this is my inspirationlog; none of these snippets are mine unless they're tagged so. ♥ livejournal twitter facebook
formspring.me
“Well what did you suppose would happen? Between laundered shirts and autumn days that vie to be the crisper. Between your slight of hand holding my manicure. Between a pink handbag to match my dress, and the kind of man you are throwing the kind of woman I want to be into focus between kisses so tender on the nape of my neck, what did you expect?
Our hearts are different vintages. You pick out shrapnel and wait for the polished shoe to drop. You are robust and aged in this way.
But I am green. I still allow my eye to glisten with the steam that powers hope. I am led by the nose that is hooked to a rope that is hooked to my heart—she knows no obedience.
And the lines on our faces are maps the clock puts there. The forehead shows the path of the first worry. The cheek charts the hardest years. Laugh lines are easy landmarks, but beware fatigue at the corner of the eye, my son; it belies the optimist gaze. I can spot a broken heart and a happy man a mile away.
And maybe more lines on your face is what you were afraid of. Or maybe my touch was getting too soft, or maybe I’m not pretty enough, or maybe there’s some other girl. But I do not take kisses lightly. The smaller and softer they are, the more weight they carry.
When we met, I asked you to be careful with my heart. Fool! I wanted danger. I would have fired the guards and told the watchmen to go, but no. You took me at my word, and for the first time in my life I hated being a writer.
Between sleep and laughter, between barbeque and catastrophe, between June and October and the process of giving over I fell into you and didn’t expect that you’d pull away so soon, so I still see you. In the silver spoon that stirs my tea I still wonder what you didn’t see in me.
Chalk it up to timing, laugh it off to friends, pillow clutcher once again. Practicing a smile and the front it faints. I loved you. And it remains.
”
Mary Fons (via mllekeri)
“ Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share. ”
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (via synnestorm)
“ The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. ”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (via beautyisanillusion)
(Source: creatingaquietmind)
“ I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. ”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (via katelizabeth)
(Source: flentes)
“ Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. ”
Hellen Keller (via cinderellainrubbershoes)
“ I used to listen to the poem while I was making dinner and one time I broke down in tears, crying into my cutting board. ‘You look like you’re in a movie written by a man,’ I said to my reflection in the mirror on the wall in front of me, a woman crying while chopping vegetables. ”
Alice Bolin, “My Own Invention” (via leopoldgursky)
“ I wanted to be a witch when I was a kid. I always wanted a more magical reality. ”
Florence Welch (via seabois)
(Source: fightaneclipse)
“ I thought the earth remembered me. she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. i slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars, but my thoughts, they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. all night, i heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their word in the darkness. all night i rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. by morning, i had vanished at least a dozen times into something better. ”
Mary Oliver (via seabois)
“ You won’t allow me to go to school.
I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this:
One day you will be sick. ”
— Poem written by an 11 year old Afghan girl
This poem was recorded in a NYT magazine article about female underground poetry groups in Afghanistan. An amazing article about the ways in which women are using a traditional two line poetry form to express their resistance to male oppression, their feelings about love (considered blasphemous), and their doubts about religion.
One of the best articles I’ve read all year. Here’s the link
(via katyuno)
Celebrity Story Time: George R. R. Martin, Part 1/3
(Source: fearisforthewinter)
A few years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat.
Most writers are all too familiar with this feeling after a red-eyed reading of a draft. I needed a way to literally jar my narrative sensibility. I needed jazz, punk rock, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, something.
Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
I started reading poetry avidly and discovered that by focusing on the exquisite “slant” poetry offers, the “truth” I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.
So, in honor of National Poetry Month and Poem In Your Pocket Day, here are my 10 reasons prose writers should read—and hopefully write—poetry.
“ No matter how much we learn, the vision science offers — of ourselves and of the universe — will always be incomplete and consequently imperfect. Stories of gods, angels and rainbow horses will persist in the gaps. ”
Maud Newton, “My Son Went to Heaven and All I Got Was a No. 1 Bestseller” (via millionsmillions)
