The Lifelong Sentence

We each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime.

[featherandarrow]

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Sylvia Plath (via enkelthed)

[endless-unfolding]

hold me like the news, where more and more of everything’s on fire, where the prayers fall through the fingers of language like ash

Colin Schmidt, from “Where Words Light the Stairs on Fire” (via zuiol)

[thelifelongsentence]

“I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no wings, it is not necessarily found at a cleared table upon a terrace, in the evening by the seaside... A necklace of pearls for which a clasp can never be found and whose existence does not hold even by a thread, that is despair.”

-Andre Breton, “The Verb to Be”

[thelifelongsentence]

“The heart is a triangle.

With one fewer side, the triangle becomes an opening door.”

-Anne Marie Rooney, “What The Heart Is”

[thelifelongsentence]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DCIkBx64DU)

Dorothea Lasky is the Ms. Frizzle of my heart.

[thelifelongsentence]

Because I don’t know where a poem is headed when I start, it seems that revelation has to play a central part in the poems, that what I’m most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind… Maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences.

Bob Hicok

[thelifelongsentence]

Juan Felipe Herrera Named U.S. Poet Laureate. Congratulations, my Latino brother!

[thelifelongsentence]

Love her he doesn’t but the thought he puts into that young woman would launch a national product complete with TV spots and skywriting outlets in Bonn and Toyko I mean it

-John Berryman, “Dream Song #69″

[thelifelongsentence]

I want to meditate and to say without hating myself, "I have made strides." I love you, and you, too, annihilation.

Joe Milazzo, “The Dream in Which Nothing is Predictable”

Peep the rest of the poem here: http://www.poolpoetry.com/poeteight.html

[thelifelongsentence]

You are the biological father of my terrible woe.

Josh Bell, No Planets Strike, “Epithalamion, Ex Post Facto”

[thelifelongsentence]

“Together we could watch these winter fields slip past, and never care again, think of it. I don’t have to be anywhere.”

R.I.P. Franz Wright

[poetsorg]

Happy Dylan Thomas Day! Read more: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/fern-hill

[watchoutforintellect]

Do you believe in always, the wind said to the rain I am too busy with my flowers to believe, the rain answered.

e.e cummings - from you said is (via watchoutforintellect)

[thelifelongsentence]

Even when it's I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.

Sharon Olds, "Stag's Leap"

[ohproserpine-deactivated2015053]

And Her soul! Her soul is consumed by this longing!

Sappho, excerpt of Atthis (tr. by George Theodoris)

[bostonpoetryslam]

I think of writing, first, as a process of listening to some series of sounds that enter my mind and, second, as a process of embodying those sounds.

Jericho Brown, via the Poetry Society of America (via bostonpoetryslam)

[thelifelongsentence]

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anaïs Nin