poetry-grimoire

[poetry-grimoire]

[poetry-grimoire]

“Grief and rage - you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Give me blood and rage and / a heart for horror; teach me to be / tough enough to face this world / still standing. Make a Fury of me.”

Elizabeth Hewer, from “Finding Ariadne” in Wishing for Birds

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Mumford & Sons, “Lover’s Eyes”

“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself,”

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“We, hurt by ourselves, keen / to be hurters and keen / to be hurt back deep inside. / We, like weapons laid / beside anger asleep.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke; “Antistrophes” (tr. Edward Snow)

“…she did not allow herself tears. When she did cry, she would explain her tears in this way: ‘I am not weeping, I am bursting with rage.’”

Gabriella Fiori, from Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

“Isn’t all that rage so ugly? / And isn’t it mine, still? / Good god, isn’t it mine?”

Ashe Vernon, from “Buried,” Not a Girl

Ada Limón, from “The Good Fight”

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

Anne Carson, excerpt of To Compostela

[poetry-grimoire]

“in front of my mother and my sisters, i pretend love is cheap and vulgar. i act like it’s a sin– i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. but at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb– i dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.”

— Salma Deera, “salt”  

[poetry-grimoire]

“If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires,” says author Eric Nuzum. Our vampires are not like the remorseless Victorian vampires, who had a taste for the blood of babies and did not seem to feel badly about it. Our vampires are conflicted. Some of them go hungry rather than feed on humans, and some of them drink synthetic blood. “Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral,” the journalist Margot Adler observed […] “It’s conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth,” she reported. “But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.”

Power, of course, is vampiric. We enjoy it only because someone else does not. Power is what philosophers would call a positional good, meaning that its value is determined by how much of it one has in comparison to other people. Privilege, too, is a positional good, and some have argued that health is as well.

Our vampires, whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we feed off of each other, that we need each other to live. Our vampires reflect both our terrible appetites and our agonized restraint. When our vampires struggle with their need for blood, they give us a way of thinking about what we ask of each other in order to live.

— Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

[poetry-grimoire]

Two individuals who are quiet to the same degree have no need to talk about the melody that defines their hours. This melody is what they have in common in and of itself. Like a burning altar it exists between them, and they nourish the sacred flame respectfully with their occasional syllables.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life

[poetry-grimoire]

when audre lorde said “you need to reach down and touch the thing that’s boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.”

[poetry-grimoire]

[poetry-grimoire]

‘Being a Woman is Inherently Uncanny’: An Interview With Carmen Maria Machado | Hazlitt

[poetry-grimoire]

“I am not a fool. I have just loved with an honest heart.”

— Mukta Singh-Zocchi, from The Thugs & a Courtesan (Srishti, 2014)

[poetry-grimoire]

“You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming – or remaining – the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.”

— Susan Sontag’s 2003 Commencement speech at Vassar–via Jac Jemc

[poetry-grimoire]

Susan Sontag

On Photography

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of ‘transparency’. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being “In Plato’s Cave”, make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today. How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured–or incited–to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity–from Goya’s The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001. In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time. Features an analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. This title alters our thinking about the uses and meanings of images, and about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes some of Sontag’s best-known works, among them On Style, Notes on 'Camp’, and the titular essay Against Interpretation, where Sontag argues that modern cultural conditions have given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics.

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

Brimming with humane and original ideas about a  disease and the modern condition, this classic  essay and its sequel – written 10 years later – are  compassionate exhortations and a liberating event.  

Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

This third essay collection by America’s leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.

At the Same Time

Sontag’s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer’s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. “At the Same Time” gathers sixteen essays and speeches written in the last years of Sontag’s life, when her work was being honored on the international stage. She writes of the freedom of literature, about courage and resistance, and fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

[poetry-grimoire]

“If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped the pain was unbearable. If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved, the pain was unbearable.”

— Mary Oliver, from “The Moths”

[poetry-grimoire]

“In her guts a woman knows there is a deadliness in being the too-sweet self for too long.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

[poetry-grimoire]

“I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

— Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

[poetry-grimoire]

“The feral woman is a woman making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naive, uninformed. She takes life in her own hands.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from “Women who Run with the Wolves,” c. 1992

[poetry-grimoire]

“If our own wild natures have been wounded by something or someone, we refuse to lie down and die. We refuse to normalize this wound. We call up our instincts and do what we have to do.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from “Women who Run with the Wolves,” c. 1992

[poetry-grimoire]

Mary Oliver, Black Oaks