April 2011
1 tag
“There is an old language broken in my throat.
Some eyes mistake me for shadow....”
– Sheryl Luna, from “River Ghost”
1 tag
“From the dark land of men
I have come, on my knees, to behold you.
Tall,...”
– Rosario Castellanos, from “Palm Tree”
“I take off my shirt, I show you.
I shaved the hair out under my arms.
I roll...”
– Carolyn Forché, Taking Off My Clothes
(via grammatolatry)
“He says he wants to taste me, pulling up my skirt, searching for the places that...”
– ”Soledad” by Angie Cruz
(via baldblackgirl)
2 tags
Black Silk by Tess Gallagher
She was cleaning—there is always that to do—when she found, at the top of the closet, his old silk vest. She called me to look at it, unrolling it carefully like something live might fall out. Then we spread it on the kitchen table and smoothed the wrinkles down, making our hands heavy until its shape against Formica came back and the little tips that would have pointed to his pockets lay flat....
3 tags
“Believe what you want to. Believe that I wove,
If you wish, twenty years, and...”
– A.E. Stallings, The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles (via yesyes)
“Write, write yourself alive”
– Jacques Roubaud
(via ahuntersheart)
Deposition of the Burden by Tadeusz Rozewicz
fuckyeahpolishpoets:
He came to you and said you are not responsible either for the world or for the end of the world the burden is taken from your shoulders you are like birds and children play
so they play
they forget that modern poetry is a struggle for breath
(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
“I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have...”
– Linda Pastan, I Am Learning To Abandon The World
(via grammatolatry)
1 tag
“I was born in a hotel,
a maskmaker.
my bones were knit by
a perilous knife....”
– Lucille Clifton, from “My Poem”
1 tag
“You
unstitch
your shirt, my sheet,
this poem.
At midnight, we thirst,
we...”
– Jennifer Chang, from “Wintering”
1 tag
“I have defined poetry as a passionate pursuit of the Real.”
– Czeslaw Milosz
(via fuckyeahpolishpoets)
1 tag
likeitalics asked: http://librivox.org/ LibriVox has an extensive collection of books in the public domain. The audiobooks are recorded by volunteers. Happy listening!
perfectlypitched asked: Do you have a list of websites that provide free, downloadable audio books? Thanks!
2 tags
“Dark thing,
make a myth of yourself:
all women turn into lilacs,
all men...”
– Jennifer Chang, “This Corner of the Western World”
“Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with...”
– Face Lift, Sylvia Plath
(via aplathaday)
2 tags
Places to find free ebooks: →
anarchyofthemind:
http://buddhisttorrents.blogspot.com/
http://openlibrary.org/
http://feedbooks.com/
http://www.mobileread.com/
http://www.scribd.com/
http://www.manybooks.net/
http://www.openculture.com/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
http://www.sacred-texts.com/
http://www.holybooks.com
http://radicalebooks.blogspot.com/
“Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me...”
– Amiri Baraka, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (via grammatolatry)
4 tags
Some Sort of Truth by Dorothea Lasky
When my dad first started to die All my mom could remember Was the time he kicked her out After they first started dating So that he could go play golf It is the sort of thing we all remember When we feel death upon us I remember he died twice And once in my dream I just had to see him all nursed and swaddled as if he were sleeping But he wasn’t sleeping I stood in the white light of the nursing...
2 tags
Who is one writer you've discovered this year and...
“So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a...”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 28 November 1928
(via proustitute)
2 tags
I Think I was Enchanted by Emily Dickinson
I think I was enchanted When first a sombre Girl — I read that Foreign Lady** — The Dark — felt beautiful —
And whether it was noon at night — Or only Heaven — at Noon — For very Lunacy of Light I had not power to tell —
The Bees — became as Butterflies — The Butterflies — as Swans — Approached — and spurned the narrow...
“Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under...”
– Virginia Woolf, “Kew Gardens”
(via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
1 tag
onesoftinfestedsummer asked: I love all the Plath on my dashboard right now!
1 tag
“Once I wounded him with so
small a thorn
I never thought his flesh would...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “To a Jilted Lover”
2 tags
“How did we make it up to your attic?
You handed me gin in a glass bud vase.
We...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Leaving Early”
“It seems probable that her real creation was her own image, so that all her...”
– Ted Hughes (on Sylvia Plath), May 1978 (via aplathaday)
2 tags
“‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘you look so cool.’
Their eyes met, and they stared together...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (via fuckyeahfitzgerald)
Denise Levertov - Love Poem
falsealarms:
Maybe I’m a ‘sick part of a sick thing’ maybe something has caught up with me certainly there is a mist between us I can barely see you but your hands are two animals that push the mist aside and touch me.
2 tags
“… I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.”
– Monique Wittig
1 tag
“I want to be earth. Be earth. To hold you closely in my embrace. Always.”
– Anna Kamienska
(via fuckyeahpolishpoets)
“I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a...”
– from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
(via falsealarms)
“If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand...”
– from Coast To Coast by Adrienne Rich (via ahuntersheart)
“What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the...”
– The Eye-Mote, Sylvia Plath (via aplathaday)
2 tags
Earthworms by Katrina Vandenberg
It is raining again this morning, and I am remembering
it rained then, too, the summer morning things almost came to be. We lay crosswise
on the bed. The curtains grazed our heads
when they were quickened by damp wind. Outside the earth was opening and the worms had surfaced,
blind. They have eaten every bit of dirt
that makes our yard. They turn the soil the way, in bed at night, we turn the...
“The pleasure is that of being lost here in the crowd
of trunks and pulp, the...”
– Afaa Michael Weaver, from “Leaves”
“The best part of ourselves is the one which remains within us, which we are not...”
– Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
(via proustitute)
1 tag
ahuntersheart:
I know the depth where one is both prisoner and ruler, like Persephone. I often lay in the stiff grass down there and watched the earth arch over me. The vault of the earth. Often-that was half of my life. -from Golden Wasp, Tomas Tranströmer
“It was curious how important letters became when you lived by yourself They...”
– Katherine Mansfield (via katherine-mansfield)
1 tag
“A droplet of blood mixed with air
a poem
a crumb of bread
and a touch of...”
– Anna Kamienska, A Droplet of Blood
5 tags
1 tag
“It was the torture, the blows, that broke us
into pieces. I was
able to hear...”
– Raúl Zurita, from Song for His Disappeared Love
(via proustitute)
1 tag
“But a sentence a solid sentence
restores the earth beneath my feet”
– from A Need by Julia Hartwig
(via fuckyeahpolishpoets)
“Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself
My God is dark, and like a...”
– Selected Poems // Rainer Maria Rilke
(via syllablefingers)
“Some lose children in lonelier ways:
tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers...”
– Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Graves We Filled Before the Fire
(via grammatolatry)
“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have...”
– Tom Stoppard, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” 