December 2009
cat haikus →
You never feed me. Perhaps I’ll sleep on your face. That will sure show you
—-
You must scratch me there! Yes, above my tail!
Behold, elevator butt. —-
Blur of motion, then — silence, me, a paper bag. What is so funny?
Watchoh hai der kitty.
Philip Larkin, the process of poetry
The process of poetry consists of three stages: The first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in...
Marvin Bell's 32 statements about writing poetry.
1. Every poet is an experimentalist. 2. Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read. 3. There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
4. The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
5. Learn the rules, break the...
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the...”
– Sydney Smith (via brokenmachine)
Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook [PDF] →
austinkleon:
Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to...
snuts (I love Simone)
caitasticccc a snutty problem i wanna be a bat
a bat inside your brain
11:52 PM its actually sad i wanna have a gun to shoot the bat inside my brain
Watchbecause this didn’t work the first time I tried to post it.
“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone...”
– unknown (via justbesplendid) (via hit-or-miss) (via lovebot) (via kari-shma) (via brokenmachine)
The Creation of Eve — Bruce Beasley
We lay a long time in the brine of my blood, Father, this other hacked from my flesh, her side by my gashed side. Strangers— How fitfully we slept like that, her hair sponging the long cut just under my throat. We didn’t speak, falling asleep, waking each other in starts— both feverish. Once I dreamed You were calling and calling and I couldn’t answer, something caught deep on my...
"Forty-three Cents" Leslie Bernard →
“One of my professors is dying. My other professor, his dear friend of forty years, started weeping in class today. Suddenly the room condensed into a single burning coin. All of us, regardless of where we were sitting, were somehow in the exact same place, yearning to reach into our teacher’s heart and touch it, softly, wordlessly. As other bodies in the room began to quiver with grief, I...
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m...”
– JSF, EL&IC (via fouxtography)
“It may be that you have lived thirty years, forty years, but you have never seen...”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Hunger Camp At Jaslo — Wislawa Szymborska
Write it. Write. In ordinary ink on ordinary paper: they were given no food, they all died of hunger. “All. How many? It’s a big meadow. How much grass for each one?” Write: I don’t know. History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, an ABC never read, air...
Waking in the Blue — Robert Lowell
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My hearts grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. (This is the house for the “mentally ill.”) What use is my...
Rabbit, Rabbit, White Rabbit
