We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

» Anthony Marra, from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

(via larmoyante)

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became, tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars

- Walt Whitman

Beauty is the illumination of your soul.

On Sundays Kafka goes for walks by himself, without any objective, without thinking. He says, ‘Every day I wish myself off the earth. There is nothing wrong with me except myself.’

(Source: hypocrite-lecteur)

I hear the wind blow,
And I feel that it was worth being born just to hear the wind blow.

(Source: anarch)

Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands

Twice as big as the universe and androgynous

poetsorg says..

You know you love this Eileen Myles tote. Get yours at OR Books.

O, MY MY!

A lap full of crystals & goddesses & John O’Donohue in the afternoon sun

[photo © Maitreya Levanchild]

What can be explained is not poetry.

O, Adrienne - I miss you already.

newyorker:

Postscript: Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

The ringing, defiant poetry of Adrienne Rich, who died yesterday at eighty-two, articulated the frustrations of women who came of age along clipped paths in the nineteen-forties and fifties, only to discover in the sixties and seventies the extent of their longing to tear up the grass. Her voice resounds, three generations on. From her 1963 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” a modernist collage in which careless references to women’s lives from Horace, Diderot, Eliot, and Shakespeare are recast in tight, furious stanzas about domestic confinement (“Dolce ridens, dulce loquens / she shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk) to her expansive later poems that elaborate the love between two women, Rich continually stretched categories of feminine identity. She was an explorer, “diving into the wreck,” as the title of one of her most famous poems has it, to help us find what is naked and unencumbered in ourselves: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”

We’ve gathered here seven of the twenty-eight poems by Rich published in this magazine between 1953 and 1958. In these early poems, we see the formal discipline and metric grace that Rich would maintain (and push against) throughout her long career. This is decorous verse becoming rude: the anger to which Rich would give such powerful voice bubbles beneath the taut surfaces of these fine poems.

“England and Always” (1953)

“The Marriage Portion” (1953)

“Holiday” (1953)

“Living in Sin” (1954)

“At the Jewish New Year” (1956)

“Moving Inland” (1957)

“The Survivors” (1957)

Photograph by Neal Boenzi/New York Times/Getty Images.

[via pinnednyc]