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why does god keep making poets?

[mikarchive2-deactivated20250714]

clarice lispector, the hour of the star ( translated by benjamin moser )

[polyhedric-dimension]

All I know of love is hunger.

[weltenwellen]

Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies

[weltenwellen]

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

[weltenwellen]

That scene in The Bear where Andrea Terry says "I got to do all the things I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do them... with the people I wanted to do them with."

[ivynightshade]

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am an observer, but not by choice.’

[text id: my fist has always been clenched around the handle of an invisible suitcase. / i am always ready to leave. / there is not a single room in this world where i belong.]

[somerabbitholes]

book recs masterpost

an ever-updating masterpost of books i've recommended. please check these before you ask for recommendations in case they've been covered —

fiction

"the tragedy still happened, but it was important that the love was there"

japanese literature

korean literature [1], [2]

gothic writing

spooky adult horror gothic

some favourites

marathi books

some ruskin bond

indian fiction [1], [2], historical fiction, stories, [3], [4]

non-fiction

general assorted ones i like

some favourites

about people living through crises

on geopolitics, foreign policy, international affairs

on political philsophy

vaguely sociology

biographies

on economic history

on the silk route

on prisons, convict labour

on afghanistan, soviet invasion, terror

capitalism

on language and linguistics

on the ancient and prehistoric world

just a bunch on india

the indus valley

indian aestheticism, art

gupta empire

sangam literature

on the northeast

india and southeast asia

nur jahan, mughal women | more

islamic conquest and state-making

on kashmir

assorted nonfiction

colonisation and aftereffects

on nationalism

on cities

on mumbai

on bollywood in bombay

on cities

on delhi

on kolkata

essays

history, migration, labour

art, reading, travel, gender, sports

nature, climate, some history

political economy, environmental and urban history, cartography and space

my comfort books

light reading

books that have got me out of my slumps

on art, photography, aesthetics, design [1], [2], [3]

on the environment

just some story and essay collections

[geryone]

Blud, Rachel McKibbens

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID: If you could / destroy the story before it started, would you -- / go back -- before the unnameable thing? ]

[totebagbisexual]

[witchesversuspatriarchy]

Full Moons 2023

[firstfullmoon]

“I did what I could. I was so lonely. I loved you. I wrote many small books using methods and forms popular and unpopular with my contemporaries. Among these books was a book of my terrors, a book of my dreams, a book of imagined things, and a book about the rabbits in the yard. I wrote a book for computers with voices. I wrote a book based on euphonious sounds. I wrote a book that was a universal novel. I wrote a book for an avant-garde collective. I wrote a book of traumatic facts. I had written only one book before that time, but at last I put the point of my life to immediate use. I wrote this memoir that you are reading, then I wrote a book that was a history of the future in advance of itself.”

— Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women (via proustiansleep)

[astranemus]

“The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.”

— Sophie Strand, The Birth of The Flowering Wand

[toastbutteregg]

i feel this on every level

[havingrevelations-deactivated20]

mental illness made me so desperate for joy that i forgot it was this simple… feeling the ocean against your skin… a really good guitar riff… sun on your back… holding the door for a stranger… a cold shower on a hot day…….. the world is like a cradle and i am just a little baby. eyes wide open there is so much to see

[emungere]

“Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in centre stage, and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”

— Leonard Cohen on why people enjoy listening to melancholy songs. From a BBC radio interview in 2007.  (via elviskeepsmypictureinhiswallet)

[thecountessolivia]

Reminds me of this

[letterful]

— MARIE HOWE.

[kristina100000]

if someone told me to come and listen to the wind blow with them i would do it. if someone told me to come and sit on their bed while they get dressed i would do it. if someone called me late at night to come and walk with them i would not hesitate and i would do it... i would do it to be there

[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!) 

[pinene]

sorry but I am not subscribing to our society’s disgusting obsession with youth. when I turn 30 I’m going to be really happy and throw a party and be elated at how much I will have grown by then, the same way I did when I turned 10 and celebrated finally being ‘double digits’. When I turn 40 I will be ecstatic. There are good and bad things about every age but there is no way my 20s are going to be the best years of my life because I am still barely getting to know myself. By 30 I hope to be very well-acquainted

[pearwaldorf]

There are many primers on how to start with Ursula K. Le Guin, all of them perfectly fine, but I haven’t seen any that just go with “Start with what’s available and easily accessible”. 

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is available online, and it’s only four typewritten pages. Confession: I hadn’t read this until today. You may think, as I did, because you know the story through osmosis (as probably many people who are familiar with sci-fi do) you don’t need to read it. You would be wrong.

This website has collated stories that are available online. They all appear to be from free sources like Baen, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld.

On Le Guin’s personal website there is a great deal of stuff: poetry (original and in translation), book excerpts, interviews, and writing advice. 

She blogged pretty extensively for many years, and there’s some lovely stuff in there. Her penultimate entry was about her cat Pard and the Time Machine. (just Ctrl + F for “pard” on the archive index. Trust me.)

Don’t let me stop you from going to the library or your online bookstore of choice to get her books, of course, but there’s plenty of stuff available that you don’t have to go very far to access.