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History student falls in love with astrophysics student by Keaton St. James

(patreon)

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im a published poet

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Poetry recs? Like your absolute absolute favourites

Okay these are the ones that made me die a little

“all people are driven to the point of eating their gods” 

“if I love you / is that a fact or a weapon?”

“the kingdom of god is within you because you ate it”

“the blood in your mouth – I wish it was mine”

“his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars”

“I am singing now while rome burns”

“that corpse you planted last year in your garden,  has it begun to sprout? will it bloom this year?”

“so the gods sank to human shape with longing”

“those imperial, disimpassion’d eyes”

“this beautiful speed will be the end of us.  those are stars in our teeth.”

“if love wants you, if you’ve been melted into stars”

“out of the ash I rise with my red hair / and I eat men like air”

“your body hurts me as the world hurts god”

“lessons on loving a prophet”

“and I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void”

“tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”

“to love a prophet is to become their desert”

“the void rushing up to greet us in the absence of god”

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“Life of my life, Savage mouth that takes the breath away and no longer allows a memory, let me be myself, let me be with you.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken (via smakkabagms)

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Hey everyone! I decided today to share my poetry with all of you, and I’ve published this in a whirlwind of adrenaline. Check it out (for free) and let me know what you think.

A sample of my writing:

“everything touches me. nothing sticks. and not in the self-confident way.”

“dear activist, in my mind there is a city. in some parts are my ugly, my terror, my fear, my unfounded misogyny and internalized racism, the abuse, the questioning, the extreme.”

“stop! yells the clock. stop, do you hear me? these are her final moments, don’t you see? can’t you give peace?”

Introduction:

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intro to lit theory

Authorship: Barthes, Death of the Author; Foucault, What is an Author?

Formalism: Eichenbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method”;  Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

Structuralism: Saussure, Course in General Linguistics ; Barthes, from Mythologies

Psychoanalysis: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Lacan, The Mirror Stage & The Significance of the Phallus

Ideology: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Foucault, Truth and Power

Feminism & Queer: Sedgwick, from Between Men; Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa; Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman; Butler, Gender Trouble

Deconstruction: Derrida, from Of Grammatology;

Postcolonial: Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth; Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Cultural Materialism: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory  

these are about 2/3 of the readings for my intro to lit theory course, if you’ve ever wondered what one studies on such courses, the links lead to free pdfs  

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“I kissed a flame, what did I expect.”

— Rosanna Warren, from Departure: Poems; “From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine,”

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“I yearn for the perfect disappearance.”

— Ida Mustazir, from “This February,” originally published c. February 2009

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your name is all orchid and plum blossom tucked into the pockets of my cheeks and there is no way to keep these petals whole. romanization is a kind of wilting, a kind of winter. somewhere someone whispers about snow as a bedtime story, plants seedling songs in wait for spring. all the cities that sleep blanketed by the white, tucked lotus-sweet into the corners of open mouths, are products of dreams and dreamers too.

here, frost flowers on the windowpane overnight and upstairs, mama hums of plum blossoms while wrapping yarn around my wrists. pattern as in skilled-work, knitwork design and flower as in natural gift might be the same word. either way the words slide between my fingers with only imagined friction, imagined presence, leave only a melody wilted down to its bones. either way i know how long you can unwind a skein of yarn without seeing evidence of its diminishing.

my father sings the same song as a promise, laying claim to a once-home whose streets he knows he won’t recognize anymore. sings of blooms opening even in hearts that linger under the snow, but this is no final resting place. like this our mother tongue is not so much a language as it is this knowledge of placelessness passed down, this folding yourself into the corner of the map where strange beasts are wreathed in clouds and the land is shapeless if it is there at all.

when i say yoke or yolk mama hears them the same and when she says yolk or king i hear them nearly the same, yet her tongue always knew to bow its voice to the curve of the song. knew to wait for the first bud to break through the snow, how it promises a refrain. but somewhere there is a place ruled only by the flowers and i inherited, too, that desire to call it mine. and a way to define first language is the primary one you use but i say another                         is the first one you ever loved.

— winterbloom | q.l. | originally published by @wearehalfmystic here

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i live on countdown. thirty-three days until i am done with this. twenty-something until christmas, until new years. only three days of work before a day of rest. just eight more classes until i graduate. just one more year until i’m out of here. just. just. just this moment itself kind of feels like i’m both wasting it and wasting in it. like it’s killing me to be here and live through it but i know when i look back it will seem like it passed in an instant. already i’m worrying that i’m missing the best of things. already i’m worrying that it doesn’t get better on the other side of this. that i reach the end of the countdown just for another one to begin. like i don’t know how to survive without a clock telling me there’s ten days before he goes away again or there’s six years before i have to buy a house or there’s only so much time left before my youth runs out. how do you plan for the future and also live in the moment. how do you keep your childhood joy and also obsess about what happens two years from now. 

i just want off the ledge. i want to be someone who doesn’t care what happens next. i want to be someplace that whatever happens, happens. that i’m not worried about the end.

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“Tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns of snow and I stare at you like I’m looking through a window, counting birds. You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.”

— Richard Siken, Crush

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“he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.”

— Richard Siken, excerpt of You Are Jeff

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12.19.18

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[bracketed = from translation by anne carson] // expansions on sappho’s fragments

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What are some of your favourite inspiring or awe filling quotes from classic Greek and Latin literature?

I don’t know if they’re inspiring or awe-filling, but here are some excerpts (obviously translated in English) that I love and that really made me… think. Experience ? Stop in my tracks, stunned. Poetry, theatre and Carson are my thing. It shows in the list. 

I am nothing but words,     just a shape            of dreams or night.(Euripides, Herakles —transl. Anne Carson)

Although they areonly breath, wordswhich I commandare immortal(Sappho, Fragments —transl. Mary Barnard)

I dream of riverswith a hundred mouthsand mountainswhere the leaves turn over like silver fire.(Euripides, Bakkhai —transl. Anne Carson)

when shall I                                 lift my throat                                       to the dewy air,                                                             like a fawn                                                             skylarking                                                    in the                                                    green joy of the meadow—                                        she runs                                                    free                                                           from the hunt and the hunter,                                        she leaps                                                   over the net                                                            as he cries up his dogs                                    with storms                                    in her feet                                    she                                                sprints                                    the plain,                                                           races                           the river                                       flies                                               down                                                       to the shadows that deepen the trees,                                                                                                           overjoyed!                                                                           at the sheer absence of men.(Euripides, Bakkhai —transl. Anne Carson)

Why are you so in love withthings unbearable?(Sophokles, Elektra —transl. Anne Carson)

—and Geryon drooped his neck to one side, like a poppy which spoiling its tender beauty suddenly sheds its petals—(Stesichoros, Geryoneis XIV —transl. David Campbell)

If you eat my heart, you swallow my pain.(Euripides, Medea —transl. Michael Collier)

I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.(Sophokles, Elektra —transl. Anne Carson)

What howl shall I howl?(Euripides, Hekabe —transl. Anne Carson)

And when one of us meets our other half, we are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s sight even for a moment. We pass our whole lives together, desiring that we should be melted into one, to spend our lives as one person instead of two, and so that after our death there will be one departed soul instead of two; this is the very expression of our ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called Love.(Plato, Symposium —transl. Benjamin Jowett)

This night is nowhalf-gone; youthgoes; I amin bed alone(Sappho, Fragments —transl. Mary Barnard)

Look thecup of my pain is already poured                            out why                            did you bring me                                       here was                                       it for this                                       was it for this                          was it for—(Aiskhylos, Agamemnon —transl. Anne Carson)

you mayblame Aphroditesoft as she isshe has almostkilled me withlove for that boy(Sappho, Fragments —transl. Mary Barnard)

At length he sinks in the soft arms of sleep.When lo! the shade, before his closing eyes,Of sad Patroclus rose, or seem’d to rise:In the same robe he living wore, he came:In stature, voice, and pleasing look, the same.The form familiar hover’d o'er his head,“And sleeps Achilles? (thus the phantom said:)Sleeps my Achilles, his Patroclus dead?Living, I seem’d his dearest, tenderest care,But now forgot, I wander in the air.Let my pale corse the rites of burial know,And give me entrance in the realms below:Till then the spirit finds no resting–place,But here and there the unbodied spectres chaseThe vagrant dead around the dark abode,Forbid to cross the irremeable flood.Now give thy hand; for to the farther shoreWhen once we pass, the soul returns no more:When once the last funereal flames ascend,No more shall meet Achilles and his friend;No more our thoughts to those we loved make known;Or quit the dearest, to converse alone.Me fate has sever’d from the sons of earth,The fate fore–doom’d that waited from my birth:Thee too it waits; before the Trojan wallEven great and godlike thou art doom’d to fall.Hear then; and as in fate and love we join,Ah suffer that my bones may rest with thine!Together have we lived; together bred,One house received us, and one table fed;That golden urn, thy goddess–mother gave,May mix our ashes in one common grave.”

“And is it thou? (he answers) To my sightOnce more return'st thou from the realms of night?O more than brother! Think each office paid,Whate'er can rest a discontented shade;But grant one last embrace, unhappy boy!Afford at least that melancholy joy.”

He said, and with his longing arms essay’dIn vain to grasp the visionary shade!Like a thin smoke he sees the spirit fly,And hears a feeble, lamentable cry.Homer, The Iliad (Book XXIII) —transl. Alexander Pope (or any other, really)

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I am trying to write / a poem in which I am neither a monster nor a martyr

Kevin Kantor, a cento of poetry from his work created by Megan O’Hern, “You are Not Just Anything,” published in Crab Fat Magazine (via lifeinpoetry)

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Do you know the quotes about one sided love?

“Come back come back come back. Come back because I need you so. And you do not need me and why should you come back your life is good and full and why should you come back.”—Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“I tried to love you less. I couldn’t.”—Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“I’ve got to tell you / how I love you always / I think of it on grey / mornings with death.”—Frank O’Hara, “Morning”

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: that we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people.”—Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”—Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Where would I be without my sorrow, / sorrow of my beloved’s making,”—Louise Glück, “Relic” 

“THANK YOU FOR THE TEARS THEY TASTE LIKE HOME”—Anne Carson, “TV Men: Hektor” 

“Love? I wanted to go with him, to be on the strong side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks shelter in the arms of the enemy to stay far from his arrows. It was different than love, I was finding out: I wanted him as a thirsty person desires water, without feelings, without even wanting to be happy.”—Clarice Lispector, “Obsession”

“We were the heartbreak of truth. / We were willing to break even more.”—Andrea Gibson, “Close for Comfort”

“Love / isn’t always magic. / Sometimes it’s just melting. / Where it’s black and blue. / Where it hurts the most.”—Andrea Gibson, “Maybe I Need You”

“Feelings like shrapnel half worked out of the wound.”—Susan Sontag, I, etcetera

“what I live for I can seldom believe in / who I love I cannot go to / what I hope is always divided”—W.S. Merwin, “Teachers”

“Either love is…–A shrine…–or else a scar.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, Bride of Ice

“…the labor of love is not letting it / crush you in its collapse.”—Sandra Meek, “Road Scatter”

“my heart / a torn thing”—Anne Carson, “Blended Text”

“Bitter the love by which I’m beaten.”—Euripedes, Hippolytos (tr. Anne Carson)

“You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, / longing,”—Rainer Maria Rilke, “You Who Never Arrived” (tr. Stephen Mitchell)

“It’s hurts all over. In the soul. In the God-place. / Spleen and rib. Blood and hearth.”—Tara Hardy, My, My, My, My, My

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Names like pain cries, names / like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented, / names forbidden or overused. Your name like / a song I sing to myself, your name like a box where I keep my love…”—Richard Siken, Crush

“His touch both consoles and devastates me; (…) I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.”—Angela Carter, “The Erl-King”

“Love me less, but love me for a long time.”—Christophe Honoré, Les Chansons d’Amour

 “…remembering carefully the one she / starts to forget again, the one—didn’t he? — / who must have nearly loved her, must have.”—Allison Seay, To See the Queen

“I look at you and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.”—Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“And then to want and not to have — to want and want‚ how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“When I desire you / a part of me / is gone.”—Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been;”—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Once again desire has made a ruin of us.”—Carole Maso, Beauty is Convulsive

“You have never understood. You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots.”—Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You alone were my fate, / I would have done anything for you.”—Anna Akhmatova, “Prologue”

“Oh, I often think that I will try to tell you how very dear you are, and how I’m watching for you, but the words won’t come, tho’ the tears will, and I sit down disappointed —”—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“My attachment to you continues, it grows more poignant, more vast, more hopeless with each day—”—Gore Vidal, from a letter to Anaïs Nin

“There is love in holding. And there is love in letting go.”—Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures