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Posts tagged "poetry"

May 15, 2013
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“As a parent, your job from the minute your child is born is to create an exit ramp away from you.
— Beth Greenspan, talking about Mary Karr’s “Entering the Kingdom”
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May 05, 2013
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“Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought — at the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — the step-ladders and demon-traps — the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
— Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition“, 1846 (via)
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Apr 13, 2013
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I recorded a Robert Louis Stevenson poem for the Poetry Foundation’s Record-A-Poem project. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/03/record-a-poem-on-soundcloud

You can read along here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171943

The new SoundCloud, btw, is pretty awesome.

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Feb 20, 2013
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Kenneth Koch talks to Mr. Rogers about feeling necessary in the world

I think all people would like to feel that they’re a necessary part of life. That they’re necessary in the world, and that life would be poorer if they weren’t in it. When you accomplish something, when you write good poetry, then I think you feel that the world would be slightly different if you weren’t in it. And that, I think, is part of what being needed is about.

Filed under: to be of use

(Source: youtube.com)

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Feb 19, 2013
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thenearsightedmonkey: Lynda Barry sketch book page

thenearsightedmonkey:

Lynda Barry sketch book page

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Feb 16, 2013
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Hafiz, “The Sun Never Says,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky in The Gift gwendabond: No longer Valentine’s Day, but this is too beautiful not to pass on. From the wonderful Stephany at crooked house. (Kind of a chuckle that the poem has been scanned from the book Everybody Marries The Wrong Person.)

Hafiz, “The Sun Never Says,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky in The Gift

gwendabond:

No longer Valentine’s Day, but this is too beautiful not to pass on. From the wonderful Stephany at crooked house.

(Kind of a chuckle that the poem has been scanned from the book Everybody Marries The Wrong Person.)

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Jan 30, 2013
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“I used to want to make poems as though poetry or even speech hadn’t existed before me. Now I work at the other end of the spectrum, making poems mostly out of what already exists, and somehow finding that fresher. More mysterious.
— Peter Cole, from “The Invention of Influence: A Notebook,” in Poetry. (via ecantwell)
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Jan 23, 2013
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Nancy and Sluggo do cut-ups From Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945

Nancy and Sluggo do cut-ups

From Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945

(Source: twitter.com)

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Jan 05, 2013
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Wilson Pickett work haiku

Watch me work y’all
Don’t let the green grass fool you
In the midnight hour

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Jan 04, 2013
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“I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
— Marge Piercy, “To Be Of Use”
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