The Other Voice

“I say that even afterward someone will remember us.” - Sappho A space for women's writing.

[the-other-voice]

"Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do."

- Sylvia Plath, Daddy

[the-other-voice]

"i write as one who raises a knife in the darkness"

- Alejandra Pizarnik, On this night, in this world

[the-other-voice]

- Mary Howe, Magdalene

[the-other-voice]

“I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one.”

- Mary Howe, Magdalene: The Addict

[the-other-voice]

“I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me.’ We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

— Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You

[the-other-voice]

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

— Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You

[the-other-voice]

“Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.”

— Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury

[the-other-voice]

Yours is the only face I recognize. Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in.

Anne Sexton, Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward

[the-other-voice]

However, nothing is just what it seems to be.   My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands   and the sea that bangs in my throat.

Anne Sexton, The Room of my Life

[c-ygne]

“I want a voice / put into my arms and hands and hair and feet / by some magic of God, so they can all cling to you / and cry out in supplication”

—

Hekabe in Grief Lessons, Euripides trans. by Anne Carson

[c-ygne]

“AGAMEMNON: And how can women prevail over men? HEKABE: There’s a strange power, bad power, in numbers combined with cunning.”

—

Hekabe in Grief Lessons, Euripides trans. by Anne Carson

[mydarkenedeyes]

Spencer Finch - 366, Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year (2009)

This work is based on Emily Dickinson in 1862, when she wrote 366 poems in 365 days. It is a real-time memorial to that year, which burns for exactly one year. The sculpture is comprised of 366 individual candles arranged in a linear sequence, each of which burns for 24 hours. The colour of each candle matches a colour mentioned in the corresponding poem. For the poems in which no colour is mentioned, the candles are made out of natural paraffin.

[c-ygne]

“Herakles: Gods are stubborn. So am I. Theseus: Quiet, lest you get more suffering. Herakles: I am stuffed with evils - nowhere to put more.”

—

Herakles in Grief Lessons, Euripides trans. by Anne Carson

[c-ygne]

“Hekabe: […] Enough death! This one is my joy. This one is my forgetting of evils. She comforts my soul - she is my city, my walking stick, my way on the road.”

— Hekabe in Grief Lessons, Euripides trans. by Anne Carson

[c-ygne]

“To never see her face again is what grief is.”

— Alkestis in Grief Lessons, Euripides trans. by Anne Carson

[c-ygne]

How I wish like a bee I could gather you - / all my heartbreak for you into one teardrop.

Herakles in Grief Lessons, Euripides trans. by Anne Carson (via c-ygne)

[the-other-voice]

“But I know too well the meaning of your persistent burning glances.”

— Anna Akhmatova, True Tenderness