#lynn melnick

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"What you smell is pleasure, not the rot of the thing / amid the waste."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

#open polls #polls #poetry #poems #poetry polls #poets and writing #tumblr poetry #have you read this #landscape with clinic and oracle #lynn melnick

[ashtrayfloors]

“I think friends can literally save your life,” Dolly told Ladies’ Home Journal, and I agree. In his book Nothing Personal, James Baldwin writes, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” That saving doesn’t have to be sexual. There’s a particular sadness in thinking—as wonderful as sex is—that it’s the only kind of love that can save us. During the worst of the many wounds of 2018, if I hadn’t had my friends messaging me throughout the day and night, I would have folded. I can assure you I never fucked any of them, but the intensity of my love is not less than if I had. “You can’t make old friends,” Dolly and Kenny Rogers sang to each other in their 2013 duet. In so many ways I think of my friend Jess as a life partner, and she is just about the straightest woman I’ve ever met. Maybe sex is easier for people to understand than love. It’s more straightforward. Love is complicated and easy prey for nostalgia, which itself is not nearly as simple as it seems.

These days we think of nostalgia as a harmless walk down memory lane, but the term was actually coined in the eighteenth century to describe a unique kind of depression experienced by sailors away from home. It was seen as an actual ailment, and that seems correct. Think of the whole “Make America Great Again” thing...; think of people’s yearning for things to be as they were, when life was “simple.” A lot of forgetting is involved in this. In an episode of her 1970s talk show, Dolly visits noted monster, and former president, Andrew Jackson’s house wearing an antebellum dress and holding a parasol. She sings—and one can’t cringe enough—that de facto Confederate anthem “Dixie.” Later in the same show, she has musician Freddy Fender on to talk about Chicano music, and they sing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” in Spanish. I wonder how much she stopped to think about any of that, because it’s not like she’s not a thinker.

Dolly herself, in her 1969 song “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” ultimately rejects the notion of the past as preferable, although her songs are very often steeped in nostalgia, whether rosy or wistful. Still, the song states that you couldn’t pay her enough to go back and live like she did in her youth. This is pretty unequivocal! Yet when my grandmother lost most of her memories, what she retained were mostly those from her foundational years into young adulthood. Maybe we’re hardwired for nostalgia. I’ll admit that the last time I was in Los Angeles, riding down Fairfax or La Brea or La Cienega and seeing the dingbat apartment buildings with their tiny windows, my throat choked up, not because I miss being inside of them but because my body felt so far from it and yet those sights and sounds and all of it are actually inside of my body, somewhere, waiting to be reactivated.

“Is nostalgia even an emotion?” poet Becca Klaver wonders in a 2017 essay about the subject. “Maybe it’s a drive, like hunger or lust. It’s in the body.” She notes that “the past seems so easy to lose.” Remembering, then, is urgent work.

—Lynn Melnick, from “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” (I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, University of Texas Press, 2022)

#lynn melnick #i've had to think up a way to survive #nostalgia #friendship #dolly parton #quotations #recently read #this book is EVERYTHING #i wanted to quote like half of it #but ultimately this was the part that hit me hardest at this current moment

[rustbeltjessie]

Listen,

recently a mess of writers said it's the mark of an amateur to use this imperative to start a line in a poem but they weren't poets and I would like to be an amateur all my life. I mean, what happens when we get good at this? When we get too good? When we get so proficiently fine that our words go down easy? I do not want easy pain or easy beauty. It takes very little for me to lean back on the grass in sunshine because my head has long tried to split from my body, but I'm here on a wooden stool in the part of February almost past love. Brick walls, pleasant chatter, so much to get done and how lucky I am that I get to try. Everything is pretend. Everything is dead serious. Listen, when I write poems again, I want them to be about joy.

—Lynn Melnick, from Refusenik (YesYes Books, 2022)

#poetry #lynn melnick #refusenik #currently reading #i love this poem so much #listen #i have started lines in poems that way before

[agirlnamedbone]

Lynn Melnick (If I Should Say I Have Hope, 2012)

#op #lynn melnick #poem #poetry #literature #quote #yesyes books

[nataliewaitesnotesapp]

#god #ah #yeah so #poetry #Lynn melnick #words #violence and desire #on trauma #on patriarchy

[goodluckfindingmyjournal]

Twelve by Lynn Melnick

When I was your age I went to a banquet. When I was your age I went to a barroom

and bought cigarettes with quarters lifted from the laundry money. Last night

I did all your laundry. I don’t know why I thought this love could be pure. It’s enough

that it’s infinite. I kiss your cheek when you sleep and wonder if you feel it.

It’s the same cheek I’ve kissed from the beginning. You don’t have to like me.

You just have to let me keep your body yours. It’s mine.

When I was your age I went to a banquet and a man in a tux pinched my cheeks.

When I was your age I went to a barroom and a man in a band shirt pinched my ass.

There is so much I don’t know about you. Last night I skipped a banquet

so I could stay home and do your laundry and drink wine from my grandmother’s glass.

When I was your age boys traded quarters for a claw at my carcass on a pleather bench

while I missed the first few seconds of a song I’d hoped to record on my backseat boombox.

When I was your age I enjoyed a hook. You think I know nothing of metamorphosis

but when I was your age I invented a key change. You don’t have to know what I know.

#poetry #lynn melnick #melnick #twelve

[mumblingsage]

...that church in Hollywood where the famous fuck-ups emerge from the basement into a mob of cigarettes clouding up an already murky sky. No, not like little stars, buddy. More like the end of the world.

from “Landscape With Twelve Steps and Prop Flora” in Landscape with Sex and Violence by Lynn Melnick

#poetry #Lynn Melnick

[garudabluffs]

Dolly Parton was Lynn Melnick's Saving Grace October 6, 2022

For many, Dolly Parton’s legacy is linked to catchy country tunes and cowboy boots; but for those who have turned to her in times of pain, Parton’s music holds a much deeper meaning.

Lynn Melnick is the author of the book, “I've Had To Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton.” 

The Takeaway spoke with Melnick about her memoir, and how her story of trauma and perseverance is intertwined with Dolly Parton's lyrics and legacy. 

LISTEN 10:17 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/dolly-parton-was-lynn-melnicks-saving-grace

#Dolly Parton book review author interview Lynn Melnick

[rockyandsparky]

Since that piece of shit Robert Pickton has finally died, remember the names of his victims.

Confirmed victims:

Sereena Abotsway

Mona Wilson

Andrea Joesbury

Brenda Ann Wolfe

Georgina Faith Papin

Marnie Frey

Suspected victims:

Jacquelene Michelle McDonell

Dianne Rosemary Rock

Heather Kathleen Bottomley

Jennifer Lynn Furminger

Helen Mae Hallmark

Patricia Rose Johnson

Heather Gabrielle Chinnock

Tanya Holyk

Sherry Leigh Irving

Inga Monique Hall

Tiffany Louise Drew

Sarah Jean de Vries

Cynthia "Cindy" Feliks

Angela Rebecca Jardine

Diana Melnick

Debra Lynne Jones

Wendy Crawford

Kerry Lynn Koski

Andrea Fay Borhaven

Cara Louise Ellis

#robert pickton

[josieandthepussycatsofficial]

who's reading lynn melnick's new memoir about dolly parton, anyone?

[euphoricquotes]

There are 24 synonyms for the word envy. And although one of them is hatred and one of them is lusting no one envies me. If I could just make it to morning without selling myself one day I might have some land beyond the ficus pot whose heart leaves leak their poison inside this slummy garage where I sleep daytimes in a city I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. I am furious for answers inside the book of words I stole from a stranger’s back pocket. You see, through the years when everyone is dying I remain clean. That's why I believe there could be a God. There are 5 synonyms for the word redemption. and 46 for fear. One of them is chickenheartedness and another is awe. Only my body is for sale.

Lynn Melnick, LANDSCAPE WITH THESAURUS AND AWE

#LANDSCAPE WITH THESAURUS AND AWE #lynn melnick #poetry #poem #book

[buswrites]

.・゜゜・　poetry prompts　・゜゜・．

-Write a poem using these following five words: effective, gravity, persimmon, ballroom, waxwing

-Write a poem using these following five words: pretend, aubergine, toast, greasewood, systematic

-Write an abecedarian poem (See: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-abecedarian)

-Write a poem called "Don’t Even Think About It"

-Write a poem called "Gunslinger’s Lament"

-Write a poem called "What Happens in Vegas"

-Write a poem that knocks the wind out of you

-Read a religious text you aren’t familiar with, then write a poem sprung from it

-Grab the book closest to you and turn to page 73 -- copy down the first sentence and then write a poem ending with that sentence

-Write a poem in two parts -- in the first, you are driving somewhere/something and in the second you are being driven

-Write a poem that serves as a thank you to another poet for their work

these are from my mother<3

#poetry #poetry prompts #lynn melnick #buswrites #writeblr

[ashtrayfloors]

Distress Call from the City of My Youth

Punks tell me they have feelings while marching their crude revolution

toward my corner of Sunset, but I am worn out of feelings so I try again

to escape this lawless hunt

by fucking the archfiend dizzy on the backstreets because I don't understand how to deserve anything

or how misery and sunlight inhabit the same vibration on my skin.

Dear you, on the other end of the line:

I imagine how tenderly you'd peel the crime from what I left exposed

but my formative years were mostly alleyways and men being brutish so

I'm confused about a lot of things

like, I crossed this burning blacktop for you when I momentarily thought if I confessed

how long I've been open season, slaughtering season you might shoulder me past city limits alive.

—Lynn Melnick, from Landscape with Sex and Violence (YesYes Books, 2017)

#poetry #typography #lynn melnick #youth #trauma #landscape with sex and violence #recently read #my misspent youth

[agirlnamedbone]

Lynn Melnick

#lynn melnick #tw:sa #op #poem #poetry #literature #quote

[vickyxc]

A shattered bottle tore through my hand last month and split a vein until every finger was purple and I couldn’t

make even a tentative fist. I used the other hand to indicate

I’m okay.

How unwise I am, how polite in a crisis. In triage, an overheard photo of someone’s lover

almost 3000 miles west made me seize with longing when I spied a palm tree in the background.

I understand what it says about me that my body lustfully wishes to place itself where it was never safe.

I have put enormous energy into trying to convince you I’m fine and

I’m just about there, no?

Besides, decades on, poorly healed bones help me to predict rain! though it’s true I like to verify weather

with another source because I tend not to believe myself. I’ve been told repeatedly that I don’t understand plot but

it would be a clever twist, wouldn’t it, if in the end I realize it’s me who does me in.

Lynn Melnick, from “Losing the Narrative,” published in Poem-a-Day

!!!

#lynn melnick #losing the narrative #poem-a-day #self harm #poem #poetry #trauma #personal #!!! #abuse #impulsive #reckless

[tanglelegs]

There are so many ways        for a body to yield monstrous but I do not know how to die        to be where I would not see you:              just glass between us, just universe.

Lynn Melnick, from “Monstrous”

#quotes #poetry #lynn melnick #if i should say i have hope