July 2011
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“Akhmatova often sat smoking a cigarette at a side table, dressed in a tight...”
– -Elaine Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova
(via ahuntersheart)
June 2011
1 tag
“When I lost my younger brother and my baby I lost pain too. It was without an...”
– Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir (translated by Barbara Bray)
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Repeat repeat repeat so that the words are not alone
In the noisy silence the word gets lost pass on the echo so it can question itself
What is repeated becomes certain what is repeated becomes uncertain
Because of this uncertainty which begins where the word ends the words must be said I must say the words
—Hilde Domin, from “Go” (translated by Meg Taylor and...
2 tags
“I thank you with all my heart (do not come) I shall write to you tomorrow. This...”
– Marcel Proust, from a letter to La Comtesse de Noailles, undated 1905 (source)
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You defy godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom’s border Exiled to no good. Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.
—Sylvia Plath, from “Full Fathom Five”
“Can I mourn?
I am an elegy.
Lament?
My mind is lamentation.”
– A.L. Strauss, from “Lament for the European Exile”
a farewell
aplathaday:
I’m going to be abandoning this blog soon. I feel guilty because I’ve been updating so rarely, let alone daily as the name implies.
However, if any of my followers are deeply interested in Sylvia’s works and want to take over the blog, please let me know in a message!
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination...
2 tags
Fred Chappell, "Narcissus and Echo"
sharingpoetry:
Shall the water not remember Ember my hand’s slow gesture, tracing above of its mirror my half-imaginary airy portrait? My only belonging longing; is my beauty, which I take ache away and then return, as love of teasing playfully the one being unbeing. whose gratitude I treasure Is your moves me. I live apart heart from myself, yet cannot not live apart. In the water’s...
I had to do it, suddenly I had to sing. I had no idea why— But when evening came I wept. Wept bitterly. Pain was everywhere. Sprang out of everything— Spread everywhere. Into everything— And then lay on top of me.
— Else Lasker-Schuler, “In the Evening” (translated by Eavan Boland)
“Tonight, while walking to the car,
I said your name to the evening star,...”
– C. Dale Young, from “Night Air” (via proustitute)
“Even as you lean over this page,
late and alone, it shines: even now
in the...”
– Mark Strand, from “The Garden” (via proustitute)
“Only now
I see that you
are the end of spring
cloud passing
across the...”
– W.S. Merwin, “To a Departing Companion” (source)
1 tag
2 tags
“See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it. I cannot...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Three Women”
“I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow my body made...”
– Janice N. Harrington, “Shaking the Grass” (via ahuntersheart)
“The sunken city,
sunken
for me
alone.
I swim
in these streets.
Others...”
– Hilde Domin, “Cologne” (translated by Eavan Boland)
5 tags
“The brave know
They will not rise again
That no flesh will grow around them...”
– Marie Luise Kaschnitz, “Not Brave” (translated by Eavan Boland)
“I have no desire to be witty. I have no desire to construct a plot. I am going...”
– Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory (via proustitute)
“as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious”
– In Passing, Lisel Mueller (via ahuntersheart)
“….One of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small...”
– Jean Rhys (via aeloquence)
“You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.”
– Theodore Roethke, from On Poetry and Craft (via proustitute)
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“Hurry up
perhaps you’ll yet manage to say
what sleeps within grand...”
– Anna Kamienska, “Hurry Up” (translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon)
4 tags
Woolf Fans Celebrate Wavesday today →
I sure wish I could be in Fort Collins, Colo., today for the day-long community reading of Virginia Woolf’s 1931 masterpiece The Waves.
Today is the first annual international Wavesday, which is modeled on Bloomsday, the event held in Dublin on June 16 each year to celebrate James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Organizers differentiate the Woolf event by saying it will have “less early-morning boozing...
1 tag
Places to See: Lady Writers
Northeastern US Louisa May Alcott / Pearl S. Buck / Emily Dickinson / Harlem Renaissance / Sarah Orne Jewett / Edna St. Vincent Millay / Dorothy Parker / Harriet Beecher Stowe / Edith Wharton / Gertrude Chandler Warner / Laura Ingalls Wilder (NY)
Southeastern US Pearl S. Buck / Kate Chopin House / Helen Keller / Harper Lee / Margaret Mitchell / Flannery O’Connor / Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings...
“I cannot promise very much.
I give you the images I know.
Lie still with me...”
– Anne Sexton (via ahuntersheart)
“…the idea of alienation. And loss. I believe that that’s the beginning of...”
– Edward Hirsch (via ahuntersheart)
2 tags
“Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk…as strange, as still…
A white moth...”
– Adelaide Crapsey, “The Warning”
“You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms…”
– Anna Akhmatova, from “You Will Hear Thunder”
(via tzarevitch)
“I am tired of little tight-fisted poems sitting down to
shape perfect...”
– from Winnie by Gwendolyn Brooks (via ahuntersheart)
2 tags
“These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the...”
– Adelaide Crapsey, “Triad”
1 tag
“When I hear violin music, I feel a painful clutch at my heart. I didn’t...”
– Anna Kamienska, from Industrious Amazement: A Notebook
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“A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “The Colossus”
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“I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Electra on Azalea Path”
2 tags
“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and...”
– Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (via lesmotsjustes)
“Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates,...”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Burning the Old Year” (via proustitute)
3 tags
“My key
has lost its house.
I go from house to house
but none fits.
I have...”
– Rose Auslander, “My Key” (translated by Eavan Boland)
“so that each day penetrates each night
so that each word runs to the other side...”
– Anna Kamienska, from “Transformation,” trans. Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon
(via proustitute)
“I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the...”
– Li Po, Self-Abandonment (via grammatolatry)
1 tag
“What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace...”
– Arthur Rimbaud in Illuminations (1874) (via predatorywaspobserver)
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Melancholy by Anna Kamienska
A melancholy of mine own -Shakespeare It is a melancholy of my own woven out of my own world out of all that did not happen all that was done out of paths through woods and across fields out of hanging branches of hazel that hit the face out of the tangle of graveyard blackberries out of the whiteness of snows out of heavy birds A melancholy of my own like the...
“‘Right now America might be the only country in the world for a writer,’ he says...”
– W.H. Auden, as interviewed by John Malcolm Brinnin in “On First Meeting W.H. Auden,” published in our Fall 1975 issue. (via pshares)
2 tags
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“I am unworthy to describe you. I
have failed. I spell you with a tear, a sigh.”
– Rose Auslander, from “Mother” 