March 2012
6 tags
“I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional...”
– Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (via booksijustread)
9 tags
“You would think
the sea was blind
to me as I stare out,
deaf to the dull...”
– Heidy Steidlmayer, from “Scylla”
6 tags
3 tags
“I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Parliament Hill Fields”
6 tags
“There is the world—
Storm-windowed, or curtained in the summer wind—
That I...”
– Randall Jarrell, from “Windows”
5 tags
6 tags
“There is nothing that controls our thoughts
more than what we think we see,...”
– Cole Swensen, from “In a Garden of Numbers”
7 tags
“Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls...”
– Henry James, from a letter to Grace Norton, dated 28 July 1883 (via litverv and Letters of Note)
5 tags
6 tags
“Do not articulate what the ocean
Turning in its bed thinks: What must be said.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick, from “Exegesis of the First Words Spoken (Ishmael)”
8 tags
“let’s track green dots on trees
our own operation of marking up...”
– Megan Kaminski, from “Untitled”
4 tags
“Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve”
– Adrienne Rich, from “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve”
3 tags
7 tags
“And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because...”
– Adrienne Rich, from “What Kind of Times are These”
6 tags
“Though lost I love
Love unburied lies”
– Susan Howe, from “Silence Wager Stories”
7 tags
7 tags
“I push my big grey wet snout through the green,
Dreaming the flower I have...”
– Thom Gunn, from “Moly”
6 tags
“As my eyes search the prairie
I feel the summer in the spring.”
– Anonymous, “Spring Song,” trans. Frances Densmore
7 tags
“I knew that he had assassinated the sea, for his hands were stained blue.”
– Rafael Pérez Estrada, from “Chronicle of the Rain,” trans. Steven J. Stewart
5 tags
5 tags
“Am I in love?—yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits.”
– Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard
8 tags
“The first movement is singing,
A free voice, filling mountains and valleys....”
– Czeslaw Milosz, from “The Poor Poet”
7 tags
“Don’t say it’s the beautiful
I praise. I praise the human,
gutted...”
– Katie Ford, from “Song After Sadness”
3 tags
9 tags
“Weep if you must, but board what falls
Away, abdomens flaring—
The brief,...”
– Neil Fischer, from “[As if the moon could haul through you]”
9 tags
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like...”
– Emily Dickinson, from “[372]”
5 tags
“Why is even pleasure a kind of chore?”
– Patrizia Valduga, from One Hundred Quatrains, trans. Geoffrey Brock
6 tags
7 tags
“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it...”
– Wallace Stevens, from “Of the Surface of Things”
10 tags
“I’ve been thinking of how I might engage pendulation—the movement between...”
– Bhanu Kapil, from “What is Experimental Literature?”
6 tags
8 tags
“I can’t hear your voice
for the wind’s cries, whistling over the...”
– Louise Glück, from “October (Section I)”
8 tags
“I claim the insignificant, the vital—
this river, these fish. I claim
this is...”
– Brian D. Morrison, from “Lungful”
6 tags
8 tags
“it does not help much to recall
how unlikely it is that we
turned up here with...”
– W. S. Merwin, from “To the Unlikely Event” in Present Company
10 tags
“I want to see the thirst
inside the syllables
I want to touch the fire
in the...”
– Pablo Neruda, from “Verb,” trans. T.M. Lauth Etiquetas
6 tags
7 tags
“Can you hear what I’m thinking, from there, even as you sleep?”
– Michael Palmer, from “Company of Moths”
8 tags
“And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more...”
– Jane Hirshfield, from “For What Binds Us”
5 tags
7 tags
“Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come.
Some things that don’t...”
– Rumi, The Book of Love, trans. Coleman Barks
7 tags
“I know red and yellow, the other colors,—
but the sea, det granna granna...”
– Edith Södergran, from “Strange Sea,” trans. Averill Curdy
6 tags
11 tags
“But since bringing things together is a metaphor, and sensation implies a body,...”
– Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann
7 tags
“For I spoke not but the magician played me tricks of the blood.”
– Anne Sexton, from O Ye Tongues in Complete Poems
3 tags
7 tags
“but who can distinguish
one human voice
amid such choruses
of desire”
– Lucille Clifton, from “sorrows”
4 tags
“There are silences harder to take back than words.”
– James Richardson (via chantellowitz182)
4 tags
10 tags
“Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and...”
– Kahlil Gibran, Broken Wings