May 2013
“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”
– Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson in his timeless Kenyon College commencement address, May 20, 1990.
“It is necessary to fall in love, if only to provide an alibi for all the random...”
– Albert Camus (via marigriffin)
[Writing the essay “Love, Hotel Style”] taught - or rather reminded - me about the importance of ceremony, which is another way of saying “story,” which is at the heart of the word romance. - Thomas Beller
Hotels and motels have always struck me as incredible arenas of possibility. This has been true, even if I was checking in to one alone. I like the feeling (or the illusion) that I am completely off the grid, anonymous and unfindable, like a fugitive. For a long time the most important quality in a hotel room was, for me, that it was a hotel room…. What every hotel room has in common is the...
“…. Sometimes / I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small / suns, and have...”
– Catherine Pierce’s “Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean” (via themapleleaves)
3 tags
In Which You Stare Over the Steering Wheel as the...
Her: Don't turn on me.
Him: You're the only one here.
“Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict....”
– Brian Eno (via mttbll)
“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or...”
– Marie Howe, “What The Living Do,” (via faulknerandfieldnotes)
April 2013
They Romp with Wooly Canines / Patricia Smith
and spy whole lifetimes on the undersides of leaves. Jazz intrudes, stank clogging that neat procession of lush and flutter. His eyes, siphoned and dimming, demand that he accept ardor as it is presented, with its tear-splashed borders and stilted lists, romance that is only on the agenda because hours do not stop. Bless his sliver of soul. He’s nabbed a sizzling matron who grays as...
3 tags
The Bell Is On The Inside
Someone privately sent me the following question a few weeks ago, and I apologize for taking so long to answer. It’s my last week of grading, the weekend before finals, and I wanted to give this question the attention it deserves - I’ve so often asked it myself. How does one manage to find real love? Do you have any hope to give the hopeless? I’m happy for this question, because I’m not sure...
“how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?
how...”
– questions for the woman i was last night - (the honest conversation), Warsan Shire (via palmofmyhands)
1 tag
Why The Right is Wrong →
Amanda Marcotte discusses the new trend of “social conservatives…singing the praises of youthful marriage—and skewing the facts on its benefits and costs.”
“I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room
where everyone finally gets...”
– Richard Siken (via haya)
2 tags
1 tag
When he says my name, he uses both my first and middle. In this way, he has made my name new, known only to him as such. It’s like being kissed in a place no one has ever touched.
1 tag
V-Neck T-Shirt Sonnet
I love a white v-neck t-shirt on you: two cotton strips racing to a point they both arrived at: there vigor barely contained, flaming hair, collarless, fenced-in skin that shines. Cool drop of hem, you, soft & lived-in, are so unlike my father & to bed you go, flushed with fur like dried grass, a rabbit’s burrow or nest for a flightless bird, brooding. Let me be that endangered specie,...
Finally I Allow Him the Pen
You firestar. Pool of moonburst. You turned my skin to dust. Rawblade glasstooth girl. With your hot rage and bus ticket anywhere. Never saw a woman run so many directions at once. One night, you shined so bright the police came to watch. Your bruises and shirt-shreds. How we all just stood there, watching you shimmer. Afraid to flinch, for a faceful of claw. You are some kind of firework....
“It’s true, you spend the years after thirty turning over
the suggestion that...”
– Dionne Brand, Hard Against The Soul (via the-unfeminine-female)
“I love how it swells
into a temple where it is
held prisoner, where the god...”
– Yusef Komunyakaa, Anodyne (via yesyes)
Small Town
You know. The light on upstairs before four every morning. The man asleep every night before eight. What programs they watch. Who traded cars, what keeps the town moving. The town knows. You know. You’ve known for years over drugstore coffee. Who hurts, who loves. Why, today, in the house two down from the church, people you know cannot stop weeping.
- Philip Booth
“People escape into other things; you don’t escape into poetry. You confront...”
– Mark Strand (via mttbll)
“I call to you across a monstrous river or chasm
to caution you, to prepare you....”
– Louise Glück, “The Sensual World” (The Seven Ages, Ecco, 2001)
1 tag
Whom You Love | Joseph O. Legaspi
“Tell me whom you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
— Creole Proverb
The man whose throat blossoms with spicy chocolates Tempers my ways of flurrying Is my inner recesses surfacing Paints the bedroom blue because he wants to...
1 tag
Speaking American by Bob Hicok
When he learned I’m a poet he asked if I knew this other poet. We don’t all know each other, I told him as he informed me she likes cheese similes. Love is like cheese, time is like cheese, cheese is surprisingly like cheese. Then I said I know this poet and he went, see. “He went, see” means he said see, see, but you know that if you’re American and alive. I explained that “I know this poet”...
1 tag
On This Very Street in Belgrade
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst. -Charles Simic
3 tags
“Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of...”
– Mary Oliver
1 tag
Big Bitch
It’s embarrassing, how many people died today
and how much I still want
to kiss you in Paris, San Francisco, your bed
in August with the windows open, where my tongue has gone sore
from sucking itself, and I feel
like an ice cream cone someone dropped
on the sidewalk in July, like you could drink
my pink hips though a straw, so I’ve been working
on my darkness, but lipstick
looks stupid on me,...
4 tags
After Love →
I wrote letters of introduction and sent them to every embassy of every future just in case you need something when you get there
including to all the outposts of wind-up afternoons and to all the banquets where the gods disagree and to all the bees muscling in all the flowers and of course to every color.
In the letters I share a couple of our secrets the story of our argument on the...
1 tag
March 2013
This Morning This Porch
The woodpecker, industrious, perched high in the pines, and the squirrels, yammering at a red-tailed hawk. Dappled sunlight filters through an old Magnolia, spotting the beams; a patchwork of clouds move across the sky. Last night we laid right here under the bright moon and beaming stars of a country sky; the Gulf of Mexico lapping the coastline, salting the air. You chewed the stem of a viola...
INTERVIEWER
You mention Auden, Thomas, Yeats, and Hardy as early influences in your introduction to the second edition of The North Ship. What in particular did you learn from your study of these four?
LARKIN
Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn. At the end of it you can’t say, That’s...
The Pain
Like the human brain, which organizes The swirls and shades of the bathroom tiles Into faces, faces With expressions Of exhaustion, of disdain. The Virgin Mary in the toast of course But also the penance in the pain, and the way My mother invented Plums and tissue paper, while My father invented the type of Sudden kindness That takes you by surprise When you’ve expected to be...
1 tag
Ode, Aubade And the morning, too, falters, struggles to assert itself, burn through the errant fog, the pines, scorch the whole grove of trees and crooked streetlamps. Your body’s turning, turning beside me in my bed’s— sprawl? Badlands? You sigh On my neck. Startled, the crick and sob buried inside it like a pulsar behind dust, like a larva in a bean, want out.
-Greg...
2 tags
Last week, a colleague’s 25-year-old daughter was shot multiple times, including in the head, by an ex-boyfriend, during the day in the parking lot of a grocery store, as she tried to escape in her car. She did not survive.
While this event is horrible and sick and sad, I didn’t personally know her. However, it’s been discussed (obviously) at length at the college where I...
3 tags
We cannot push ourselves away from this quiet, even in our sprees of inattention, the departing passengers stubbing out their smokes, arrives in tears, lots of cellophane, the rumpus over parking. Wind scrapes leaves across the road, first flashes of snow, it is dark then it’s really dark. Forgive me for not writing for so long, I’ve been right beside you, one of the vaguer divinities...
1 tag
Panels for the Walls
Leave the long fall between us (peak after peak) Here were my paints and there were my powders And then I was drunk and we lost each other My shadow tumbled after Soaking cinnamon leaves in the lake of the moon The roll of the damned drum calls me to duty The dice in the light of the lamp I hear a stone gong I lean full weight on my slender staff Yellow leaves shaken and petals confused to my...
1 tag
Marty McConnell Wants Tumblrverse to Know... →
A) Thanks for the poem love
B) Frida Kahlo did not write that poem C) That poem has line breaks, yo
“Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and...”
– Laurie Penny (April 2012) Loving Laurie Penny (who also has some beautiful articles up at The New Statesmen on topics such as Steubenville, Feminism, Capitalism, etc.
“She still had the heart-threshing looks, the wicked corneal glint of a serious...”
– Sam Lipsyte, “This Appointment Occurs in the Past”
Dispatch from Spring Training
Today was sunny goodness, and I went on a long run in the warmth. This run was very much the start of Spring training for me. While I’ve been maintaining a 3x a week HIIT schedule for the last month, my game has seriously been off since I did the Warrior Dash in October, fell in love, made a bunch of goodbig changes in my life. [[MORE]] I gained 15 pounds this winter, and for the first...
