“In this time of book banning and mistrust of truth, I find writing poetry a most subversive act.”
— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
“… I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.”
— Dodie Bellamy / “Hoarding as Ecriture”
“Sometimes I start a story with just a feeling. Often it is a place or an image. A house, a tree, a mountain. A sentence or a phrase. Sometimes it is like a line of music, a tone.”
— Andrea Barrett / The Creative Independent interview
“… It is also stolen from our own children, who will never know the amazing and spectacular world that we enjoyed when we were young. Already, at one degree, our globe is becoming impoverished and reduced. We might all weep for what we have done.”
— Mark Lynas / Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency
“Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written … When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing … I am not fracking or selling useless things to lonely seniors or otherwise abusing my humanity. Find pleasure and joy.”
— Rebecca Solnit / “How to Be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit”
“In short, it has been a summer of climate insanity. But even so, this will be, on average, the coolest summer with the least climate chaos for the rest of your life.”
— Peter Kalmus / “To Understand the Scale of the Climate Emergency, Look at Hurricanes”
“Poetry is part seduction, part abduction.”
— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
This is a digitized morning page. This is a digitized mourning phase. This is digitized mental squall. This is digitized coming to terms. This is digitized hullabaloo. This is digitized push and pull through the eye of a needle in haystack out on the fringes of the wasteland. This is digitized someone else’s neuroses filtered through semi-quavered skronk tectonics. This is digitized skronk tectonics, this. This is digitized digital manipulations via pistoning thumbs—tap tap tap tap poo. Ok, this is digitized poo. Ok, this is the pops. This is digitized digital masturbatory aleatory foo. This is digitized living in the still relatively new-new century. This is digitized raw manifold with a peculiar filter applied. This is digitized. This is. This.
What I’m Reading:
“there is no longer a tear in space nor in myself”
…the bipolarities of bipolar2 means the investiture of happy sad happy sad happy sad…means the cyclic nucleic acidic gentrification of my sadness…and the entropic dystopic myopic envisioning of my happiness…sorta’ rolla’ coasta’ o’ love hate love hate love hate love sorta’ like sorta’ dislike back to happy sad happy sad love hate and rolla’ coasta’ sum’ mo’…it gives me the heebies and the jeebies all at once in a confluence of cortisol and endorphins as a raging tsunami of yin ‘n yang alla’ tha’ time…now and then now and then now and then since i was a kid and now as an adult now and then alla’ tha’ time…and so i cope and grope and cope and grope and cope and grope…and live to see another day…until i don’t…until then let us place our shoulders to our boulders and push upward towards the heights…
What I’m Reading:
“I am living since the year began in a great mental chaos, feral as an unmade bed … there is no one who can help me unpack the suitcases in my brain.”
— Sandra Cisneros / from Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
image: from agnes giberne’s the story of the sun, moon, and stars (1898), in the public domain.
Versus to a Moralist
(N+7 & N+12 recombined, after Luis Carlos López)
Oh moralist, who now looks over my roommate face-deep in the chutney of tropical camellias to be saluted by she who has been out all nightlight-long, to be barked at by the do-gooders in their dollar-deep pews,
Oh moralist who in your simpleton manner have laughed at all the vomitus! In your sidereal shadow when, keeping carefully in the shallow, the butler steals the syrup of ipecac.
But you offer, saturnine trollop, with eloquence in myriad dry heaves, consolation to him whose throat is raw,
while there to sire you from a drunken breakfast a long-haired, neurasthenic barmaid, lousy with crabs who gifts to you doom.
Versos a la luna By Luis Carlos López
¡Oh, luna, que hoy te asomas al tejado de la iglesia, en la calma tropical, para que te salude un trasnochado y te ladren los perros de arrabal!
¡Oh, luna! . . . ¡En tu silencio te has burlado de todo! . . . En tu silencio sideral, viste anoche robar en despoblado . . . ¡y el ladrón era un Juez municipal!
Mas tú ofreces, viajera saturnina, con qué elocuencia en los espacios mudos, consuelo al que la vida laceró,
mientras te cantan, en cualquier cantina, neurasténicos bardos melenudos y piojosos, que juegan dominó. . .
Verses to the Moon (translated from Spanish by William George Williams, 1916)
Oh moon, who now look over the roof of the church, in the tropical calm to be saluted by him who has been out all night, to be barked at by the dogs of the suburbs,
Oh moon who in your silence have laughed at all things! In your sidereal silence when, keeping carefully in the shadow, the municipal judge steals from some den.
But you offer, saturnine traveler, with what eloquence in mute space consolation to him whose life is broken,
while there sing to you from a drunken brawl long-haired, neurasthenic bards, and lousy creatures who play dominos.
(Poems, 1916/1920, are in the public domain.)
image: from agnes giberne’s the story of the sun, moon, and stars (1898), in the public domain.
What I’m Listening To:
“He bends his mouth up to your ear The words won’t disappear He’ll take your eyes out for a ride”
“The new ease of our lives sometimes feels like a betrayal of those who need it more, though I know that the guilt of privilege pays no debt.”
— Melissa Febos / “Iowa Bestiary”
“. . . And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white And then I see nothing but fog. . . “
— Dorothea Lasky / “Monsters”
“… our most precious contribution may well be that at the time of the plague we did not flee; we did not hide; and we did not separate.”
— Dr. Jonathan Mann / Former Head of the W.H.O. Global AIDS Program
“there is a reason for the phrase a riot of colors. witness the fury of the poppies … … let’s talk about the peony held down by the weight of the rock.”
— Lois P. Jones / “Between Fulmination and Adoration”
“The threats we face are overwhelming, way beyond the scope of our powers as individuals, or even as individual nations—and yet, as individuals, we must bear the grief of all that we know. This knowledge exacts a toll.”
—Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that.”
— Brian Eno / “Pushing Back the Limits of Speech and Music”
“Rhyme is cheap. So is pop. Easy to be obese in a land fat with rape.”
— Maureen N. McLane / “Another Day In This Here Cosmos”
What I’m Listening To:
“Fame and fortune is a stupid game and Fame and fortune is the game I play”
