Needle and Thread / Nettle and Breath

A gathering of fragments

[nettleandbreath]

Mood.

[nettleandbreath]

"To light, and then return -" — Emily Dickinson, Jen Bervin #thegorgeousnothings

[nettleandbreath]

"Nor would the mechanical death of moments have come roaring down on us as darkness, had we not stopped to look round for the light." — Anne Carson, Plainwater

[nettleandbreath]

"There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it." I know I'm late to the party, but this book is fucking awesome. (at Furet du Nord)

[theyuniversity]

[maudnewton]

I have never truly been in love with anyone who couldn’t write a beautiful letter. By beautiful, I mean spontaneous and true, surprising and passionate. I mean that every word feels as though it was written especially for me and that when I reach the end I read the whole thing again, two or three or five times more, without stopping. I mean that I want to bask in the language, or to bathe in it or eat it or have sex with it, or at the very least to put the envelope under my pillow so that if I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it and I want to make sure my favorite part really is as deep or as intimate or delightful as I thought, I can read it again right away….

Last year I wrote a letter for therumpus' Letters in the Mail. I thought about it a lot while I was holed up writing over the past year, so I decided to post it on my site. (via maudnewton)

If this isn’t a reason to subscribe, I don’t know what is.

(via therumpus)

[nettleandbreath]

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

Anne Carson, Nox

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

“All weather is sin-related. Lust causes thunder, anger causes fog, and you don’t want to know what causes dew.” ―Stephen Colbert, I am America (And So Can You!)

[nettleandbreath]

Consider incompleteness as a verb. Every verb has a tense, it must take place in time. Yet there are ways to elude these laws. The Greek verb system includes a tense called aorist (which means “unbounded” or “timeless”) to capture that aspect of action in which, for example, a man at noon runs directly on top of his own shadow.

Anne Carson, from Plainwater (Vintage, 2000)

[nettleandbreath]

Nor would the mechanical death of moments have come roaring down on us as darkness, had we not stopped to look round for the light.

Anne Carson, from Plainwater (Vintage, 2000)

[nettleandbreath]

Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.

Mary Ruefle, "The Cart," from Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010)

[nettleandbreath]

Spring card-making > spring cleaning.

[nettleandbreath]

So I go on and on Into the night And the townspeople, they say to you That they may have seen A monster But no no I was only the dawn

closing lines to Dorothea Lasky’s, “What Poets Should Do,” from Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012)

[nettleandbreath]

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

Wallace Stevens, “Section VIII,” from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

[nettleandbreath]

Your redletter brain as you struggle and sift longlost puns comes a torrent of noise each cell shimmying on its little mitochondrial hilt. Pure energy there.

Anne Carson, from Red Doc> (Knopf, 2013)

[nettleandbreath]

I’m just sayin’… untapped market…

[nettleandbreath]

All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars.

Anne Carson, from Red Doc> (Knopf, 2013)