May 2012
8 tags
“In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Sonnets to Orpheus” (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
April 2012
4 tags
“After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had...”
– Denise Levertov, “Intrusion” (via sharingpoetry and refinedhedonism)
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like...”
– Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
4 tags
“She had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer’s afternoon,...”
– Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
2 tags
“Overhead the geese are a line,
a moving scar. Wavering
like a strand of pollen...”
– Anne Michaels, from “Miner’s Pond”
2 tags
“It happens that one pronounces
a few words just for oneself
alone on this...”
– Jean Follain, “Speech Alone” (translated by W.S. Merwin)
“And now
I want to be left
without words. To know how to lose
what is being...”
– Mirta Rosenberg, from “Portrait Ended” (translated by Julie Wark)
“but writing down the words
alters what I want to remember
that which had no...”
– Remco Campert, from “Memo” (translated by Donald Gardner)
4 tags
“So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the...”
– Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar” (via semperaugustus)
5 tags
“At the heart of the emptiness there is born in me a sudden understanding.”
– Fabienne Verdier
1 tag
“Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry...”
– W.G. Sebald
“Loss takes place
in the mouth first; the scream
possible only after
the mouth...”
– Arlene Ang, from “Skin”
“The razor across the eyeball
is a detail from an old film.
It is also a truth....”
– Margaret Atwood, from “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written”
“Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Tulips”
1 tag
2 tags
4 tags
4 tags
“I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of...”
– Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
5 tags
“When you use the word ‘flummox,’ for instance, your tongue is rolling across the...”
– B.K. Loren, from “Word Hoard” in Parabola, v.28, no.3, August 2003 (via apoetreflects)
3 tags
“Crisis is good—it brings change and renewal. The human being is a creature of...”
– Angélica Gorodischer, BOMB 32/Summer 1990 (via bombmagazine)
“Trying to explain
how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time,
how their...”
– Dina Ben-Lev, from “Driving”
“Ruin is a promise
we make to each other.”
– Katie Ford, from “Beirut”
3 tags
“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My...”
– Audre Lorde (via diamondmind)
“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast...”
– Mary Oliver, from “The Ponds”
1 tag
1 tag
“What was it then? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the...”
– Virginia Woolf,To The Lighthouse. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
2 tags
“But on bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a lustre lay over...”
– W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (translated by Anthea Bell)
“This summer which
only consisted of your
absence -
I felt you everywhere...”
– Ludwig Steinherr, “Letter” (translated by Richard Dove)
1 tag
2 tags
“We will meet again
in the lake
you as water
I as lotus blossom
You will...”
– Rose Ausländer, “Love VI” (translated by Vincent Homolka)
“I dug a grave under an oak-tree.
With infinite care, I stamped my spade
Into...”
– Amy Lowell, from “Dreams in War Time”
“There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then...”
– Emily Dickinson
“And in that instant comes
the low echo
of a beyond beyond,
a language archaic...”
– Pura López Colomé, from “Echo,” trans. Forrest Gander (via proustitute)
2 tags
“In shaping the snow into blossoms—
The north wind is tender after all.
All...”
– Ping Hsin, from “Spring Waters” (translated by Kai-yu Hsu)
“I live in my suffering and that makes me happy.
Anything that keeps me from...”
– Roland Barthes, from Mourning Diary
“Rumors say the secret of life is sewn
into a dead man’s coat, but when we...”
– Traci Brimhall, from “Come Trembling”
1 tag
“There is fire under the earth,
and the fire is pure.
There is fire under the...”
– Ingeborg Bachmann, from “Songs from an Island” (translated by Mark Anderson)
1 tag
“When you rise from the dead,
when I rise from the dead,
no stone will lie...”
– Ingeborg Bachmann, from “Songs from an Island” (translated by Mark Anderson)
1 tag
2 tags
“Rilke’s special gift as a poet is that he does not seem to speak from the middle...”
– Robert Hass (via litverve)
2 tags
“If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.”
– Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books (via litverve)
1 tag
theblueoftombs asked: “What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?” —Sylvia Plath from “Conversation Among the Ruins”
1 tag
