The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

— Audre Lorde / “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”

“The deluded dreams of billionaires aside, there is no Planet B.”

— António Guterres / UN Secretary General at Cop15

“These days, I’m still an ardent environmentalist, but now that means recognizing how none of us are alone. Not the wolves or oceans or trees or me. That’s the idea I’m keeping in mind this winter, as the world feels bleak and I don’t know how to deal with mass murder and terrible laws and each daily injustice. We grow our own networks to survive…”

— Sarah Mirk / “You will never be self-sufficient”

“Once I sat in rain,
opened my mouth to the sky.
I yearned to be changed.
But each drop was a small knife.”

— Victoria Chang / “Far Along in the Story”

“I assert that poetry without politics is narcissistic & not useful to us. I also believe that everything is political-there is no neutral, safe place we can hide out in waiting for the brutality to go away.”

— Chrystos / Fire Power

“It will be about nothing.
Not about love or God,
But about nothing.”

— Charles Simic / “The Last Lesson”

“There are so many roots to the tree of anger   
that sometimes the branches shatter   
before they bear.”

— Audre Lorde / “Who Said It Was”

What I’m Listening To:

“When I screamed in the night
I wasn’t screaming for you
I was afraid of the things
That you’d do
Was I asking for it”

— Mhaol / “Asking for It”