Poetry should not mean but be: on sharing poems on Tumblr | MobyLives
On May 27, Heather Christle posted a poem on her Tumblr. The poem was Christle’s own; called ”1998” and picked from the collection The Trees the Trees…Baby’s first Moby!
Alla Osipenko with John Markovsky, ca. 1970s
(Source: fit-girl-in-the-real-world, via witheredbluebells)
"It was like seeing the word HOTEL echoing through the city and feeling the urge to take off your clothes in the taxi, and then to see how much if any of your skin you can take off, to get down to something you own."
— Donna Stonecipher, from “Model City” (The Paris Review no. 205)
"When I was a child, about eight years old, I went to stay with a family and I picked up a copy of The Waves that happened to be at my bedside. It was the first book by Virginia Woolf I ever looked at. I read the pages at the beginning, where the children are speaking in single phrases. I just thought, This is my language, even though I had only read two pages and didn’t know what was going on. So I think that primal, childlike reading, where you know nothing, is very important."
— Hermione Lee, The Paris Review no. 205
1996 by Sara Peters
This is what I wrote in my notebook as I read Sara Peters’ brilliant 1996. Somehow the notes I made, spaced and toothed like Peters’ own work, lean at a tweezered precision I can’t quite get at in prose. These chevrons pointing right up my arms, separated by Peters’ parts, cool metals on the corners of the insides of my elbows.
Now live on TFG!
“I came to America when I was 14. My mother told me that books were too heavy to bring, and I had this crazy idea that I’d never be able to replace them, so I copied all my favorite Russian poems by hand.”
"desperate to align myself with the ringing I was always hearing, eager to make the pulse in my skull a sharable surge"
— Maureen N. McLane, My Poets (via emmaylor)
“… the thought of sending all this to the wise wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s red leather purse. It is my little old life-tragedy.
“It means everything to me.” —Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil’s ComingAbove: An advertisement for MacLane’s lost 1917 film, Men Who Have Made Love to Me.
(Source: marymaclane.com)
Summer is for readers.
Pearl Bremner
1960
May reading
[In which I binge on Anne Carson before graduating & losing access to my school’s library; & oh, it was good.]
Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband—Raw scorching lines; perfect use of Keats; kickass titles; some of the poems in here read in this video (starting at 12:50, but before that she reads some of her short talks so that’s worth watching too).
Marina Tsetaeva (tr. Angela Livingstone), Art in the Light of Conscience—I love how she writes about other poets & about capital-p Poetry; sometimes her essays run on a little longer than they need to due to their circularity, but I love her too much to care.
Anne Carson, Nox—Summed by a line from the book itself: “But all those little kidnaps in the dark.”
Up on ze writing blog!
gammas & gerunds: Lois in the Sunny Tree
Mark Halliday
When in August 1920 I smiled for the camera
from my perch on the limb of a sun-spangled tree,
says Lois, long dead now but humorously seen years old then,
with a giant ribbon in my hair, the sorrow of living in time
was only very tiny and remote in some far corner of my mindand for me to know then, as I smiled for that camera
in Michigan in the summer of 1920
that you would peer thoughtfully and admiringly
into my happy photographed eyes eighty-some years later
would have been good for me only in a very tiny and remote way.—Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
(Source: poems.com)
