June 2012
150 posts
5 tags
“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of...”
– Henry Beston, The Outermost House
3 tags
May 2012
147 posts
3 tags
“In my small way I prosper.”
– Turner Cassity, ”Off the Nollendorfplatz” (The Best American Poetry 2011)
(with thanks to leopoldgursky)
3 tags
“He liked the late afternoon light as it dimmed
In the living room, and wouldn’t...”
– David Lehman, “Dutch Interior”
2 tags
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“Thought’s surface: word.
Word’s surface: gesture.
Gesture’s...”
– Vera Pavlova, “[Thought’s surface: word]”, translated by Steven Seymour
6 tags
“I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white...”
– Lisel Mueller, from “When I Am Asked” (thank you, proustitute)
3 tags
3 tags
“I don’t believe in the next world. The world is one. One reality. Death isn’t a...”
– Anna Kamienska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook”, translated by Clare Cavanagh
2 tags
“The rest of my days I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die,...”
– Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
4 tags
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“Learn to look past,
to be the first to part.
Tears, saliva, sperm
are no...”
– Vera Pavlova, “[Learn to look past]”, translated by Steven Seymour
5 tags
“Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.”
– Henry Miller, Sexus
3 tags
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“‘Tis but a part of sorrow that we hear:
Deep sounds make lesser noise...”
– William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece
3 tags
“If I could only put up with myself and the selves inside me.”
– Fernando Pessoa, from Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown
3 tags
“Perhaps it’s true, my happiest moments are the anticipation of other moments...”
– Susan Mitchell, lines from “Bird: A Memoir” in Erotikon (Thank you, A Poet Reflects:)
2 tags
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“Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like...”
– Anna Kamienska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook, translated by Clare Cavanagh (Thank you, awritersruminations)
4 tags
“I have often asked myself why I enjoy writing (manually, that is) to such a...”
– Roland Barthes, from the preface to La civilisation de l’écriture by Roger Druet and Herman Grégoire (Thank you, awritersruminations)
4 tags
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“I cry continually against my life. I have sleepless nights, thinking of the time...”
– W. B. Yeats, Estrangement: Extracts from a Diary Kept in 1909
3 tags
“It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside...”
– Gary Snyder, “How Poetry Comes to Me”
3 tags
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“Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few,...”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
4 tags
“It’s my mind, with its hoard of horribles,
that’s me.
Or...”
– Anne Stevenson, from “Washing My Hair”
4 tags
3 tags
“Morning arrives
unannounced
by limousine: the tall
emaciated chairman
of...”
– Franz Wright, “Morning Arrives”
3 tags
4 tags
“Always learn poems by heart,” she said. “They have to become the...”
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander
3 tags
“To speak of the smell and feel
of books, the erotics of the text,
has begun to...”
– Yahia Lababidi, “Shuttered Windows” (via berfrois)
3 tags
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“More than kisses, letters mingle souls…”
– John Donne, from “To Sir Henry Wotton”
3 tags
“Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde
4 tags
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“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in...”
– Philip James Bailey, from [“We live in deeds, not years”]
2 tags
“She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for...”
– E. M. Forster, Howards End
3 tags
“Be what I think? But I keep thinking I’m so many things!”
– Fernando Pessoa, from “Tobacco Shop”, trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown
3 tags
4 tags
“I see my life go drifting like a river
From change to change; I have been many...”
– W. B. Yeats, from “Fergus and the Druid”
3 tags
“Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen...”
– Oscar Wilde, from “Her Voice”
3 tags
2 tags
“There is ecstasy in paying attention.”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (via Risky Wiver)
3 tags
“Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet...”
– Louise Erdrich, from “Advice to Myself” (via @Soulclaphands)
3 tags
“Seat yourself next to your joy
and have your awakened soul pour wine.”
– Rumi
3 tags
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“Every thought reorders the universe.”
– William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War
6 tags
“I do feel at home in the world. I have genuinely felt throughout my life a sense...”
– William Stafford, The Paris Review
2 tags
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“Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
How many times...”
– Juan Ramon Jimenez, “Who Knows What Is Going On”, translated by Robert Bly 