May 2012
1 post
April 2012
1 post
March 2012
6 posts
I could be very happy, except that I am broke
Dear Harriet Monroe—
Spring is here. —and I could be very happy, except that I am broke. Would you mind paying me now instead of upon publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have? I am become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco.
Wistfully yours,
...
“I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think poetry is a mere Jack a Lantern to...”
– John Keats; letter to Benjamin Bailey, TODAY, 1818. (via poetrysociety)
1 tag
“‘Do you write novels?’ I said.
‘Novels, Lord no,’ she said. ‘I can’t even...”
– Pam Houston, Waltzing the Cat
Run, don’t walk, to get a copy of Pam’s latest, Contents May Have Shifted
(via wwnorton and poetrysociety)
February 2012
4 posts
The Wish / Louise Glück
Remember that time you made the wish?
I make a lot of wishes. The time I lied to you about the butterfly. I always wondered what you wished for. What do you think I wished for? I don’t know. That I’d come back, that we’d somehow be together in the end. I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.
January 2012
2 posts
Romantic Comedies/Mark Leidner (via Thermos)
He has a turtle and she has a shell.
She’s the principal and he’s the janitor.
She’s a widowed social worker looking for a father figure and he’s an elderly vagrant.
She’s a woman and he’s … a woman.
He’s unprincipled and she’s … principled. Everyone in his life has drowned and he hates dogs and she’s a collegiate swimming coach with a thousand...
W. W. Norton: The Obligation to Be Happy →
The Obligation to Be Happy
It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them.
And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more...
December 2011
2 posts
“I pity nonsense, because until now it has been so neglected in the making of...”
– (Kurt Schwitters. from Merz)
“My recent feeling is that poetry is nothing more (or less) than the attempt to...”
– Brandon Shimoda
November 2011
2 posts
from The Stars That Come Before The Night
iv. / by Ana Bozicenic
If the sign on the door signals to the passer-by that the store is OPEN, does the other side of the sign tell those inside the store that the world is CLOSED? Close up shop, put world back in business. This poem is called The Mystery of Commerce.
October 2011
6 posts
WatchDetail of Louise Seamster’s amazing extra-illustrated book in action!
Watch“how weird it is that some people have normal lives and some people have very sad lives and then some people are Spike Jonze.” (thanks Louise)
“It used to be that if you wanted to be subversive and radical, you’d publish on...”
– Kenneth Goldsmith from this believer interview
“What are names for a sloping outside cellar door?” “What do you call the kind of...”
– HUMANITIES article on dialectology and the Dictionary of American Regional English.
September 2011
2 posts
“he finds poetry most beautiful when it’s quoted in prose—line breaks...”
– I interview Ben Lerner for the Poetry Society website.
August 2011
2 posts
“We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We...”
– From an article about Facebook by smartypants Zadie Smith
5 tags
almost all the way / w4m / 28 / A to Far Rockaway →
I wrote THIS fictional craigslist missed connection for Brett’s blog, Ships that Pass, and it got one hilarious, real response. Check it out.
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
April 2011
5 posts
7 tags
3 tags
Nothing pleases me
Nothing pleases me the traveler on the bus says—Not the radio or the morning newspaper, nor the citadels on the hills. I want to cry / The driver says: Wait until you get to the station, then cry alone all you want / A woman says: Me too. Nothing pleases me. I guided my son to my grave, he liked it and slept there, without saying goodbye / A college student says: Nor does anything please...
1 tag
Thank you, poetry.
noideasbut:
Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
1 tag
March 2011
6 posts
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Reblogging this because its the easiest way for me...
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A Hole to See the Ocean Through →
Dispatches from a drifting polar vessel.
an incredible lyric essay by Ellie Ga in the newest edition of Triple Canopy. Also one of the most beautifully formatted pieces of writing I’ve ever seen on the internet!
6 tags
When did the poems get written?
“One of the most startling things about Frank in the period when I first knew him was his ability to write a poem when other people were talking, or even to get up in the middle of a conversation, get his typewriter, and write a poem, sometimes participating in the conversation while doing so. This may sound affected when I describe it, but it wasn’t so at all. The poems he wrote in...
4 tags
“When I think about blogging I think about this Bill Murray quote about how...”
– Molly Lambert, about making the stuff that later may turn out to be art
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“I have a lot of stolen goods in the poems. So much has been stolen—women’s...”
– From this amazing interview with my teacher Hoa Nguyen on Evening Will Come, a beautiful online publication I think I have raved about before….
February 2011
11 posts
1 tag
LetterMpress: A Virtual Letterpress on Your iPad →
check. it. out.
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“When the point of reading is remembering, you approach a text very differently...”
– Memory Athletes and the history of their sport in this week’s NYT
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More Michael Robbins! →
I have few legs. I sleep on meat.
I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/01/12/090112po_poem_robbins#ixzz1EH8GxZBx
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Hey it's Michael Robbins discovery and... →
6 tags
Michael Robbins continues to impress! "The boys... →
My fish, fast and loose, shoot fish in a kettle.The boys like the girls who like heavy metal.On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom,on Motörhead, Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem …
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I just discovered (in plain sight! in POETRY... →
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