tender demented

(by Mary Stein)

[marycstein]

I dare you to hold yourself steady in the aftershock of reading Gretchen Marquette’s poetry. 

[marycstein]

[marycstein]

White Debt

Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege.

[theparisreview]

If you were alone on a desert island and there were no more world and no more people, would you go on writing? Supposing I had the pen and paper, I probably would.

Lydia Davis (via theparisreview)

[weareherethisisnow]

The Murder of Crows

"All our crows are dying. The deaths come under different names."

“All our crows are dying. The deaths come under different names. The deaths present with different causes: suicide, murder, addiction, police brutality. Over half a million crows sit, caged, unheard, unseen, and they are dying one day at a time. Those that are free are hunted, shot down, shot on the street, shot on their land. They are not protected, not by any treaty, not by any act. All our crows are dying.

***

I am envious of crows and of their flight. I fly in some of my dreams. Like the one in which I am a crow cutting through the air, one among hundreds of thousands unchained, unburdened. Like the one in which I am a raven sitting on a rock in the desert enjoying the stillness, the peace of it all, unrestricted by civilization and its systems, its rules. In these dreams, I am filled with joy. I hope to be one of them someday later, some life later. I hope to be a creature of flight so that I can leave the earth beneath my feet, the earth that my ancestors were forced onto, the earth filled with their sweat and blood, the earth that holds the bodies of all of those we have lost.”

[theparisreview]

James Tate, 1943–2015

James Tate at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in 1965. Photo by Elsa Dorfman.James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award,... Read More »

James Tate, 1943–2015.

[marycstein]

A loss that has created another unfillable hole in the poetry world.

[housingworksbookstore]

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black.

(via ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’ - The New York Times)

Necessary reading - Claudia Rankine in The New York Times Magazine

[marycstein]

Vola nel cestino

There is a translated version of my very short story, “Flyer” (that originally appeared on Tin House Flash Fridays) recently translated into Italian and published on Dudemag. I highly recommend reading its google translation from Italian to English, which is a whole different language in and of itself. 

Many thanks to Materiale d’importazione (Material Import) editor, Daniele Zinni, for taking interest in the story, and to illustrator, Alberto Fiocco, for the charming art. Here it is in all its glory: 

Dal momento che sei una persona ragionevole, i pulcini morti – quelli contro i quali metteva in guardia il volantino – sono seppelliti sul fondo del tuo cestino della spazzatura metallico, sotto frammenti di pastelli gialli, grumi di gomme da masticare rapprese e pezzi di carta appallottolati, tra cui lo stesso volantino. Sono però sopravvissuti più pulcini di quelli che credevi, e adesso ce ne sono a dozzine che zampettano per la stanza, scacazzando dappertutto. 

(read the rest here)

[marycstein]

Here is a link to a phenomenal interview on Numéro Cinq with the ever-brilliant Jen Bervin, who discusses her project, Silk Poems, and the poetry of Su Hui –exploring the intersections between textile, nanotechnology and poetry:

I’m a Big Fan of the Joyful Solution: Interview with Jen Bervin — Darren Higgins

“Su Hui’s intended audience for the poem, and her intended purpose as well, is quite singular and yet the poem everything but—it’s infinite. It’s easy to fall into the trap of speculating about a writer’s life instead of focusing on her work, and this is too often the case with women artists and writers. When a lot of translations of the poem exist and Su Hui’s work is getting tons of attention, I won’t need to have this redirecting bent. I look forward to that.” 

[marycstein]

Restoration through Creation for Those Who Have Experienced Poverty - The Loft Literary Center

“We swim in our mother’s stress hormones, breathe in toxins, and are victims of violence at higher rates than folks born into families with more resources. Yet, something magical happens when individuals born and raised in demoralizing conditions due to persistent poverty begin to give the account of their own lives. Conditions, factors, and correlations do not have the last word. Poverty does not have the last word.”

A beautiful post by the ever-intelligent/talented/kind/generous Sherrie Fernandez-Williams. 

[marycstein]

“It was only then, after the hazard was gone, that the people of the town saw the deep divide it had carved between them.” - Year of the Snake

A real-time pre-nap story brought to you by the incredible Amelia Gray.

[marycstein]

Novel in progress.

[therumpus]

Earlier in the day I’d typed “how to talk to someone with dementia” into Google. Experts suggested showing pictures. They said you shouldn’t argue with them, no matter how absurd the things they said. And, tell them you loved them. This gave me pause. Did I love Paulie? Was it possible to love someone you’d barely thought of in ten years, someone you’d so easily let slip from your life? What would it mean to love her? To love anyone? This sounds rhetorical, but it isn’t. Despite our cultural fixation on the idea of love, we have shockingly little consensus about the word: what does it mean? Is it a noun or a verb? What does it look like to love another?

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: What Do You Bring Pauline? by Elizabeth Tannen. (via therumpus)

The fabulous Elizabeth Tannen.

[poisonouscandyfactory]

I never believed, for a moment, that anyone ever learned a single thing about poetry from hearing a lecture. Don’t misunderstand me; lectures are important insofar as they teach us how to talk about poems, but never do they teach us how to write them. Nothing does. Except, sometimes, the dead. Why is that, I wondered, when poetry is alive and well insofar as plenty still-beating hearts are writing it? And I came to believe—call it delusional—that no living poet, non, could teach us a single thing about poetry for the simple fact that no living poet has a clue as to what they are doing, at least none I have talked to, and I have talked to quite a few. John Ashbery and/or Billy Collins can’t teach you a thing, for the simple fact that they are living. Why is that, I wondered? I mean I really wondered. I think it is because poets are people—no matter what camp they sleep in—who are obsessed with the one thing no one knows anything about. That would be death. They talk to the dead and have a rapport with the dead and write about death as if they had done it, which is utterly ridiculous because they are not dead and never have been and cannot teach us a single thing about death and being dead. And yet—here’s the weird thing—THE MINUTE THEY BECOME DEAD THEY CAN TEACH US EVERYTHING. Why, why is that? I think it’s because the minute they are dead all of their poems about death become poems about being alive. And we are alive and can be taught something about that. I mean it. John Ashbery or Billy Collins can teach you nothing about poetry today, July 21, 2009, but if one of them were to die tomorrow he could teach you something about poetry on July 23, 2009. Poets are dead people talking about being alive. It’s that simple. People who are alive are not really people because they haven’t died; but people who have been alive and then died are the whole kind of people we want to be our teachers. I really can’t explain it, being alive and all.

Mary Ruefle, “Short Lecture on Death”  (via poisonouscandyfactory)

[marycstein]

What I'm reading:

- Thomas Bernhard, The Loser 

[marycstein]

What I'm reading:

- Kazushi Hosaka, Plainsong 

[marycstein]

– from Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes