March 2012
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“We haven’t forgotten anything. Forgetting is simply a sensation.”
– César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind, trans. Rosalie Knecht
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“I’ve known one night my whole life.”
– Mathias Svalina, from “One Night”
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“If you stand
there long enough the air will thicken
with dusk and...”
– Philip Levine, from “How to Get There”
February 2012
0 posts
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“Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened…”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell
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“… though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell...”
– H. D., from “Eurydice”
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“Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting...”
– Donald Hall, from “Affirmation”
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“All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall,
And the silence...”
– W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror
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“We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.”
– Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
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“If you find yourself lost, dig
a cave in the snow, quickly
you need shelter...”
– Nick Flynn, from “Elsewhere, Mon Amour”
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“If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.”
– William Carlos Williams, from “Dedication for a Plot of Ground”
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“There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated...”
– Wendell Berry, from “How to Be a Poet” in Given
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“Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
– Shakespeare, Macbeth, I, iv
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“I adore him.
Yet I adore also the drowse of mountains.”
– Mary Oliver, from “Of Time” in Swan
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“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being...”
– T. S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding” in The Four Quartets
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“One wants to turn away—and cry
for fire to break out on the stairs
and raze...”
– Dana Gioia, from “Maze without a Minotaur”
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“… we have become the present.
We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we...”
– George Oppen, from “Leviathan”
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“You came into the heart of our grief.
This is a house dressed in black.”
– Euripides, Alkestis, translated by Anne Carson in Grief Lessons
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“My favorite ghosts and I bear down harder birth ourselves”
– Margo Tamez, from “Drinking under the Moon She Goes Laughing”
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“I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had...”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Wild Swans”
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“Here is a handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope,...”
– Margaret Atwood, from “Mushrooms” in Selected Poems: Volume 2
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“The walls like streams. Hard streams. Kafka’s sea. Although there
is...”
– Melissa Buzzeo, from What Began Us (adapted from ahuntersheart)
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“Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming. I think
you...”
– Gabeba Baderoon, from “Old Photographs”
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“An angle of light. Believe in it.”
– Ana Božičević, from “Death, Is All”
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“Thou forgettest me.”
– Sappho, from a fragment translated by J. B. Hare
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“The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has...”
– Robert Frost, “Snowfall”
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“I don’t want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater...”
– Robert Walser, The Tanners, trans. Susan Bernofsky
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“I miss holding my breath.”
– Mary Ruefle, from “Elegy for a Game”
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“Be wet
with a decent happiness.”
– Robert Creeley, from “The Rain”
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“… but ‘I’ rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at...”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 26 April 1938
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“beneath the surface we rub up against each other
will we capsize in
the surge...”
– Kazim Ali, from “Sleep Door”
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“Beauty is not compatible with modern life. So this is the last time I’ll...”
– Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Madame Roger des Genettes, December 1864
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“What we must do,
I suppose,
is to hope the world
keeps its balance;
what we...”
– Mary Oliver, from “The Owl Who Comes” in New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
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“The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,...”
– Billy Collins, from “Silence”
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“… desire is full
of endless distances.”
– Robert Hass, from “Meditation at Lagunitas”
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“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
– Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
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