herstory. poetry. recipes. rants.
The files in the filing cabinet
Are all talking at once.
Mumble jumble, say the files
In the filing cabinet.
The desk, discreet,
Discloses nothing.
Rough drafts live
A roustabout life,
Tumbling from shelves,
While books, published
and smugly replete,
No longer feel the need
To compete.
Stationery sprawls,
Casual as sunbathers.
In the locked drawer,
Love letters lie.
Kelly Cherry
I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could — it all could — just disappear.
Maggie Nelson
The Red Parts
My heart
Is full of February longings
I want to take it out
To make a wreath
To hold your heart
My love
Is pricked by the February roses
I want to swallow the pain
And brew red wine to moisten my lips
To seal your love with a kiss
February roses
I wish that I would be able to exchange with many a night’s waiting
For a moment to have a intimate chat with you
Hearts beat in unison, glances in communion
February roses
I wish that I would be able to exchange with many a day’s loss of wits
For a chance to have you appear in my dream
Without complaint or regret
February roses are like flames
That warm the cold Moon on a winter night
And burn the grey into multicolor
To set the ocean and the other shore ablaze
Rose Lu ( Bing Hua )
RIGHT WING WHITE SUPREMACIST DOMESTIC TERRORISM.
Christopher Paul Hasson, who is A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home. Authorities say he was planning to launch a massive domestic terrorist attack targeting Democratic politicians and journalists, you know, The Enemy of the People.
And our failed media still cannot say Right Wing Domestic Terrorist.
AP:
“A Coast Guard lieutenant who was arrested last week is a ‘domestic terrorist’ who drafted an email discussing biological attacks and had what appeared to be a hit list that included prominent Democrats and media figures, prosecutors said in court papers. …
“[Christopher Paul] Hasson’s list of prominent Democrats included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and presidential hopefuls Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. The list … also included mentions of John Podesta ……
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Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
On January 6th 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union Message to Congress and the nation. I spent the time to both both read it and listen to it the other day. It is a profoundly moving speech, not without controversy of course, but one which we need to hear again. It is a speech that like the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a Dream speech calls us to higher ideals, ideals that we often come up short in living up to, but ideals worth living for and to endeavor to attain in our lifetime.
When Roosevelt spoke the nation was in the midst of crisis. The United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. War threatened as Hitler’s Nazi German legions had overrun all of Western Europe and…
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Poetry is not just an outpouring of feelings into words; diaries are good places for that. Nor is it use of words merely to convey information, as newspapers are purported to do. OK, so we all know that poetry’s medium is words — but don’t be fooled by that “fact” into thinking that poetry is made of words. “Pure poetry,” poet Russell Edson says, “is almost a nonlanguage art.” I think of poetry as a right-brain activity, using image, sensory gatherings, spatial impressions, free associations, music, and creative perception, and only casting its line into the language lake on the left to fish out the words to articulate it. If you read it only for the words (information, feelings, experience) it will not awaken and inform your full feelings and experience but will frustrate you in its seemingly mad illogic and leaps.
Alice B Fogel
Strange Terrain
THIS SOUNDS LIKE ME
My poetic life started before I was even born, I believe, but really I’ve been a working poet for about a decade. As a child, I’d notice things the other children didn’t; I saw the world as a place filled with secrets, in-between colours, textures, whispers, and hidden spaces. I could make a world out of the smallest moment. I still do. Being a poet feels like having two bodies — one in this world, and one in some other. Does this sound like you?
Lisa Marie Basile
If You Want To Become a poet
OMG what a great look
Communication between disconnected parties — I like that! It makes me want to get personal and psychoanalytical rather than theoretical. But theory and my gut tell me that most communications are between disconnected parties. The poet and her reader? My Facebook page and my friends? Which of those nouns ought to be in quotes? Certainly, our communiqués — our tweets and texts and two-sentence Facebook life-story-announcements—share more, stylistically, with Raymond Chandler than with Edna St. Vincent Millay or most any other traditional lyric poet. When you think of it, we’re a society of world-weary, world-poor detectives: did u c him? yes. when? last night. what was he wearing? omg and a : ) thrown in for an idiot criminal’s good measure. I wrote “The List” before I ever texted anyone; but I think I knew what it felt like to be disconnected.
No one in my family had ever considered…
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When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No…don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is!
Louis de Bernières
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
The first known poet in history, Enheduanna, was an Iraqi woman. She wrote about Inanna on tablets in the cuneiform language. The interesting thing about her is that she had a position or title. It was “The keeper of the flame.” I think that if a poet should have any role at all, it should be (wherever and whenever) the same: “keeper of the flame.”
Dunya Mikhail
Interview with Cathy Linh Che, Cantos April 2010
silverapplequeen 