self-affection

[louisegluck]

Anne Carson, from Red Doc> [ID in alt text]

[hwhwgwhnwnwbwbwg-deactivated202]

Lora Mathis

[soracities]

“A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body. It does this by taking over and briefly possessing existent bodies: the body of the double bass standing vertical while it’s being strummed, or the body of the mouth-organ cupped in a pair of hands hovering and pecking like a bird before a mouth, or the torso of the drummer as he rolls. Again and again the song takes over the body of the singer, and after a while the body of the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song, are remembering and foreseeing.”

— John Berger, from ‘Some Notes About Song (for Yasmine Hamdan)’, Confabulations

[letterful]

btw archive dot org is SUCH a treasury when it comes to out-of-print poetry anthologies… i am having the time of my life, truly ❣️

[letterful]

some of my bookmarks:

against forgetting: twentieth-century poetry of witness,

postwar polish poetry (edited by czesław miłosz!),

poems for the millennium: the university of california book of modern & postmodern poetry vol 1 + vol 2,

essential pleasures: a new anthology of poems to read aloud,

poems that make grown women cry + poems that make grown men cry,

the oxford book of short poems,

a book of women poets from antiquity to now,

first loves: poets introduce the essential poems that capitivated and inspired them (so many literary greats!),

the poets’ grimm: 20th century poems from grimm fairy tales,

disenchantments: an anthology of modern fairy tale poetry,

arthur, the greatest king: an anthology of modern arthurian poems,

chapters into verse: poetry in english inspired by the bible,

killer verse: poems of murder and mayhem,

poetry in medicine: an anthology of poems about doctors, patients, illness, and healing,

a mind apart: poems of melancholy, madness, and addiction,

friendship poems + marriage poems + motherhood poems + fatherhood poems,

billy collins’ poetry 180 + 180 more,

good poems + good poems for hard times

the penguin book of… modern african poetry + irish poetry + japanese verse + hebrew verse + love poetry + sick verse (sic!) 

[tamsoj]

Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

[response-to-other]

joel oppenheimer

[response-to-other]

-- cid corman

[electramouthed]

 Selves are crucial to writers.  […] Reading and writing require focusing the mental attention upon a text by means of the visual sense. As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort for the individual, psychologists and sociologists tell us. In making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action. The recognition that such controlling action is possible, and perhaps necessary, marks an important stage in ontogenetic as in phylogenetic development, a stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration.  If the presence or absence of literacy affects the way a person regards his own body, senses and self, that effect will significantly influence erotic life. It is in the poetry of those who were first exposed to a written alphabet and the demands of literacy that we encounter deliberate meditation upon the self, especially in the context of erotic desire. The singular intensity with which these poets insist on conceiving eros as lack may reflect, in some degree, that exposure. Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself. For individuals to whom self-possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event, as it may be in an oral environment where such incursions are the normal conductors of most of the important information that a person receives. When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.

Anne Carson, from Eros the Bittersweet

[flowerytale]

Virginia Woolf, from The Waves

[lifeinpoetry]

When I’m suffering I don’t ask for help. I’m afraid they’ll come and try To take my pain away.

— Elisa Gabbert, from "Dramedy," Normal Distance

[electramouthed]

 Because the light is not something you see, exactly. You don’t look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don’t look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette. And you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet) although the fact that he is there, silent and absent beside a thin wisp of cigarette smoke, hammers you. You rest your chin on your hand, like a saint on a pillar. Moments elongate and drop. A radiance is hitting your skin from somewhere, every nerve begins to burn outward through the surface, your lungs float in a substance like rage, sweet as rage, no!—don’t look. Something falling from your mouth like bits of rust.

Anne Carson, from Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

[sawasawako-archived]

It can be a challenge to get working people to recognize themselves as workers, let alone as surplus-to-be, one workplace accident away from a burden to society. It’s equally daunting to get an “able bodied” person to see themselves as a potentially disabled person. But the point isn’t that everyone is potentially disabled, but that everyone is currently vulnerable under capitalism, which creates false divisions between the sick and the healthy, the disabled and the able bodied, as if we weren’t all just bodies that do what they’re supposed to do — break down.

– Is Anyone Ever Well?, Natalie Adler

[response-to-other]

-- Svetlana Cârstean

[llovelymoonn]

this body is not a home

jody chan sick (via @geryone) \ edward hopper interior, model reading (1925) \ olivia laing the lonely city (via @soracities) \ joan didion on self-respect (via @girlfictions) \ dion palinckx (2019) \ james tate selected poems (via @heartshop) \ @artofbrianluong​ \ olivia laing the lonely city (via @soracities​) \ edvard munch self-portrait in hell

shout me a chai latte

[transangelicism]

regarding the röttgen pietà, elle emerson

[dailyrothko]

On this day in 1970, we lost 𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗥𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗞𝗢, whose work left an indelible impression on millions of people. Many viewers have had transformative emotional experiences interacting with his paintings, the same kinds of experiences Rothko claimed to have painting them. In spite of the grand scale of many of his works, Rothko sought an intimate communication between the work of art and the “Sensitive observer” he trusted more than any critic.

It’s impossible for artists to rise above their myth, doubly perhaps when the manner of your death creates headlines overshadowing more measured insights that might push us towards elucidation. Maybe Rothko was temperamental or had good and bad paintings. Maybe some have dimmed too far to be still reachable, but Rothko’s impact is impossible to shrink to irrelevancy or chalk up to artistic fad. His work endures and burns brightly in hearts of generations of art lovers.

Today I’ll share the artist’s reflection on his own work, a rare later statement from Rothko who had all but given up, trying to explain himself by the time he addressed the Audience at the Pratt institute in 1958.

Peace and love to everyone and thanks for sharing the artwork and helping it live.

Art © Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society

[thefugitivesaint]

Nikki Giovanni, ‘Allowables’, “Chasing Utopia”, 2013 Source This poem was once making the rounds and I thought I’d share it again.