street-light-poetry

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new poem live on patreon! (transcript in image description)

#mine #poetry

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“The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity, even a term of endearment; the word is impartial: the usage is all. The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience—everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home […].”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (via exhaled-spirals)

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The responsibility of the poet? My medical mentor, a Jewish man from Waco, Texas, used to say that a plethora of ongoing research on a particular medical subject indicates that we still don’t know enough about that subject. And that’s how I feel about the responsibility of the poet. We keep talking about it because it is relentlessly mutable, pluripotent. We are never satisfied with our answers. I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant. In poetry, the range of metaphors and topics is limited, predictable, but the styles are innumerable. Think how we read poetry from centuries ago and are no longer bothered by its outdated diction. All that remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human. And perhaps that’s all we want from poetry. A language of life. I like this quote by J. M. Coetzee: “The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.”

Fady Joudah, from his interview with Aria Aber: "Fady Joudah | The poet on how the war in Gaza changed his work", published in The Yale Review, February 28, 2024

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A Country Called Song

by Najwan Darwish tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

I lived in a country called Song: Countless singing women made me a citizen, and musicians from the four corners composed cities for me with mornings and nights, and I roamed through my country like a man roams through the world.

My country is a song, and as soon as it ends, I go back to being a refugee.

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i am like. SO HUNGRY for fiction written by trans people that’s just that little bit fucked up and juicy and gripping but i can’t find any fucking recs because all the lists are like “150 books with trans stories!” and 145 of them are the same copy pasted young adult romance/anti-romance shit with 14 year old protagonists and the other 5 is shit i’ve already read

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H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Pygmalion

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anyways. look at my poem boy

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"That it will never come again"

by Emily Dickinson

That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet. Believing what we don’t believe Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best An ablative estate -- This instigates an appetite Precisely opposite.

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Meghan Privitello, One God at a Time

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The Winter Palace

by Philip Larkin

Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century Losing what I had learnt at university.

And refusing to take in what had happened since. Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

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Vision

by May Thielgaard Watts

Today there have been lovely things I never saw before; sunlight through a jar of marmalade; a blue gate; a rainbow in soapsuds on dishwater; candlelight on butter; the crinkled smile of a little girl who had new shoes with tassels; a chickadee on a thorn-apple; empurpled mud under a willow, where white geese slept; white ruffled curtains sifting moonlight on the scrubbed kitchen floor; the under-side of a white-oak leaf; ruts in the road at sunset; an egg yolk in a blue bowl.

My love kissed my eyes last night.

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Lauren Clark, Music for a Wedding

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note: although this was printed as a prose poem, the form conceals a perfect sonnet written in iambic pentameter.

#fav

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I Have Gone Marking

by Pablo Neruda tr. W.S. Merwin

I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire. My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide. In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst. Stories to tell you on the shore of evening, sad and gentle doll, so that you should not be sad. A swan, a tree, something far away and happy. The season of grapes, the ripe and fruitful season. I who lived in a harbour from which I loved you. The solitude crossed with dream and with silence. Penned up between the sea and sadness. Soundless, delirious, between two motionless gondoliers. Between the lips and the voice something goes dying. Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion. The way nets cannot hold water. My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling. Even so, something sings in these fugitive words. Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth. Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy. Sing, burn, flee, like a belfry at the hands of a madman. My sad tenderness, what comes over you all at once? When I have reached the most awesome and the coldest summit my heart closes like a nocturnal flower.

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Field of Skulls

by Mary Karr

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,    and if you're predisposed to dark — let’s say    the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love    Lucy reruns have gone off — stare

like your eyes have force, and behind any night’s taut scrim will come the forms    you expect pressing from the other side.    For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.    They’re plain once you think to look.

You know such fields exist, for criminals roam your very block, and even history lists    monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters    unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps    that disgruntled mail clerk from your job

has already scratched your name on a bullet — that’s him    rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought, for it proves there’s no better spot for you than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing    the bad news piped steady from your head. The night    is black. You stare and furious stare,

confident there are no gods out there. In this way,    you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine    and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all    your remembered loves. If the skulls are there — let’s say they do press toward you against night’s scrim — could they not stare with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,    at the force your hands hold?

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“I arrived by air, in the dark,” she wrote, two years later. “When night descended over the ocean, many unfamiliar stars sprang out in the sky; as we approached land, there began to blossom below me such an irregular confusion of small lights it was difficult to be certain if the starry sky lay above or below me. So the aeroplane ascended or descended into an electric city where nothing was what it seemed at first and I was absolutely confused.” There she is—dizzy, suspended between two beds of light. 

Angela Carter’s Feminist Mythology, Joan Acocella

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Year's End

by Jorge Luis Borges tr. W.S. Merwin

Neither the symbolic detail of a three instead of a two, nor that rough metaphor that hails one term dying and another emerging nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process muddle and undermine the high plateau of this night making us wait for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.

The real cause is our murky pervasive suspicion of the enigma of Time, it is our awe at the miracle that, though the chances are infinite and though we are drops in Heraclitus’ river, allows something in us to endure, never moving.