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torsamors · 7 months
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[I won’t be able to write from the grave] by fanny howe (id in alt text)
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sageandscorpiongrass · 6 months
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First off I wanna say I love Elsa's song and the amazing devil...
Do you think you could make a web weave of your best friend cutting you off after years? It's been a lot on me :(
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What do I do with myself now? On: Friendship and endings.
I hope this is alright. It's been... a few years since someone's called me their best friend? So my implied emotion might be a tad off.
Poem, Langston Hughes | Near Miss, Fanny Howe | Bluets, Maggie Nelson | @/petrichara | Spirit Hold Part 2, Holly Warburton (desaturated) | The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman | Cough It Out, The Front Bottoms | Honeybee: "I Still Forget We’re Not Even Friends", Trista Mateer | To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like a Death, Lloyd Schwartz | @/becherdireinen | If You Knew, Ruth Muskrat Bronson | Cocaine Jesus, Rainbow Kitten Surprise | The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald | @/inkskinned
[transcriptions and image ID in alt text]
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woundgallery · 11 months
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Doubt by Fanny Howe
Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then.
Edith Stein, recently and controversially beatified by the Pope, who had successfully worked to transform an existential vocabulary into a theological one, was taken to Auschwitz in August 1942.
Two years later Simone Weil died in a hospital in England—of illness and depression—determined to know what it is to know. She, as much as Woolf and Stein, sought salvation in a  choice of words.
But multiples succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary.
While a whole change in discourse is a sign of conversion, the alteration of a single word only signals a kind of doubt about the value of the surrounding words. Poets tend to hover over words in this troubled state of mind.  What holds them poised in this position is the occasional eruption of happiness.
While we would all like to know if the individual person is a phenomenon either culturally or spiritually conceived and why everyone doesn’t kill everyone else, including themselves, since they can—poets act out the problem with their words.
Why not say “heart-sick” instead of “despairing”? Why not say “despairing” instead of “depressed”?
Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person—hidden like a laugh inside a sob—that loves even more than it loves to live? If there is, can it be expressed in the form of the lyric line?
Dostoevsky defended his later religious belief, saying of his work, “Even in Europe there have never been atheistic expressions of such power.  My hosannah has gone through a great furnace of doubt.”
According to certain friends, Simone Weil would have given everything she wrote to be a poet.  It was an ideal but she was wary of charm and the inauthentic.  She saw herself as stuck in fact with a rational prose line for her surgery on modern thought.  She might be the archetypal doubter but the language of the lyric was perhaps too uncertain.
As far as we know she wrote a play and some poems and one little prose poem called Prologue. Yet Weil could be called a poet, if Wittgenstein could, despite her own estimation of her writing, because of the longing for a conversion that words might produce. In Prologue the narrator is an uprooted seeker who still hopes that a transformation will come to her from the outside.  The desired teacher arrives bearing the best of everything, including delicious wine and bread, affection, tolerance, solidarity (people come and go) and authority.  This is a man who even has faith and loves truth.
She is happy.  Then suddenly, without any cause, he tells her it’s over.  She is out on the streets without direction, without memory.  Indeed she is unable to remember even what he told her without his presence there to repeat it, this amnesia being the ultimate dereliction.
If memory fails, then the mind is air in a skull.
This loss of memory forces her to abandon hope for either rescue or certainty.
And now is the moment where doubt—as an active function—emerges and magnifies the world.  It eliminates memory.  And it turns eyesight so far outwards, the vision expands.  A person feels as if she is the figure inside a mirror, looking outwards for her moves.  She is a forgery.
When all the structures granted by common agreement fall away and that “reliable chain of cause and effect” that Hannah Arendt talks about—breaks—then a person’s inner logic also collapses.  She moves and sees at the same time, which is terrifying.
Yet strangely it is in this moment that doubt shows itself to be the physical double to belief; it is the quality that nourishes willpower, and the one that is the invisible engine behind every step taken. Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.
In this prose poem Weil’s narrator recovers her balance after a series of reactive revulsions to the surrounding culture by confessing to the most palpable human wish: that whoever he was, he loved her.
Hope seems to resist extermination as much as a roach does.
Hannah Arendt talks about the “abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for.”  Consciousness of this abyss is the source of belief for most converts.  Weil’s conviction that evil proves the existence of God is cut out of this consciousness.
Her Terrible Prayer—that she be reduced to a paralyzed nobody—desires an obedience to that moment where coming and going intersect before annihilation. And her desire: “To be only an intermediary between the blank page and the poem” is a desire for a whole-heartedness that eliminates personality. Virginia Woolf, a maestro of lyric resistance, was frightened by Freud’s claustrophobic determinism since she had no ground of defense against it.  The hideous vocabulary of mental science crushed her dazzling star-thoughts into powder and brought her latent despair into the open air. Born into a family devoted to skepticism and experiment, she had made a superhuman effort at creating a prose-world where doubt was a mesmerizing and glorious force.
Anyone who tries, as she did, out of a systematic training in secularism, to forge a rhetoric of belief is fighting against the odds.  Disappointments are everywhere waiting to catch you, and an ironic realism is always convincing.
Simone Weil’s family was skeptical too, and secular and attentive to the development of the mind.  Her older brother fed her early sense of inferiority with intellectual put-downs.  Later, her notebooks chart a superhuman effort at conversion to a belief in affliction as a sign of God’s presence.
Her prose itself is tense with effort.  After all, to convert by choice (that is, without a blast of revelation or a personal disaster) requires that you shift the names for things, and force a new language out of your mind onto the page.
You have to make yourself believe.  Is this possible?  Can you turn “void” into “God” by switching the words over and over again? Any act of self-salvation is a problem because of death which always has the last laugh, and if there has been a dramatic and continual despair hanging over childhood, then it may even be impossible. After all, can you call “doubt” “bewilderment” and suddenly be relieved?
Not if your mind has been fatally poisoned. . . . But even then, it seems the dream of having no doubt continues, finding its way into love and work where choices matter exactly as much as they don’t matter—at least when luck is working in your favor.
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entheognosis · 5 days
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Paradise may be the time when we can finally turn to our past and see that its beauty was there despite our being there. In fact, its beauty can finally be seen because we aren’t there.
Fanny Howe
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loneberry · 6 months
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Poets partying
(Bohemian Tea Party, Woodberry Poetry Room)
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Christina Davis gives a speech about the poetry room's activities + I am caught close-eyed catching up with poet Fanny Howe + selfie with poet and Woodberry fellow Rosa Alcalá for our mutual friends.
Poets grieving
(Memorial for Ukrainian writer and poet Victoria Amelina)
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A moving night of readings, remembrances, and reflections on war and the Ukrainian literary community. Also ran into Fanny again (3 times in 5 days--I forgot how much I missed seeing Fanny at all things poetry & film related in Boston/Cambridge).
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Ukrainian poet Iryna Shuvalova's reading and speech was utterly devastating.
Poets reading and translating
(Kim Hyesoon reading with translator Don Mee Choi, introduced by poet and translator Jack Jung)
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Was deviously thrilled to get this pic of Jack that also captured Don Mee snapping Jack's photo. Don Mee read her English translations of Kim Hyesoon's poems.
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The queen herself, Kim Hyesoon!
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I've been a Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi fan for over a decade, so this reading was a real treat for me. Could not pass up the opportunity to buy this gorgeous signed broadside, which tickles my bird-woman fancy!
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spudcity · 10 months
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Somewhere
Somewhere between Norway and Ireland volcanic rocks and glaciers leap from the sea My map has failed me, I’m there
the boom of my ship knocking against each obstacle, cones of ice engraved by gray waves
Blue in our sails shows the sun is somewhere in the vicinity but will never come to this particular latitude
or parades of comic and beautiful animals stricken by my depression  There is nothing here
to love  This seascape fits exactly with the geography of my mind: whatever is close is dangerous
–Fanny Howe
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campgender · 2 years
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“Disgraceland” by Mary Karr (x) / @3000s (x) / “ten honest thoughts” by Mac Wilder (x) / Ladders to Fire, “This Hunger” by Anaïs Nin tr. Gunther Stuhlman (x) / The Needle’s Eye, “Kristeva and Me” by Fanny Howe (x) / “ten honest thoughts” by Mac Wilder (x)
[ID: six screenshots of text. 1: You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it. 2: falling in love makes me want to eat. 3: ix. in the worst flare I’ve ever had, when I can barely manage the juice my best friend buys, he is the only hunger I have left— 4: I keep thinking about your hunger. I feel the pangs of it in my own stomach.
5: The crowds told Jesus a little girl had died and asked could he bring her back to life. He looked at the girl and said she was just sleeping. Then he said, Little girl, get up! And as soon as she did, he told the others there to feed her. The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger. Mint, salt, bread, and leg of lamb. The child must have an appetite. 6: x. days later, when I tell him I am eating again, she rejoices. end ID]
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* * * * *
 “The narrative about the world has replaced the world itself”
 -Fanny Howe
[alive on all channels]
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gogandmagog · 7 months
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garadinervi · 11 months
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Peace Feelers, Artists Against Racism and the War, Boston, MA, 1968, Edition of 80 [Granary Books, New York, NY]. Collection of 15 broadsides housed in portfolio and printed at Impressions Workshop in Boston, MA. Contributors include Helen Chasin, William Corbett, Sam Cornish, Arthur Freeman, Sidney Goldfarb, Paul Hannigan, Fanny Howe, Ron Loewinsohn, Gail Mazur, Geoffrey Movius, Yvonne Ruelas, Kathleen Spivack, Richard Tillinghast, Andrew Wiley, and Ruth Whitman. Dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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days-of-reading · 2 years
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Fanny Howe, Introduction to the World (1986)
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poemic · 1 year
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...each day // something that loves us // tries to save us
A quartet for love and loving: “I won’t be able to write from the grave” by Fanny Howe; “Wild Poppies” by Colleen Parker; “The Dangerous World” by Naomi Replansky; “mother-tongue: the land of nod” by Lucille Clifton
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contremineur · 2 years
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White quartz. Some green mermaid’s tears.
Fanny Howe, from My stones (in ‘Second childhood’, Graywolf Press 2014)
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woundgallery · 9 months
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Fanny Howe
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neo-somaliana · 11 months
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It's as if words are remnants of thoughts that can't be caught.
Fanny Howe, Night Philosophy
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