of words & wonder

[mournfulroses]

Oscar Wilde, from a letter featured in The Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde

[shisasan]

"you have both; they must never leave you."

[mournfulroses]

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, from a letter featured in The Life & Letters of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

[metamorphesque]

 — Vladimir Nabokov, from Letters to Véra

[ text ID: I’m walking out now into the soft light, the cooling hum of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and still many more, so very many more tomorrows. ]

[weltenwellen]

Warsan Shire, from “Backwards”, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

[metamorphesque]

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

[luthienne]

Nikki Giovanni, from “When I Die”

[mournfulroses]

Savannah Brown, from a poem titled "Girl knees! This is what I've become," featured in Closer Baby Closer: Poems

[mournfulroses]

Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke featured in Letters, Summer 1926

[weltenwellen]

Maya C. Popa, “Letters in Winter”, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder

[geryone]

Premonitions, Elizabeth Schmuhl

[wovi]

*

jennifer willoughby, the sun is still a part of me

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID: I am so busy. I am practicing my new hobby of watching me become someone else. There is so much violence in reconstruction. Each minute is grisly, but I have to participate. I am building what I cannot break. ]

[soracities]

Samuel Beckett, letter to Morris Sinclair (March 4th, 1934), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929-1940 [ID'd]

[soracities]

Alice Notley, The Art of Poetry No.116

[neoyorzapoteca]

Gizzi: Poetry is such an incredibly ancient technology. If a poem is any good, it’s always good. I am extremely moved by what you say: that the experience of reading my poems only deepens. Nothing could make me happier, Ariana. Thank you for saying this. I certainly relate to this experience myself as a reader of poetry throughout my life. Poetry might be like friendship. It happens one poem at a time over many, many years and continues to blossom in my body. Poems are companionable. One would hope that the voice is always being discovered, always happening. Poetry is a gift of presence, intimacy, mystery. These three aspects are something I favor in the works I love. So am I consoled or is it an act of recognition? The gift of loss is a gift of sight and empathy that allows for a fuller comprehension of being. Whether it be a lost love or someone passing on, these events only deepen our senses, enrich our sense of compassion and joy. Tears soften the heart. 

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve drifted between the sensation of having a life—a rich, satisfying, complex, highly articulated life—and wondering if it’s all been some strange accident or apparition, none of which pertains to me, where I am fatally alone, lonely, invisible, not here. I blur between the two sensations constantly. I learned very early on that I can be here and not here and that falling into that fathomless gap between these two poles leads to a meaningful place of “not knowing,” a generative place to discover new sensations or architectures of feeling in a poem. Some might call it sadness. I don’t. I call it consciousness and like to think of it as a comprehensive music. If you’ve lost a lot of people in life like I have, you begin to have a stereoscopic view. I learned very young this double sense of all at once being here and not here. And so I like to use that threshold experience to compose for me what I call reality, the reality of being in a constantly changing state. To accept that periodicity is a useful tool to understand objective reality: all things are in a state of change and are not here for very long. Nothing is. And while the world is in a state of constant renewal, it is equally also in a state of constant loss. I’m not just talking about humans, but about other species, ecosystems, languages, cultures, civilizations, etc.: everything is subject to this law. So elegy for me is a useful way to speak to this reality and to accept the mystery of life, its preciousness and precariousness. Perhaps what you call an experience of being “consoled” by my poems is the experience of recognition of the basic universal fact that while the world is constantly renewed, it is also constantly in a state of loss. And if my poems carry sorrow, I also find that there’s equally a joyfulness in them. The concept of joy for me is amplified by the knowledge of constant change and loss. To me that recognition is a form of love.

(via A Comprehensive Music: Peter Gizzi with Ariana Reines - The Brooklyn Rail)

[anthropoetics]

to keep

love letter

a dream’s tale

i and the night alone

of an overflowing river.

the wasp and the fig

language is fossil poetry

be my mother i said to the trees

the precious intimacy of little things

and that orange it made me so happy

the world begins at a kitchen table

loneliness is still time spent with the world

the ugly and the flawless beauty of us 

let your laughter fill me like a bell

do you adore the green grass with its terror beneath? 

engrave my name on the trunk of a pomegranate tree

the heart of the world is blue

[hadesoftheladies]

the true reason “not all men” sounds absurd to me (aside from the ignorance of statistics) is that it fundamentally misunderstands misogyny. “not all men” assumes that male supremacy is not an ideology like Nazism or fundamentalism might be. additionally, it assumes that male supremacy is disconnected from male violence. if a white supremacist killed a black innocent, you would not disconnect his ideology from the crime. but male violence must be psychological, not ideological. he beats a woman because he himself was beaten as a child, etcetera.

misogyny, loosely described is the dehumanization (not mere dislike) of women. thus it takes many forms: objectification, pedestalization, decontextualization, caricaturization (or stereotyping), etc. BUT FUNDAMENTALLY, the ideology of male supremacy centers around one core tenet: men are entitled to women for anything at any time. misogyny will, given time, result in male violence and exploitation. but it begins with entitlement. misogyny is a man feeling entitled to a woman’s body. to a girlfriend, wife, prostituted woman. but it doesn’t have to be solely sexual. he can be entitled to a woman’s subordination. he can be entitled to her kindness or attention. he can be entitled to her time and effort. he can be entitled to her support and loyalty. he can be entitled to her service and ideas. he can be entitled to her career and finances. there is no limit to the expression of male entitlement toward women. and that is what makes a man a patriarch. any person a misogynist. that a woman or girl, by virtue of being female, must be an endless fount of whatever one wishes.

misogyny is uncritically expecting your girlfriends to support all your decisions. misogyny is a man expecting his mother to cook and wash after him. misogyny is a boy getting angry that a girl has genuine, logical counter arguments to his ideas. misogyny is a boyfriend expecting his girlfriend to be 100% available to him whenever he wants attention or feels needy. without returning even half that energy. misogyny is stripping nuance from prominent female figures whether historical, fictional or celebrity. it is the denial of a woman’s interiority and needs. misogyny is a pastor that expects women to defer to him on spiritual matters. it has so many flavors and languages and it has no limits. male entitlement toward female people knows no limits. it’s TRA’s demanding access to women’s female spaces and calling any woman or girl that expresses discomfort or argues for her rights “inconsiderate bigot cunts.” entitlement to a woman’s agreement. it’s the government banning a woman’s right to terminating pregnancy or self-defense against sexual violence because governments are entitled to workers and soldiers.

and so, “not all men” is absurd because there’s virtually no man that does not have some level of this entitlement and expect it of at least one woman or girl in his life. especially because even women do not escape misogyny. men’s entitlement to controlling or overpowering a woman in some way (as the prime hallmark of the identity of a man) is omnipresent, whether or not it escalates into male supremacist violence. but again, once the ideology takes root, that women naturally owe men themselves or some capacity of themselves, violence (or neglect in the face of it) is almost always certain to follow. in which case the question for a woman doesn’t become a matter of “if” but “when.”

all men are entitled to women and girls and believe, as a result of being male supremacists, that they are owed our labor, bodies and minds. this alone makes all men (and boys) weaponized.

dangerous.

[vegantinatalist]

this is a fabulous breakdown of misogyny and id like to add that this applies to specieism/carnism too

[lunamonchtuna]

— June Gehringer, ‘I get so jealous of euthanized dogs’ (via lunamonchtuna)