hypervolumes

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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body  love what it loves.  Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting─ over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, ‘Wild Geese’ in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry ed. Czesław Miłosz

[hypervolumes]

Only calmness will reassure the bees to let you rob their hoard. Any sweat of fear provokes them. Approach with confidence, and from the side, not shading their entrance. And hush smoke gently from the spout of the pot of rags, for sparks will anger them. If you go near bees every day they will know you. And never jerk or turn so quick you excite them. If weeds are trimmed around the hive they have access and feel free. When they taste your smoke they fill themselves with honey and are laden and lazy as you lift the lid to let in daylight. No bee full of sweetness wants to sting. Resist greed. With the top off you touch the fat gold frames, each cell a hex perfect as a snowflake, a sealed relic of sun and time and roots of so many acres fixed in crystal-tight arrays, in rows and lattices of sweeter latin from scattered prose of meadow, woods.

Robert Morgan, ‘Honey’ in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry ed. Czesław Miłosz

[hypervolumes]

Horatio, Merrie Cherry, Linda Felcher, and Devo Monique. Photography by James Emmerman at Brooklyn’s Bushwig Drag Festival, 2018.

[hypervolumes]

Even when she sleeps, she’s listening, as animals do ─ for a break in the pattern, for an unknown sound, for a silence opening like a crack in rock. When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.

Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

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'Listen, Skip, if you entirely hated yourself, you'd be dead by now, right? So part of you does love you.' He giggled wildly. 'What a valentine. Part of me loves me. Signed, some love, Skip.'

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

[hypervolumes]

I definitely started looking at comics through the lens of semiotics, like OK, comics is its own specific language and it’s not that old, and who was the first to develop certain vernacular that’s used in the comics, and why do we repeat it? Why do we all latch on to repeating certain things and giving those drawn symbols significance? It’s really interesting to show my comics to some people who don’t read comics, and sometimes they are confused about how you even read the whole thing. [Laughs.] And it reminds me very much that this language is established and it’s kind of taught by reading it. Like the more you read it, the more you learn all the symbols and how they denote meaning or emotion or whatever as part of the story. And I find all that really fascinating. I try to apply that as well and look at it in a very similar way with my paintings because I feel like my paintings are very allegorical, and so I’m using a lot of the symbolic in a very similar way that I’m using the comics.

Esther Pearl Watson on Comics, Fine Arts, Theory, and Pink Flying Saucers

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This is what happens to trans feminine people: You watch people get life from the art you are creating all the while you struggle on how to finance your own. You are constantly extracted for inspiration, but rarely — if ever — allowed to focus on your self-preservation. How can you get back up when they think the only reason you are falling is a death drop? Complex people are reduced to the summation of their looks: “toot or boot!” We don’t ask how they’re getting home safely (or even how they got to the venue). We dismiss their legitimacy as we simultaneously extract from their looks for our mood boards. We love their look, but we won’t pay for their songs or tip them at venues or demand fair compensation for their work. We say that they are “impersonating females,” but we lack the vocabulary to name how cis women and the cis beauty industry continue to pilfer from trans/drag aesthetics. Who is masquerading as whom?

Imp Queen and the Perpetually Problematic Erasure of Trans Drag Queens

[hypervolumes]

I have also learned to be tranquil. In the midst of chaos, I can be tranquil. Tranquility is inner peace.   I practice being peaceful when others are agitated. I do not have to buy into people’s agitation.

Louise Hay, Affirmations for PTSD

[hypervolumes]

I think she’s such a personality. I don’t know, when you’re around her you just feel this larger-than-life energy. She’s funny and loud and real and, on a dime, starts crying. [Laughs.] And the next moment laughing and singing and just this giant tornado of emotion and energy. And you’re really acutely aware that she’s taking in everything. She knows what it is to be alive. She’s just zapping all that air around her. Just like charging it with this energy and taking everything in. I really like that. There’s some people in this world who are so alert and so present. They’re so lucid. And then there’s some people in this world where you can just see the glaze over their eyes. They’re missing everything around them like they’re not quite alive. And it’s really something special, I think when you’re around someone who just really appreciates everything about the moment they’re in. I think it makes you a little more alert and awake as well.

Esther Pearl Watson on Lynda Barry, in Esther Pearl Watson on Comics, Fine Arts, Theory, and Pink Flying Saucers

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Lynda Barry

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I feel like I learned to draw from the most, or I learned my comics from, was Barbie coloring books actually. Because I would trace the images and then alter them, and there was always text at the bottom. And the Catholic churches, too. I think they brought out a lot of narrative interest, the stations of the cross had these sequential images and sometimes text underneath it. And the churches in Italy with the beautiful paintings on the ceiling. I would just sit there during Mass, looking up. And you could just make up all these stories from the images. I feel like I was picking up sequential narrative imagery all around me. But not from traditional comics.

Esther Pearl Watson on Comics, Fine Arts, Theory, and Pink Flying Saucers

[hypervolumes]

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets, Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat, The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots, And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top,─ That was moss-gathering. But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets Of green, or plunged to my elbow in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes: And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland; Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance, By pulling off flesh from the living planet; As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

Theodore Roethke, ‘Moss-Gathering’ in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry ed. Czesław Miłosz

[hypervolumes]

The hour from night to day. The hour from side to side. The hour for those past thirty. The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks. The hour when earth betrays us. The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars. The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us. The hollow hour. Blank, empty. The very pit of all other hours. No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning ─three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come if we're to go on living.

Wisława Szymborska, ‘Four in the Morning’ (tr. Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire) in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry ed. Czesław Miłosz

[hypervolumes]

A taxidermist is sitting before the russet breasts green and purple wings of his song-birds dreaming about his lover with a body so different yet so close sometimes to the body of the birds that it seemed to him very strange in its curves and its volumes in its colors and its finery and its shades . . .

Jean Follain, ‘A Taxidermist’ (tr. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass)

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For me, poetry has two main purposes. The first is to ask unanswered—perhaps unanswerable—questions. I mean this in the sense of relentless interrogation more than gentle curiosity. The other function is curative—a tonic for conditions that are perhaps incurable. I'm curious about love and mourning in the  abandoned bodies and spaces. Directive language is one way to world-build: poems as spells or self-created balms for conditions under which healing are not possible. In the anthropocene, mourning is exponential. If everything one consumes or discards accelerates the death of one's progeny, how does one demonstrate love to the living? Poems don't answer this question, but they create intimate spaces for it to sit.

Nina Puro on "Prescription"

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From the bough floating down river, insect song.

Issa

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In the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone. Never should I forget this event in the life of my fatigued retinas. Never should I forget that in the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ‘In the Middle of the Road’ (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)