🌬️ Some favorite quotes from Valéry’s, Poetry and Abstract Thought:
A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.
The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.
“Thought is, in short, the activity which causes what does not exist to come alive in us, lending to it, whether we will or no, our present powers, making us take the part for the whole, the image for reality, and giving us the illusion of seeing, acting, suffering, and possessing independently of our dear old body… Anticipation and its gropings, desire, planning, the projection of our hopes, of our fears, are the main interior activity of our being.”
🌬️ 🕊️ Sharing a poem today that was immensely popular days after the 9/11 attacks and published in The New Yorker.
Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski
Praise the mutilated world / and the gray feather a thrush lost, / and the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.
🎵 Happy Friday! I waited all week to eat a cinnamon bun (treat!) from a neighborhood coffee shop that just opened near me.
Here are some tunes I am stuck on this week ft pic of cinnamon bun & a very delicious cold brew
Little Lover So Polite - Silversun Pickups
My Blue Tears - Dolly Parton (there is also this cover with Linda Ronstadt of this song I am obsessed with)
I Don’t Know Why I Said That - Me As A Girl (I truly hope Limited Too music comes back)
Harvey - Alex G “success for my buddies, success for my friends” has been stuck in my head all week
🌬️ Just discovered the term Catachresis yesterday and I am so glad there is a word for one of my favorite literary devices. It is when someone uses a metaphor but stretches it out so it’s wrong on actual level, but in it’s wrongness it is right. It’s a very extreme metaphor that is working in both directions!!
EX: Deafening silence We know this is impossible, but what the deafening modifier does is adds a new layer on the type of silence. Only language can do this. 🙃
Shakespeare uses this so often: “Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse” (a season being shoved in a purse jumps over the use of a standard metaphor because it’s talking about finance trouble)
🌬️ Excited to discuss Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds today in class.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come. / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom: / If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare uses negation all throughout this sonnet! So lovely and so clarifying.
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.“
🐿️ tiny friend
⭐️ 🌬️ #Make a Ritual of the Thing You Dread, after CA Conrad, poetry prompt #5
Poetry is spiritual. It’s where you can communicate to the dead. It’s where you can meet the duende, the angel, and the muse.
Classes start back up next week, here’s an excerpt from my prep-reading, too good not to share, from The Poet as Fool and Priest by Sigurd Burckhardt:
”What sustains him in this perilous balance is the love of the Word in its absolute integrity. As Othello demonstrates, that is no easy matter; the most sacred thing is also the most vulnerable. The poet would be much safer if he did not commit himself to the Word, but in ironic detachment exploited the infinite ambiguities of speech. Or he could retreat to the safety of a socio-religious order, give up his claim to verbal priesthood and turn " mouthpiece." Both roads have been taken; but they lead to self-abnegation. The poet as a fool must be a corrupter of words, a punster, rhymster, verbal trickster, for there is no other way to break the disgraceful bonds into which words have fallen. But if he is not also, and ultimately, priest-if he is not a parson disguised as a fool rather than a fool disguised as a parson-speech will be " wanton " rather than sacramental…”
“If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves: for our own lives and actions. It is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.” – Gloria Steinem 🪽
Want to binge all of his stuff now. It’s no wonder he’s received that sweet sweet Pulitzer. Finished reading: The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips 📚
As brilliant and as devestating as I expected ❤️🩹
Finished reading: The Going Is Forever: Poems by Elizabeth Metzger 📚
⭐️🌬️ September Prompt #2
#Build a Labyrinth like an Oulipian
Oulipians are “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.“The lipogram, then, is one maze among the many Oulipo builds. But the technique is inert on its own. It becomes literature only under the Oulipian wager: that a constraint obeyed without exception stops being an obstacle and becomes a heuristic, yielding locutions the unconstrained ear would never reach. The discipline is not to negotiate the prohibition but to submit to it and let it do the thinking. The prohibition is not the poem’s cage. It’s the poem’s argument.
Read the full prompt → here
⭐️ 🌬️
Happy September! I love this month & the beginning of Fall. I figured I would do a poetry prompt series throughout the month of September. I’ve been writing a poem a day recently, and it’s because of prompts that have helped me find a (new) place to start rather than the blank page I am a little too familiar with at times. I hope you can find a piece of this prompt that is helpful on your own exploration! 💫 🔭
Read the full prompt → here
⭐️ New Blog Post!
I wrote a disjointed (sorry!) blog post on thoughts I had after watching Coyote vs. Acme (which I loved). No spoilers, mostly about poetry, nonsense, and etc.
#Coyote vs. Acme, Poetry Using Toon Logic, & Defiance Against Fascism
Read the piece → here
Fascism’s claim isn’t just that the future is closed but also the present order is necessary. That the way things simply are is how it should stay. Arendt noted that tyranny of logicality deduces everything from one premise and stops answering to the world. These are ways of saying it could not have been otherwise. Nonsense is the demonstration that it could!
🎵 One of Bob Dylan’s Theme’d Radio Hours where he talks about a theme and pairs songs with that theme. Love this one on Luck.
Had me thinking about all types of luck, I love writing about luck & thinking about it, it’s one of those words that sounds like what it is:
Bad luck, good luck, unlucky, tough luck, luck of the devil, rabbit’s foot, down on your luck, irish luck, beginningers luck, lucky charm, lucky lady, dumb luck, better luck next time, try your luck, lucky penny, four-leaf clover, run of luck, black cat crossing one’s path, pure luck, lucky break, just my luck, lucky streak, push your luck, luck of the draw, luckiest guy alive, make your own luck
love mornings in my apartment
🎵 Midweek Music! Alot of Racing Mount Pleasant (which is sad, sorry! the whole album is so good but so sad)
Your New Place (ugh and the last song on the album is your old place)
Other:
Way Out - stevestevesteve found on NTS thanks flo.
Stay - The Blue Nile so romantic & so much of their music makes me excited for fall in nyc
I added many more songs to my Spotify playlist finally - here