August 2011
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“Often what I need is even a darker
darkness.”
– Valzhyna Mort, from “Mocking Bird Hotel” (adapted from the-final-sentence)
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“A poem,
like trying
to remember,
is a movement
of the whole body.”
– Rosmarie Waldrop, from “The Ambition of Ghosts: I. Remembering into Sleep” (via proustitute)
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proustitute, harassment, and staff's...
I have sent this message to the tumblr staff. I will no longer stand by and watch this cruelty continue. Tumblr should never be a place where people feel unsafe. I’m speaking out because proustitute is an important person in my life.
My name is Caitlin. My personal blog is awritersruminations and I have been using tumblr for more than a year now. I’ve always had a very positive view of this...
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Traci Brimhall, "Via Dolorosa"
We have been telling the story wrong all along, how a king took Philomela’s tongue after he had taken her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale
so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday’s heat,
pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir...
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“At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my...”
– Czeslaw Milosz (via fuckyeahpolishpoets)
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“Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions....”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 4 January 1929 (via proustitute)
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Anne Michaels, "The Weight of Oranges"
My cup’s the same sand colour as bread. Rain’s the same colour of a building across the street, its torn red dahlias and ruined a book propped on the sill. Rain articulates the skins of everything, pink of bricks from the fire they baked in, lizard green leaves, the wrinkled tongues of pine cones. It’s accurate the way we never are, bringing out what’s best without changing a thing. ...
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“God forbid that another should ever live the life I have known here and yet...”
– Katherine Mansfield (via katherine-mansfield)
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“If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.”
– Yusef Komunyakaa, from “Corrigenda” in Neon Vernacular (via proustitute)
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“Now the sky above New Mexico
is hazy with Los Angeles, what words
will you...”
– Jan Zwicky, K.219, Adagio
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“I’ve talked a lot about writing. But I don’t know what it is.”
– Marguerite Duras, from “The Blue of the Scarf” in Practicalities, trans. William Collins (via proustitute)
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“When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,...”
– Muriel Rukeyser, “Then”
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“Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one...”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 30 June 1927 (via proustitute)
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“In the history of language
the first obscenity was silence.”
– Christina Davis, The Primer (via the-final-sentence)
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messages
Because of the unreliability of the tumblr message system, I have enabled submissions and that is how you can now send me messages. Just got to http://www.awritersruminations.tumblr.com/submit and hopefully I will get your message!
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“The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire,...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931 (via proustitute)
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“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd...”
– Sylvia Plath (via inherwar)
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“All words about death are a lie, since all hopes are a lie. Words are futile...”
– Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook.” (via confusionis)
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“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.”
– Anne Michaels, from “Memoriam”
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“I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less...”
– Anne Michaels, from “Memoriam”
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From Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr Resurrection of the body of the beloved, Which is the world Which is the poem Of the world, the poem of the body. Mortal ourselves and filled with awe, we gather the scattered limbs Of Osiris. That he should live again. That death not be oblivion. When I open the book I hear the poets whisper and weep, Laugh and...
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“Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where...”
– Philip Levine, “A Story” (via the-final-sentence)
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“love is a thought, hidden
in the darkness of the world.”
– Igor Isakovski, from “Alright”
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“Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.
But then you wouldn’t...”
– Gregory Orr (via ahuntersheart)
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“And if you are without fear you are free; it’s fear makes us slaves.”
– Katherine Mansfield, August 9th, 1921 (via katherine-mansfield)
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“…How weightless
words are when nothing will do.”
– Philip Levine, from “Gospel”
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“I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way,...”
– Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from “Stillbirth”
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“I shall see a light in the depths of the sea, and stealthily approach - for...”
– Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Ethel Smyth, September 1930 (via acandleandawick)
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“we are all here, just to repeat a great error
just to repeat a terrible...”
– Ayten Mutlu, from “Speak Now” (trans. by Aysu Erden)
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“The blood dried –
and I was a rose, blown into flower.”
– Cevat Çapan, “Winter is Over” (translated by Michael Hulse)
(via the-final-sentence)
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Anna Kamienska, "In a Hospital"
By the side of an old woman who is dying in a corrider no one stands Staring at the ceiling for so many days already she writes in the air with her finger There are no tears no laments no wringing of hands not enough angels on duty Some deaths are polite and quiet as if somebody gave up his place in a crowded tram
Translated by David Curzon and Grazyna Drabik
(via sharingpoetry)
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“… before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them,...”
– Dylan Thomas on poetry (via lesmotsjustes)
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“The last few days, what one notices more than anything is the blue. Blue sky,...”
– Katherine Mansfield, from a journal entry dated 16 October 1921 (via proustitute)
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“The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the...”
– Willa Cather, My Antonia
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There’s another skin inside my skin that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light; that looses its memory, its lost language into your tongue, erasing me into newness.
…
Like the light of anything that grows from this newly-turned earth, every tip of me gathers under your touch, wind wrapping my dress around our legs, your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.
— From “Flowers,” by...
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All night love draws its heavy drape of scent against the sea and we wake with the allure of earth in our lungs, hungry for bread and oranges. […] We are sailors who wake when the moon intrudes the smoky tavern of dreams, wake to find a name on an arm or our bodies bruised by sun or the pressure of a hand, wake with the map of night on our skin, traced like moss-stained stone.
...
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“I am now writing to test my theory that there is consolation in expression.”
– Virginia Woolf, Diary Entry, 9th May 1926. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
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“Like dew drops
on a lotus leaf
I vanish.”
– Senryu, died June 2, 1827
(from Japanese Death Poems, edited by Yoel Hoffmann)
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“Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my...”
– Kozan Ichikyo, died February 12, 1360, at 77
(from Japanese Death Poems, edited by Yoel Hoffmann)
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“Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown...”
– Gesshu Soko, died January 10, 1696, at age 79
(from Japanese Death Poems, edited by Yoel Hoffmann)
“You still don’t understand? Throw the emptiness in
your arms out into that...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The First Elegy” in Duino Elegies, translated by A. Poulin, Jr. (via fuckyeahrainermariarilke) 