A Writer's Ruminations

"…though grief would come later and it was a relief
to know I wasn’t alone…"

— Gerald Stern, from “Day of Grief” (via proustitute)

"That beautiful mind! That was the thing. Lucid, passionate, independent, acute, proudly and incessantly nourished, eccentric for honorable reasons, sensitive for every reason, it has marked us forever. Allow it its blind spots, for it could detect pure gold. It could detect contradictory purity. In the presence of poetic fire it sent out shower of sparks on its own. It was a mind like some marvelous enchanter’s instrument."

— Eudora Welty, on Virginia Woolf, from N.Y Times Book Review (via violentwavesofemotion)

"Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time."

— Walt Whitman “America”

"A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared."

— Gloria Anzaldúa ”Speaking in Tongues” (via thugzmansion)

"But women have survived, and our feelings have survived. As poetry. And there are no new pains. We have felt them already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, they lie in our poems, and it is our dreams and our poems that point the way to our freedom."

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”

"Poetry is not a luxury. For the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon those changes we hope to bring about through those lives. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dreams birth concepts, as feeling births ideas, as knowledge births or precedes understanding."

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”

"My poetry is not separate from my living, nor is yours. The only way we can teach another person to create poetry is to teach that person how to feel herself or himself. The experience of poetry is intimate, and it is crucial. For that reason, of course, it is often resented or resisted. The pursuit of one’s own poetry is basically a subversive activity, because the pursuit of one’s feelings colors one’s total existence, and we are paid well for refusing to feel ourselves."

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”

"She does not know
her beauty,
she thinks her brown body
has no glory.

If she could dance
naked
under palm trees
and see her image in the river,
she would know.

But there are no palm trees
on the street,
and dish water gives back
no images."

— William Waring Cuney, “No Images” (thanks to The Crunk Feminist Collective)

"When I am next to the sea, the wide spread of water laps over me with an enduring peace and excitement that feels like finding some precious rock in the earth, a sense of touching something that is most essentially me in a place where my past and my future intersect along the present. The present, that line of stress and connection and performance, the intense crashing now. Yet only earth and sky last forever, and the ocean joins them."

— Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde

"the fragments join in me with their own music."

— Muriel Rukeyser, from “The Poem as Mask”