#rebecca lindenberg

[apoemaday]

Litany

by Rebecca Lindenberg

O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you astride the sea and you unhammocked in the cyprus grove and you with your hair full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned from the savor of plums to the merits of pity — touch and interrupt me, chasten me with waking, humble me for wonder again. Seed god and husk god, god of the open palm, you know me, you know my mettle. See, my wrists are small. O you, with glass-colored wind at your call and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page, whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returns air to its forms, send me a word for faith that also means his thrum, his coax and surge and her soft hollow, please — friend gods, lend me a word that means what I would ask him for so when he says: You give it all away, I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.

[firstfullmoon]

Rebecca Lindenberg, “The Splendid Body”

[havingapoemwithyou]

the splendid body by Rebecca Lindenberg

[derangedrhythms]

You give me flowers resembling moths' wings.

Rebecca Lindenberg, Love, An Index; from 'Catalogue of Ephemera'

[potatoesandsunshine]

[blackberryjambaby]

A McSweeney’s Books Q&A with Rebecca Lindenberg, author of Love, an Index

[reicartwright]

where a story stops before it ends

[wordsthatkeepmyfeetdry]

Marblehead by Rebecca Lindenberg

[hautlesmasques]

"The mask that burns like a violin, the mask that sings only dead languages, that loves the destruction of being put on. The mask that sighs like a woman even though a woman wears it. The mask beaded with freshwater pearls, with seeds. The plumed mask, the mask with a sutured mouth, a moonface, with a healed gash that means harvest. A glower that hides wanting. A grotesque pucker. Here’s a beaked mask, a braided mask, here’s a mask without eyes, a mask that looks like a mask but isn’t—please don’t try to unribbon it. The mask that snows coins, the mask full of wasps. Lace mask to net escaping thoughts. Pass me the rouged mask, the one made of sheet music. Or the jackal mask, the hide-bound mask that renders lovers identical with night."

Rebecca Lindenberg, Carnival (Love, an Index)

[cosmicodysseys]

I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.

[apoemaday]

Poetic Subjects

by Rebecca Lindenberg

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck.                         — The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems. My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns. Dr. Peebles. The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say, I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say, That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like, Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car.  Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said, One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply, Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of february

avery r. young peestain

claudine toutoungi future perfect

david rivard bewitched playground: "not guilty"

brian kim stefans the future is one of place

lisa gill post-traumatic rainstorm

clare pollard pinocchios

rebecca lindenberg love, an index: "catalogue of ephemera"

etel adnan the arab apocalypse: "xxxvi"

stanley moss god breaketh not all men's hearts alike: "a blind fisherman"

robert browning an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician

tom sleigh beirut tank

khaled mattawa ismailia eclipse: "date palm trinity"

mark levine unemployment (3)

lucia cherciu butter, olive oil, flour

reginald shepherd fata morgana: "you, therefore"

john updike claremont hotel, southwest harbour, maine

bruce smith the other lover: "february sky"

johnny cash forever words: the unknown poems: "don't make a movie about me"

eamon grennan what light there is & other poems: "jewel box"

eduardo c. corral in colorado my father scoured and stacked dishes

thomas mccarthy the beginning of colour

divya victor curb: "blood / soil"

henneh kyereh kwaku in praise

joanna fuhrman to a new era: "lavender"

rosemary catacalos sight unseen

sam willetts digging

megan fernandes winter

jaswinder bolina the plague on tv

juan felipe herrera notes on the assemblage: "almost livin' almost dyin'"

kofi

[antigonick]

Do you have any recs for more obsucre experimental poetry?

Not particularly obscure, no, but some who experiment with what writing can do and that I love: obviously Anne Carson (particularly Fragments of Stesichoros, Variations on Ibykos, Decreation), Alice Oswald (particularly Memorial and Nobody), Hanif Abdurraqib (his work on voice and pacing is phenomenal; everything is worth a look, but A Little Devil in America is a good first pick), Frank Bidart (more so his early work, like The Book of the Body), Natalie Diaz (less about format and more about thematics: the way she uses eroticism as political is just--mwah; see Post-Colonial Love Poem), Rainer Maria Rilke (the most abstract of his writings are also most extraordinary--see Sonnets to Orpheus; in English, Crucefix is lovely and unique in his takes on the text); Emily Berry and Rebecca Lindenberg have the same sort of cheeky experimenting with format and lacunae that I enjoy, though not everything is strong--see especially Letter to Husband by Emily Berry and Love, a Footnote, by Rebecca Lindenberg; Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons obviously); OBVIOUSLY too E. E. Cummings, everything he's ever written, because he's a fucking GENIUS. Okay. And not technically advertised as poetry, but two things: John Cage's letters to Merce Cunningham (his attempts at translating music-feeling into written meditations are so thought-provoking), and fiction-camouflaged poetry--Faulkner and his experimentations with point of view. I learned a lot about what writing could do in The Sound and the Fury. Finally, experiments in translation are an amazing way to rubik's cube a text and put its intersubjectivity at the forefront: see Andal's sacred poetry doubly-translated by Ravi Shankar and Priya Sarukkai Chabria in Autobiography of a Goddess, Anne Carson's own works which I've already cited (her work in liberal translation is usually better than the solely authorial stuff, though usually translational and authorial are irretrievably linked in her writing anyway--a good example is her Bakkhai); feminist, anti-racist or anachronical works of translation, which challenge the idea of "faithfulness" and lampshade translator's subjectivity (no, not Ezra Pound: leave Ezra Pound on his shelf, we're good); if you have French, Olivier Py's translations of Shakespeare for the stage--much more exciting and baroque (and queer) than what Bonnefoy did, even if Bonnefoy's own poetry is quite striking. He's timid with Shakespeare, and that's a disservice. Oh, poetry-as-theatre and definitely experimental: Sarah Kane, too, though she's hard to go through. She explodes writing and expression though, and it's extraordinary.

That's all that comes to mind for now; I hope something in there strikes your fancy!

[derangedrhythms]

[…] it was thought that when you die, your soul flutters as a moth from your open throat.

Rebecca Lindenberg, Love, An Index; from ‘Love, An Index’

[3416]

1634 + shared dreams

Credits: Marina Tsvetaeva | Mark Blinch | Behind the Maple Leafs’ franchise-changing draft selection of Mitch Marner | Matthews: It's a dream come true | Rebecca Lindenberg, “Love, An Index” | NHL: Auston Matthews was born for this | Marner on wanting to continue playing for the Maple Leafs | H.G. Wells, The Time Machine over Lee Balterman, Steve Russell | The Hockey News over Steve Russell | Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena over Kevin Sousa (1) (2) | Leaf's (former) goal song: You Make My Dreams by Hall & Oates | TSN Unique Opportunity graphic | Jeff O'Neill on TSN The Quiz Panel | Two young Leafs join a pair of all-time Leaf greats | Hall & Oates again | Matthews thrilled to be committed to Maple Leafs | Kevin Sousa | Mitch Marner has another gear in him. | Frank Bidart, “To the Dead” on Mark Blinch (1) (2) (3) | Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart | Mark Blinch

[awsok]

sabine wren (and shin hati)

dreams of clytemnestra, dacia maraini / ahsoka, ‘master and apprentice’ / ahsoka, ‘master and apprentice’ / dreams of clytemnestra, dacia maraini / terrible thing, ag / ahsoka, 'fallen jedi' / the perjured city, hélène cixous / ahsoka, 'fallen jedi' / machineryangel / ahsoka, 'dreams and madness’ / love, an index, rebecca lindenberg