November 2010
October 2010
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Witch Burning by Sylvia Plath
In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat teh devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.
It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar’s belly. They’ve blown my sparkler...
thebeautythelight asked: thanks for the Frieda Hughes post.
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“He found her more beautiful and youthful than ever, but more lost to him than...”
– Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (via fortuneandglory)
soverypretty asked: Fabulous blog! Loved your Ted Hughes post. I've read several biographies about Plath, Hughes, and also his mistress, Assia Wevill. The book is called "Lover of Unreason" by Yehuda Koren. Keep up the good work with the great posts. :) Gwyn
theoceanislikeyou asked: I love your blog... all these beautiful works inspire me so much!
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“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read”
– Raymond Carver (via deadwriters)
“I’m not against it because it’s disgusting. I’m against it because it’s falling...”
– Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (via fortuneandglory)
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Paralytic by Sylvia Plath
It happens. Will it go on?—- My mind a rock, No fingers to grip, no tongue, My god the iron lung That loves me, pumps My two Dust bags in and out, Will not Let me relapse While the day outside glides by like ticker tape. The night brings violets, Tapestries of eyes, Lights, The soft anonymous Talkers: ‘You all right?’ The starched, inaccessible beast. Dead egg, I lie Whole On...
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Wintering by Sylvia Plath
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing. I have whirled the midwife’s extractor, I have my honey, Six jars of it, Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,
Wintering in a dark without window At the heart of the house Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam and the bottles of empty glitters— Sir So-and-so’s gin.
This is the room I have never been in This is the room I...
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“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”
– Anaïs Nin (via iponderis)
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Mystic by Sylvia Plath
The air is a mill of hooks—— Questions without answer, Glittering and drunk as flies Whose kiss stings unbearably In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.
I remember The dead smell of sun on wood cabins, The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets. Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Once one has been seized up
Without a part left over, Not a toe, not a...
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Years by Sylvia Plath
They enter as animals from the outer Space of holly where spikes Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi, But greenness, darkness so pure They freeze and are.
O God, I am not like you In your vacuous black, Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti. Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.
What I love is The piston in motion … My soul dies before it. And the hooves of the horses, Their...
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Poppies In October by Sylvia Plath
circusfolk:
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly — A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for By a sky Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to halt under bowlers. O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of...
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Waking in Winter by Sylvia Plath
I can taste the tin of the sky —- the real tin thing. Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations —- An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green Poison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones, Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on...
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“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us...”
– Simon Van Booy (via wearebasiclight, lydianea, exsouvenir, vilis, colourwars) (via earlyfrost)
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“Our right to be different is, in a deep sense, the most precious right we human...”
– Lillian Smith
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“So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world...”
– Insomnia (poem), by Elizabeth Bishop (via the-final-sentence)
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“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and...”
– Martin Luther King Jr. (Letter from Birmingham Jail)
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“I love you the more that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for...”
– John Keats (via circusfolk)
His birthday is on October 31. So while everyone around me will be dressing up and eating candy, I just might be reading some great Romantic poetry (with candy too of course!)
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Emptiness by Stephen Dunn
circusfolk:
I’ve heard yogis talk of a divine emptiness, the body free of its base desires, some coiled and luminous god in all of us waiting to be discovered… and always I’ve pivoted, followed Blake’s road of excess to the same source and know how it feels to achieve nothing, the nothing that exists after accomplishment. And I’ve known the emptiness of nothing to say, no...
“Then he thinks about the idea of a museum: the physical record of things; the...”
– The City of Windy Trees (short story from Love Begins in Winter), by Simon Van Booy (via the-final-sentence)
“The stars were very high, and the wind was fresh as if it had come from woods...”
– rebecca west, the thinking reed (1936), p.11. (via modernistwomen)
I’ve said it before, but I cannot recommend this tumblr enough!
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“Eventually it comes to you, the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at...”
– Lorraine Hansberry
betwixt-and-between asked: I absolutely love your blog. I'm happy I found it! I am also in love with Bright Star. I just watched it again yesterday. :) Beautiful, beautiful movie. xx
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purple.
redhead-bouquet:
wearing purple on the 20th is important. purple tumblr is important.
however, if we don’t make this purple mean anything more, it’s pointless. at the very least our wearing purple is a visual reminder to LGBTQ youth that they’re not alone and isolated, and that there’s a lot of love and support for them in the world. really, though, the purple needs to mean more than that.
...
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“There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or...”
– David Foster Wallace (via whiskyandwhimsy)
Happy Deathday Edna St. Vincent Millay!
deadwriters:
On this day in 1950, American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay took a fall down some stairs at her home and broke her neck. She was found eight hours later and it was presumed that she died from a heart attack. Millay was 58 years old.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s first collection of poetry, “Renascence,” was published in 1917, and it remains to be one of our...
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“He is not to them what he is to me, I thought: “he is not of their kind. I...”
– Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)
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“No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might...”
– Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre) 