thisisthepoeticjustice

I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.

[words-and-coffee]

Hate rises up inside her. A hate that clashes with her servile urges, her childlike optimism. A hate that muddies everything. She is absorbed by a sad, confused dream. Haunted by the feeling that she has seen too much, heard too much of other people’s privacy, a privacy she has never enjoyed herself. She has never had her own bedroom.

Leïla Slimani, Lullaby (Translated by Sam Taylor)

[thingsfromthedirt]

The Party on the Stairs by Adelaide Claxton (c. 1875)

[owengentillustration]

Icarus - Personal painting based on the song of the same name by Nic Jones, written by Anne Lister 

[veepoutofcontext]

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Mary Oliver, from Long Life: Essays & Other Writings; The Perfect Day, 2004.

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[nowordsandnotune]

Not quite sure why the clarinet addition got me crying, but here you go people: just in case, let's get you some new pads.

[women-loving-art]

Mary Oliver, from Flare

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

This gorgeous poem by Chaia Heller

[readmydesire]

on hedonism by anne carson

[soracities]

Hồ Xuân Hương, "Jackfruit" (tr. Natalie Linh Bolderston), pub. Modern Poetry Review [iD'd]

[soracities]

Maram al-Massri, from A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (trans. Khaled Mattawa) [ID'd]

[soracities]

Maram al-Massri, from A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (trans. Khaled Mattawa) [ID'd]

[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!) 

[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

[sagewraith]

The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can’t. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

Victoria Chang, Obit

[thecrownedgoddess]

“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”

Edward Said, Representations of an Intellectual

[sanstoitniloi]

"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."

- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity