sea sun and stars

sideblog for poetry and other things

[victusinveritas]

Mary Oliver spitting facts.

[nobrashfestivity]

Felix Vallotton, 1913

more

[seekingstars]

IN 150 CHARACTERS OR LESS - Nikita Gill

[enbeemagical]

Text:

(all caps) In 150 Characters or Less

Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things

and trying to make life worth living,

and I know I don't have to believe in everything,

but I believe in that. /end

[nyctarian]

Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, pages 176-77

[boobookittenartblog]

Foie Graphics

[weltenwellen]

Lindsay Tigue, from "Code"

[seasunandstar]

Vermin

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" What child cries out, ‘An exterminator!’? One diligent student in Mrs. Taylor’s class will get an ant farm for Christmas, but he’ll not see industry; he’ll see dither. "The ant sets an example for us all," wrote Max Beerbohm, a master of dawdle, "but it is not a good one." These children don’t hope to outlast the doldrums of school only to heft great weights and work in squads and die for their queen. Well, neither did we. And we knew what we didn’t want to be: the ones we looked down on, the lambs of God, blander than snow and slow to be cruel.

-- William Matthews, from The New Yorker

[apoemaday]

Keeping Quiet

by Robert Bly

A friend of mine says that every war Is some violence in childhood coming closer. Those whoppings in the shed weren’t a joke. On the whole, it didn’t turn out well.

This has been going on for thousands Of years! It doesn’t change. Something Happened to me, and I can’t tell Anyone, so it will happen to you.

[apoemaday]

"To read only children's tales..."

by Osip Mandelstam tr. Robert Chandler

To read only children’s tales and look through a child’s eye; to rise from grief and wave big things goodbye.

Life has tired me to death; life has no more to offer. But I love my poor earth since I know no other.

I swung in a faraway garden on a plain plank swing; I remember tall dark firs in a feverish blur.

[apoemaday]

The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

by Mary Oliver

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts. I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks. I want to see how many stars are still in the sky that we have smothered for years now, a century at least. I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all, and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know. All that urgency! Not what the earth is about! How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only. I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts. In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

[apoemaday]

I Am Learning to Abandon the World

by Linda Pastan

I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of hills, moving to a flat, tuneless landscape. And every night I give my body up limb by limb, working upwards across bone, towards the heart. But morning comes with small reprieves of coffee and birdsong. A tree outside the window which was simply shadow moments ago takes back its branches twig by leafy twig. And as I take my body back the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap as if to make amends.

[projectiondepartment]

[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.  There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.  The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like:  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you. 

/end id]

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press Goose Lane Editions Breakwater Books Ltd. The Acorn Press Bouton d'or Acadie Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada

[three--rings]

When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig.  I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports?  What’s your favorite subject?   And I told him, no I don’t play any sports.  I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.  

And he went WOW.  That’s amazing!  And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” 

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them.  I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life.  Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them.  I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them. 

[seasunandstar]

Birds

for Hanif Abdurraqib

The day my grandmother fled her homeland, a thousand birds blackened the sky like night. That’s not true, but I never know what to say

to call you close. In their 1676 volume Ornithologiae, Francis Willughby and John Ray developed the first classification

of birds. Oh, bird. What will I do with you? Everything I write, a way of saying: look what I can do

with language. I am trying to tell you: I miss wonder. I wonder if nostalgia is what we invented to name ourselves species

and mean: we once stood on the same shore. If history were as brackish as what thrashes in us, how could we possibly worship our reflections? Show me

an animal who has built a god from such roiling waters. In my house, a stiller mirror. Some say glass is liquid moving very, very slowly. Speed it up

and, there, the ocean, like the one my grandmother watched the birds dive into—headfirst, all at once. Once, a woman fell in love

with a bird. She spent her whole life removing power lines and painting glass doors. Stay with me. I just want us to see

what we are crashing into. In 1758, Carl Linneas modified Ornithologiae to devise the taxonomic system currently in place. Classification

is a country. If the pens of white men had fallen differently, we might share a homeland. I might be a bird.

-- Claire Schwartz

[seasunandstar]

Ripeness

Ripeness is what falls away with ease. Not only the heavy apple, the pear, but also the dried brown strands of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body love this world that gave itself to your care in all of its ripeness, with ease, and will take itself from you in equal ripeness and ease, is also harvest.

And however sharply you are tested -- this sorrow, that great love -- it too will leave on that clean knife.

-- Jane Hirshfield

[whisperthatruns]

The problem with any first sentence, said Joan Didion, is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. Before beginning, too many options. Then, in the next breath, none. When you can't sleep, goes an old cure for insomnia, start telling yourself the story of your life. For some reason, writer's block has always felt to me like a kind of insomnia. I like that Norman Mailer said there's a touch of writer's block in a writer's work every day. I don't remember who said, Insomnia is the inability to forget. When you're having trouble writing, get up, go out, take a walk in the street. You will discover that certain streets exist precisely for this purpose. Once, I saw a man---homeless by the look of him---digging through the trash. He pulled out a couple of sheets of newspaper, examined them, and threw them back. Fishing deeper, he hauled up a magazine, squinted at the cover, and threw it back. Shit, he said, walking away. There ain't nothing to read in these fucking cans anymore.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)

[apocryphics]

franz wright

[seasunandstar]

[image id]

There is a heartbreaking beauty about my crummy street tonight, at 2 o'clock in the first snow: I stand looking out at this window, I think how everything seen is something seen for the last time. At last I turn away, I give up. I am tired, I can't mourn anymore the loss of what I never asked for and never understood

[/id]