One day, you’ll be half asleep in the dark, listening to a radio
play in another room, and feel yourself
suddenly filling like a jug with the cold
awareness nothing more will ever happen, the disaster
of your old ambivalence, the familiarity
of desire’s wolfish teeth sinking into the body.
The body, as if it didn’t belong to you anymore.

~ portion of “Post-Romantic,” a poem by Paisley Rekdal

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“…Writing is one of the crossroads where what is most disturbing can be explored and investigated without destroying yourself or others. This is one of the highest purposes of the arts.

As writers we have a responsibility to name our danger zones, prepare ourselves and bring them to the empty page in as small or as large portions as are manageable.”

~ Bonni Goldberg

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“Men are autonomous beings who must not be interfered with!”

~ the amusing Ian

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Pain Thinks of the Beautiful Table

the way water looks up Pain thinks of the beautiful table
surrounded by light Pain thinks of glass & cup iridescence
& afterwards paper & mouth the wall Pain is used to craving
the hand lifting the usual thing Pain thinks of the body’s
meekness the fork without hunger without interruption Pain
thinks of going for days without the beautiful table without
food or expression so that flowers & cold are drawn in

~ Laurie Lamon, from The Fork Without Hunger (a book of poems)

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“…so far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality. If poetry were anything — like dropping an atombomb — which anyone did, anyone could become a poet merely by doing the necessary anything; whatever that anything might or might not entail. But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet’s calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you’ve got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being. I am quite aware that, wherever our socalled civilization has slithered, there’s every reward and no punishment for unbeing. But if poetry is your goal, you’ve got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it’s you — nobody else — who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. There’s the artist’s responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth. If you can take it, take it — and be. If you can’t, cheer up and go about other people’s business; and do (or undo) till you drop.”

~ i six nonlectures by ee cummings

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“I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness…”

~Exremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

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“I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.”

~Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

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for Josh :)

Inflammatory Writ
by Joanna Newsom

Oh, where is your inflammatory writ?
Your text that would incite a light,
“Be lit”?
Our music deserving devotion unswerving -
cry “Do I deserve her?” with unflagging fervor.
(Well, no you do not, if you cannot get over it)

And what’s it mean when suddenly we’re spent?
Ambition came and reared its head, and went.
Even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden
but you dirge for the dead, take no jam on your bread
- just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed.

And all at once it came to me,
and i wrote and hunched ’till four-thirty
But that vestal light, it burns out with the night
in spite of all the time that we spent on it:
one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet!
While outside, the wild boars root
without bending a bough underfoot-
O it breaks my heart; I don’t know how they do’t.

And as for my inflammatory writ?
Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit.
Advice from the master derailed that disaster;
he said “Hand that pen over to ME, poetaster!”
While across the great plains, keening lovely & awful,
ululate the last Great American Novels -
An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit.
(But at least they didn’t run, to their undying credit.)

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