it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it in

May 17th, 2013

May 13th, 2013

… night fell fast or slowly according to the day and the season or the state of the sky, or whether the pain in someone’s heart was terrible or only slight.

Marguerite Duras, in Practicalities (translated by Barbara Bray)

. (by ibán ramón)

May 12th, 2013

(by LUOXI羅)

It was at the end of the long promenade at Cabourg, near the harbour where the yachts are. There was a child on the beach flying a kite, as in Summer 1980. He didn’t move from the spot where he was standing. All around him other children were playing football. I was quite a long way away, on the terrace. It was windy, and soon it would be dark. But the child didn’t move, and his not moving became irksome and then actually painful. Then by dint of peering hard at him, really concentrating, I saw what was the matter. Both his legs, which were as thin as sticks, were paralysed. Someone would no doubt be coming to take him home. Some of the other children were already leaving. He went on playing with the kite. Sometimes you say I’m going to kill myself, and then you go on with the book. Someone must have come and taken the child home before it got dark. The kite in the sky showed where he was. There couldn’t be any mistake.

Marguerite Duras, ‘Cabourg’ (translated by Barbara Bray)

I find this totally devastating. Last night, reading it brought me to tears. And I don’t cry at anything. Mostly.

His biographers recount that when the poet Paul Celan was four years old, he took a notion to make up his own fairy tales. He went about telling these new versions to everyone in the house until his father advised him to cut it out. ‘If you need stories the Old Testament is full of them.’ To make up new stories, Celan’s father thought, is a waste of words… Perhaps poets are ones who waste what their fathers would save.

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (via invisiblestories)

56 notes

May 11th, 2013

Portuguese tarts at my local deli.

Sometimes Roy Dupuis insists that I blog images of him. Shameless man. This, from Memoires Affectives / Looking for Alexander.

What Is a Person

capable of feeling
while in contact with another?

I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles

facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini’s angel’s

silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’s white one
that’s practically transparent in his

Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!

Then the bells start, flood the void.

Elizabeth Arnold

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

LINE BREAKS & OTHER VIOLENT CRIMES: How To Correspond With A Writer

ecantwell:

Like many other writers on Tumblr and on the Internet in general, my inbox is full of messages like this:

“Hey can you look at my writing when you get a chance?”

“When are you going to respond to my email?”

“I write poems and it would be great if you could look at them when you have time!”

Wow, yes, this.

74 notes

May 6th, 2013

Weekend on the Warren River, near Pemberton, Western Australia. Our campsite was situated in karri forest - karri are some of the world’s tallest trees, and, since they are eucalypts, the forest smells incredible.

We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbours of fire.

From Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red

I go into the mill. What is a water mill? Describe.”
“Describe the forest.”
“Two emaciated horses, describe the horses.”
“Describe the air, the soldiers.”
“Describe the bazaar, baskets of cherries, the inside of the tavern.”
“Describe this unendurable rain.”
“Describe ‘rapid fire.’”
“Describe the wounded.”
“The intolerable desire to sleep - describe.

Some entries in Isaac Babel’s diaries, as listed in Elif Batuman’s memoir of reading Russian books, The Possessed.

April 29th, 2013

On the Chemin de St Jacques

(via findadventure)

9,180 notes