verses versus @versesversus - Tumblr Blog

Couple (1933), Mark English

I went for a walk up a hill and these little mates followed me. When I turned around to say hi they stopped in their tracks. We stood looking at each other for a bit and then I took this shot. It broke the ice: they burst out laughing and ran up to join me - Lesotho, August 2016

twinriversstudio

14 year old Mncedisi brushes his teeth before walking to school - Swaziland, August 2016

versesversus

As always, Elize’s photos are really something

primitivefeathers-blog

nathanlevasseur

colporteur

To learn is the someday you’ll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they’ve shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There’s grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth’s bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I’ve made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one’s a god.

Mary Karr, The Lesson You’ve Got (via colporteur)

apoemaday

The Red Poppy

by Louise Glück

The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. I have a lord in heaven called the sun, and open for him, showing him the fire of my own heart, fire like his presence. What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered.

aliveandfullofjoy

Well, I’m deeply frustrated all the time. All my plays usually follow a two-year-period of deep frustration and not-writing and there’s usually an aha moment that surfaces gurgling from the pit of despair I’ve fallen into and unlocks the play for me after I’ve convinced myself that I will never write a play again. But I had an aha moment, I guess in my late 20s, when I stopped thinking about What Kind of Play I Wanted to Write and What Kind of Writer I Wanted to Be. I just gave up. I accepted the fact that I’m a little stupid. That I don’t know exactly what I want to say. That I don’t know what kind of theatre I want to make. That I don’t know how to classify it. I stopped thinking strategically. I stopped trying to prove to people that I was smart through my writing. I stopped trying to write stuff that I thought other people would like. And all that followed a long period of bad writing and deep, deep frustration with the fact that my talent couldn’t live up to my taste. I mean, it still doesn’t.

Annie Baker (via aliveandfullofjoy)

Someone asked Calle how the man who wrote the email felt about the project, and she said that he didn’t like it but he respected the project. And then she said, “But he is not with out arms, he is a writer, and he is able to respond.” So that is how I feel about my ex, the Radical Poet. In fact, I remember when he was first involved with the polyamorous poet, reading various polyamorist literature like The Ethical Slut, quoting this rhetoric to me; I remember he and his polyamorous lover told me, “We decided that you should be able to write about this. It’s ok.” And I laughed, I think, or I thought about Chris Kraus, I think, or I thought about I Love Dick, but that’s not why I laughed, I laughed because I WAS ALREADY WRITING ABOUT IT I mean, didn’t he know who he married? I have ARMS, as Sophie Calle would say. I’ll wear this story out, I’ll exhaust it by sheer repetition, I’ll use my sentimental life to make art, I’ll control my emotions while google-stalking, I’ll see the online trajectory of his latest grotesque-radical-poetic affair. I’ll see the radical poets playing soccer, sharing meals, sitting on the floor at another not-so radical poet’s house. I’ll collaborate with Paul Auster. I’ll take a job as a chambermaid. I have no discourse around surveillance! I’ll call every hotel. I’ll fly to Venice. I’ll contact 107 women and ask them to interpret his emails. You’ll see. I have arms.

http://emilybooks.tumblr.com/post/144146846321/my-own-private-radical-poetics-birthday

twilight driving gotta watch out for the roos

rustbeltjessie

Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally - that what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that. But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection; we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world. A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them - but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

Mark Doty, from Still Life With Oysters and Lemon (via rustbeltjessie)