June 2012
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“If you bend over your page … and do not suddenly tremble with fear, throw away your pen. Your writing would have little value.”
—Edmond Jabès
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“The burden of living one’s own life is experiencing sensations that no one else...”
– David Ignatow, The Art of Poetry No. 23 (via theparisreview)
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“If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling”
– Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet (Seriously who else can record the disquiet of our feelings like Pessoa did ? )
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“You can find me on the moon waxing and waning. My heart full of petals, every...”
– Andrea Gibson (via moqueur)
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poetrysince1912:
For an hour I was a maple tree, and under the summer of his fingers the notes seeded and winged away in the clutch of small, elegant helicopters. Sandra Beasley, Poetry, July/August 2009
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“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing...”
– Gilles Deleuze (with thanks to diariodeinviero and sunrec)
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It’s odd how the objects of our lives Continue to not define us, no matter how close we hold them unto us. Odd how the narrative of those lives is someone else’s narrative.
—Charles Wright, opening strophe to “Bees Are the Terrace Builders of the Stars” in Sestets (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009)
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What is it about the motives of the night? All of those lovers Walking in the luster of their pasts. The strings of melody plucked In the lightness of sleep.
—David St. John, from “The Book” in The Auroras (Harper, 2012)
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“We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we...”
– Mia Mingus (via awritersruminations)
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Romance, exactly as I remember it, is how the moon rises full every night and the line it marches is always taut with hopes of young lovers tonguing their troubles into a place their mouths can hardly contain.
—B.J. Ward, opening lines to...
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All the while we thought we were writing for the angels, And find, after all these years, Our lines were written in black ink on the midnight sky, Messages for the wind, a flutter of billets-doux From one dark heart to the next.
—Charles Wright, section “18” from Littlefoot: A Poem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)
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“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be...”
– T.S. Eliot (via mllekeri)
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“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no...”
– Henry Rollins (via wichmanart)
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poetrysince1912:
The strings, as if they knew the lovers are about to meet, begin to soar, and when he marches in the door they soar some more—half ecstasy, half pain the musical equivalent of rain
Rachel Wetzsteon
—Poetry, October 2010
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I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among us. There was a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain indifference, I have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had nothing to say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by a thread.
There was...
