“and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
—James Joyce, Ulysses
(Happy Bloomsday)
(Happy Bloomsday)
June 2013
4 posts
“Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness … If he gave an interview to a reporter, or performed any unusual exploit, he would find it recorded in such terms as these: “Professor Bract, although a distinguished botanist, is not in any way an unmanly man. He has, in fact, a wife and seven children. Tall and burly, the hands with which he handles his delicate specimens are as gnarled and powerful as those of a Canadian lumberjack, and when I swilled beer with him in his laboratory, he bawled his conclusions at me in a strong, gruff voice that implemented the promise of his swaggering moustache.” […]”
—From seanan_mcguire’s posting on Sexism, the current SFWA kerfuffle, and “lady authors:” in the comments, via jenk, a long lovely passage from Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1947 essay, “The Human-Not-Quite-Human”. Read the whole thing. The perception of this problem is nothing new… (via dduane)
May 2013
13 posts
“The Yamana … had fifteen names for clouds and more than fifty for different kinds/ of kin. Among their variations of the verb/ ‘to bite’ was a word that meant ‘to come surprisingly on a hard substance/ when eating something soft/ e.g. a pearl in a mussel.”
—Qtd. in Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998)
“I used to love the run-up to a storm” by Melanie Braverman : Poetry Magazine →
poetryfoundation.org
I used to love the run-up to a storm, watching from the porch as the grown-ups hurried to bring things in, my mother rummaging through drawers for a flashlight, cursing: nothing was where it was supposed to be in our house. It can’t be so, but the only people I ever remember huddled in the basement were my mother and me, suspended in that eerie half-light like bats. We’ve just spent a week like this, my mother perched in a chair above the water keeping watch for the next bad thing. We were happy so sometimes she’d let the vigil rest, the sentry of her shoulders easing to a more receptive pose, a quarter moon, until something called her back to the watch, mother first no longer but this white, foremost light. You can read by it. You can see.
Tarp by Rick Barot : Poetry Magazine →
poetryfoundation.org
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof
of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one
took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,
black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,
the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind
that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,
whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:
He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof
of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one
took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,
black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,
the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind
that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,
whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:
He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
April 2013
18 posts
“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
—Nikki Giovanni (via amandaonwriting)
