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If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up. The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual.

geoff dyer on reader's block, fsg work in progress (2011)

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I’m sorry to bring him up incessantly but Pablo Picasso wasn’t fucking around with artist statements. He and his buddies were hanging out, inventing new ways to use the senses, collecting poets, starting magazines when they felt like it, painting whatever, showing on the boulevard sometimes, icing out losers, reading, honestly kind of torturing each other, and so on. We should not allow our own artistic practices to be replete with inanities! They want us to describe ourselves in GRANT-WRITING LANGUAGE like we are PROJECT MANAGERS rather than to describe our ideas with the MANY VARIED LANGUAGES OF ART! This is how they make us speak THEIR desires!

elisabeth nicula on re-imagining support for art, small press traffic (2024)

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all that wanting, right? by Devin Kelly

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“I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.”

— Marie Howe, Boston University’s 2016 Theopoetics Conference  (via mothersofmyheart)

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ALT

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Learning Latin in Old Age” (from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 2012)

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what's the opposite of feeling sand slip through your fingers because I feel this poem more and more as time passes

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I Love You to the Moon &

not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of queer zest & stay up there & get ourselves a little moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean i was already moonlighting as an online moonologist most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you packing your bags yet, don’t forget your sailor moon jean jacket, let’s wear our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let’s love each other (so good) on the moon, let’s love the moon         on the moon

-by Chen Chen 

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Stardust is the hardest thing to hold out for. You must make of yourself a perfect plane— something still upon which something settles— something like sugar grains on something metal, but with none of the chill. It’s hard to explain.

kay ryan, stardust (2002)

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tenderness and rot

by kay ryan

Tenderness and rot   share a border.   And rot is an   aggressive neighbor   whose iridescence   keeps creeping over.   No lessons   can be drawn   from this however.   One is not   two countries.   One is not meat   corrupting.   It is important   to stay sweet   and loving.

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Tormented by spiritual thirst I dragged myself through a somber desert. And a six-winged seraph appeared to me at the crossing of the ways. He touched my eyes with fingers light as a dream: and my prophetic eyes opened like those of a frightened eagle.

aleksandr sergeyevich pushkin, the prophet (1826)

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But four young Oysters hurried up,       All eager for the treat: Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,       Their shoes were clean and neat — And this was odd, because, you know,       They hadn't any feet.

lewis carroll, the walrus and the carpenter (1871)

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midsummer, tobago by Derek Walcott

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I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. [...] All which thy child’s mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’ Halts by me that footfall: Is my gloom, after all, Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? ‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’

francis thompson, the hounds of heaven (1890)

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Hou is interested in the private pains of upheaval. Prisoners write poems before they die. Hiromi writes in her diary. Wen-ching writes notes. The two lovers write to each other, having no other way to communicate. These texts appear in large block print that occupy the entire screen in a way that recalls old silent films. Why so much text? The film’s screenwriters, Hou, Chu T’ien-wen, and Wu Nien-jen, were born after the violent uprisings and grew up during a time when it was forbidden to talk about them. To write City, they sifted through diaries, letters, and private archives. The film thus stands as a reflection on what remembering feels like: sifting through text. That activity is soundless. You must imagine the lives of people who have dared to leave a trace. Consider, in contrast, the simple yet poignant narratives of the White Terror that have emerged in the mainstream news since government archives opened in the early 2000s. The BBC reported one such story. “My most beloved Chun-lan,” a father wrote on the night before he was executed, to his five-month-old daughter, “I was arrested when you were still in your mother’s womb. Father and child cannot meet. Alas, there’s nothing more tragic than this in the world.” He wrote that in 1953. The government confiscated it and never delivered to his family. His daughter would receive it fifty-six years later, at age fifty-six. She cried when she read it. “I finally had a connection with my father,” she told BBC. “I realized not only do I have a father, but this father loved me very much.” Narratives like these have a beginning (arrest, execution), middle (prolonged, multidecade separation between father and child; suspended wondering), and end (cathartic reception of the letter; connection established). One of the central precepts of trauma healing holds that we reclaim events of loss through narrative. Hou refuses a narrative, thus refusing reclamation, suspending us in the psychic trauma of his generation.

on a city of sadness, the paris review (2023)

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you work with words, which unlike the wallet, is not a material you touch, but you wonder if in reordering them you might disrupt what is presupposed, if you might work something other than emptiness from their grooves. you’ve only failed at this. you are not yet a skilled enough practitioner of failure, and so you keep reordering them, to see what casts a shadow.

chaun webster, by way of entry you sit with a citizen (2023)