“Because we have crossed the river and the wind offers only a numb uncoiling of cold and we have meekly adapted, no longer expecting more than we have been given, nor wondering how it happened that we came to this place, we don’t mind that nothing turned out as we thought it might. There is no way to clear the haze in which we live, no way to know that we have undergone another day. The silent snow of thought melts before it has a chance to stick. Where we are is unresolved. The gates to nowhere multiply and the present is so far away, so deeply far away.” - Mark Strand, “Bury Your Face in Your Hands” (via growing-orbits)
“To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the “in” box and the “out” box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free future, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past— maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings.” -
Robert Grudin— Time and the Art of Living.
‘Nuff said.
A sneaky shot before settling down to get some work done. January disappeared in a puff of grey smoke. And February, almost halfway done, and I’m determined to make something of the rest of it. Oo-rah.
“As far as I’m concerned, no one form of writing is opposed to any other form of writing. Rather, I think of the various forms – journalism, essays, fiction, plays, poetry – as lying at different points along the same axis. Or, to use another metaphor, I think of them as different flowers in a mixed bouquet. Writing is writing is writing. A writer avails him- or herself of whatever form – journalism or poetry or scholarship – suits his or her immediate purpose. To privilege one form over another is self-defeating. A good writer can turn journalism into a kind of poetry (consider Orwell or Agee). By the same token, poetry often provides the kind of urgent news we can ill afford to ignore.” - Howie Good interviewed by neo:writers
“To write anything tolerable, you have to write with your “ear” – that is, you have to be conscious of how various combinations of words sound. Hearing what you have written is the only way I know to test whether what you’ve written is any good. I don’t necessarily mean declaiming it; I mean hearing it in your head the way readers might hear it in theirs.” - Howie Good interviewed by neo:writers
“A good day of writing for me almost always entails little or no talking. So much of a poem for me is not reaching for an image, but rather ear-training, or the training of the ear to listen for and hear the cadences of speech, those tapping consonants and pearled vowels which don’t produce musical pitches, but instead musical, or rhythmic, patterns. When I look at a work in progress, and it seems to rely less on description and more on how a thing operates, then I can let myself feel it’s been a good day.” - Paper Fort: A Good Writing Day for Laton Carter
Darn it. Got “prohibitively busy” again. Hm. One month down, and the new map already doesn’t properly reflect the landscape. Time to reboot. All change, please. All change.
“know yourself / find the truth / express the truth”
Emphasis in the imperative tone…
via Austin Kleon
—Linda Pastan, Poetry, December 1979Over at Voltage Poetry, Purvi Shah discusses the turns in Pastan’s “Ethics.”
Grab the kids. We’re heading east.
“I don’t think happiness is an end goal. I don’t think not feeling sad is an end goal. I think finding that comfortable medium with yourself, where you can sit in silence and your thoughts don’t eat you alive is the goal. I think feeling content with what you have and haven’t done is the end goal. Maybe that in itself is happiness, where you can be alone and love yourself just as much one day as the next, where no matter what faults you have or mistakes you make, you’re able to wake up and continue going. Maybe.” -
This. Yes.
“I like Mandelstam’s sense of the reader being like a stranger who walks along the shore and finds a bottle with its message inside, the stranger to whom we might say more intimate things than we would to someone we actually know.” - Betsy Sholl
“I like Mandelstam’s sense of the reader being like a stranger who walks along the shore and finds a bottle with its message inside, the stranger to whom we might say more intimate things than we would to someone we actually know.” - Betsy Sholl
“I like Mandelstam’s sense of the reader being like a stranger who walks along the shore and finds a bottle with its message inside, the stranger to whom we might say more intimate things than we would to someone we actually know.” - Betsy Sholl
“Can’t say I’m worried about success because I don’t really know what constitutes success in the poetry world. Book sales? Fellowships? Being invited to read or interviewed? Having people request your work rather than having to send it out cold? I don’t ever want to think that what I’m doing is automatic, or that I can’t fail. Too many once-great poets (no names here) have let their work go stale, and I wonder if it’s because no editor will tell them “this sucks — I don’t want it.” I don’t know if I’ll ever be a great poet, but whatever I am, I don’t want to be a guy who writes the same poem over and over again, no matter how well I write it.” - A Poet in My Bones: A Conversation with Brian Spears « Used Furniture Review
If result = FAIL: acknowledge_and_own(), repair(), reboot(), return(); set end_of_world = “false”; set tomorrow = {‘new day’, ‘blank page’}. End if.
—#fail_script v1.1
“To a city dweller there is nothing so unnerving as the absence of ambient noise. It feels unnatural, as if the world all around is deliberately holding its breath. He waits instinctively for an exhalation, or for the trap to be sprung.” - Philip Sington, The Valley of Unknowing (via wwnorton)
Poet (+ mentee and friend) Miriam Nash, shortly before she left London for an MFA in the US. Proud, particularly after the recent launch of her debut pamphlet. Photo credit: yours truly.
