#ben downing

[llovelymoonn]

ben downing saudades

kofi

[photographylj]

Masketta Fall 9/4/16 @ Oxford Art Factory

[maskettamoli]

The cutest puppy and the cutest human 😍😍😍😍

[liveandlovethequestions]

“Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.”

— Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76 (interview by Ben Downing and Daniel Kunitz)

[bookofwriting]

"In Poetry and the World, I wrote: 'Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.' A couple of friends who read it in draft said, Well, Robert, you know . . . dancing is probably more bodily than poetry. But I stubbornly left the passage that way without quite having worked out why I wanted to say it like that. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. After a while, I realized that for me the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth. That is, poetry's medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem—a body, and not necessarily the body of the artist or an expert as in dance."

— Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76 (interview by Ben Downing and Daniel Kunitz), The Paris Review

[liveandlovethequestions]

"Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them."

— Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76 (interview by Ben Downing and Daniel Kunitz), The Paris Review

[theparisreview]

A scattering of mind (like rain flung out small and squalled against the random panes attention turns to in its hunt for some lasting fascination that will hold its gaze and not allow a second scene to come and slide its heart away) is hard to stay and even harder to abide.

—Ben Downing, “The Weather” Art Credit Heidi Swanson

[sirsavantsmooth]

Inshallah

by Ben Downing —which is to say “God willing,” more or less: a phrase that rose routinely to her lips whenever plans were hatched or hopes expressed, the way we knock on wood, yet fervently, as if to wax too confident might be to kill the very thing she wanted most. It used to pique and trouble me somehow, this precautionary tic of hers, but now I understand why she was skeptical of what Allah in His caprice allots, because that she should live He did not will, or, more terribly, He did that she should not.

(i.m. Mirel Sayinsoy 1967 – 99)