Young Lee, “This Hour and What Is Dead”          

[serratedpens]

Cynthia Cruz, “Phosphorescence”