Poetry is the evidence of life

[havingapoemwithyou]

Worm Moon by Mary Oliver

[havingapoemwithyou]

Stilled life by Donna Allegra

[dk-thrive]

My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night. I open mine as wide as possible. I like to see everything, I say. What’s there to see? Moon. Air. Sunrise. All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up. I like to wake up.

― Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay” in “Glass, Irony and God” (New Directions Publishing Corporation, November 17, 1995) (via Alive on All Channels)

[macrolit]

“There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”

— Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (b. 7 January 1891)

[feral-ballad]

Vikram Seth, from Summer Requiem: A Book of Poems; “Things to Say”

[firstfullmoon]

hanif abdurraqib via his instagram stories

[orpheuslament]

Angels in America, Tony Kushner

[literarymiscellany]

“If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.”

— Anne Carson, “Could 1,” from Candor

[holybeings]

Fire feelings

[lisareadsthings]

[neoyorzapoteca]

Muriel Rukeyser

[wovi]

[wovi]

lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

*

adam phillips, on flirtation

[readmorepoets]

Hey, where is that quote about Jane Eyre as linked to Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast from? Is it Maria Tatar’s Bluebeard book, or Heta Pyrhonen’s Bluebeard Gothic, or something else? Thank you!

hi thank you for asking!! i forgot to add the source that was my mistake. it’s from a paper i was reading titled "bluebeard and the beast: the mysterious realism of jane eyre"

[virgin-martyr]

“Every family is a cruel, intransigent monarchy.”

— Heather O’Neill, excerpt from When We Lost Our Heads

[metamorphesque]

― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

[familyabolisher]

hey so i made a patreon cos my income is very unreliable and absolutely about to dip after next week. no pressure, obviously + you can pledge as much or as little as you like; i also haven't made any tiers or anything like that because i want to continue to facilitate equal access to my writing rather than sticking it behind a paywall. if however you have the money to spare and you've found my writing (on here, on substack, wherever) helpful or enlightening or anything else, it would be hugely appreciated :~) thanks!

[familyabolisher]

i also have a ko-fi if you'd rather just like tip me a couple of quid as a one off, lol. i just made the patreon bc my ko-fi tends not to get used very often and i'd rather something a bit more reliable

[harlecore]

if i had tiktok i would make one where i lie and say that shirley jackson knew cottagecore would happen and cite the sundial as an example and i would lie about it in the most sensationalist condescending way and then after posting i would delete the app