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“In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is—as the light called human life is—at its coming and its going.”
—Charles Dickens, from A Tale of Two Cities (Chapman & Hall, 1859)
“ After a story is told there are some moments of silence. Then words begin again. Because you would always like to know a little more. Not exactly more story. Not necessarily, on the other hand, an exegesis. Just something to go on with…. And yet, having held you in my company so long, I find I do have something to give you. Not the mysterious, intimate and consoling data you would have wished, but something to go on with, and in all likelihood the best I can do. It is simply the fact, as you go down the stairs and walk in dark streets, as you see forms, as you marry or speak sharply or wait for a train, as you begin imagination, as you look at every mark, simply the fact of my eyes in your back. ”
Anne Carson, Plainwater (via leopoldgursky)
“ Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. ”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Sensible Thing’ (via funeraire)
(Source: quotewhore)
i don’t think i’ve ever agreed with anything more than what this man is saying
watch this. seriously
yes yes yes yes yes
this is amazing
this guy is so sick
I needed this right now. Anyone taking finals needs this right now.
yeah WOW
“ I chose to be a writer in girlhood because books rescued me. They were the places where I could bring the broken bits and pieces of myself and put them together again, the places where I could dream about alternative realities, possible futures. They let me know firsthand that if the mind was to be the site of resistance, only the imagination could make it so. To imagine, then, was a way to begin the process of transforming reality. All that we cannot imagine will never come into being. ”
bell hooks, “Narratives of Struggle” (via ellesugars)
(Source: sevenredumbrellas)
When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie died in 1986, instructions were left that two boxes of books owned by her father were to be sent to her great friend, Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli of the English department at the University of South Carolina. Among the books was a volume by Ernest Boyd entitled Portraits: Real and Imaginary. On the front endpaper, Fitzgerald had written “Don’t bother about first stuff. Read definite portraits”—instructions to someone to whom he was intending to lend or give the book.
Thanks to some fine detective work by Bruccoli’s wife Arlyn, we now know who that person is. Noting that the rear endpaper of the book had been torn out, Arlyn observed faint impressions on the preceding page, which suggested someone had written a message in the book before tearing out the page. Applying the familiar method of rubbing the indentations with a soft pencil, she was able to recover the message. It appears above.
From Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast we also know the circumstances—Fitzgerald had missed the train the two of them were to take to Lyon together to pick up the Fitzgerald’s car and drive it back to Paris. As Hemingway writes: “There was nothing to do but wire Scott from Dijon giving him the address of the hotel where I would wait for him in Lyon … ”
Hemingway writes of reading a book in his hotel room in Lyon while he waits to hear from Fitzgerald. It is the first volume of A Sportman’s Sketches by Turgenev. Who knows whether he ever looked into the Boyd book, except to write in it.
“ Dreams on waking were like empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems. ”
Gerald’s Game by Stephen King (via bohemea)
“I think sex is an act of … a kind of soul-commitment. If the sex is good, your injury will be healed, your imagination will be invigorated. It’s a kind of passage to the upper area, to the better place. In that sense, in my stories, women are mediums—harbingers of the coming world.”
—Haruki Murakami, The Paris Review Interviews, IV
(Source: frenchtwist)
“ It isn’t for anything; a poem is country,
and it needs you to keep walking it, and I walk out into it now, carrying my friend
and smelling the paddocky wind and feeling the rain cold on my face. ”
Mark Tredinnick, from “Eclogues” (via the-final-sentence)
While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.
When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.
Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:
“The life of my heart is crimson.”
[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]
“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”
“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”
[Writing about a terminal illness:]
“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”[Writing about life as a movie:]
“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”
“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.
Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.
Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]
So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:
Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”
“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”“Now I feel secure with my head held high.
Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.
While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.
Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”
The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.
The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.
(source)
SUFFICIENTLY MINDBLOWN
when you see a map or a family tree at the front of a novel you know that shit is gonna get complicated
“Metaphor offers the opportunity for my inwardness to connect itself with the world out there. All things are related, and that knowledge resides in my unconscious.”
—Charles Simic, from section III of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)
