You see…the trouble is that there is little the dead can do; otherwise they wouldn’t be the dead. No! But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless. They are powerless only to give the full answer to the new questions posed for the living by history. But they try! Whenever they hear the imperious cries of the people in a crisis, the dead respond.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
I’m reading on June 24th, at 6 pm, with Emily Alta Hockaday and Alina Gregorian at Keats Restaurant (842 Second Ave, New York, NY). Emily’s chapbook Starting a Life is available for preorder from Finishing Line Press.
I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses.
No one ever made that mistake with me.
—Charles Simic
(Source: nybooks.com)
I build worlds to critique world building.
—Cathy Park Hong (as interviewed by @elsabee)
(Source: bombsite.com)
WHEN A CHILD DIES
When a child dies the forehead of god
should clench like an arthritic fist
and the limbs of trees should hold each
other against the dark like parting lovers.
When a child is murdered we should lead
ourselves into the forest at night
to sleep in caves, having erased the
small stones and pieces of bread that
could have lead us back to one another.
Dave Kelly, from Filming Assassinations.
(Source: books.google.com)
“The revolution does not put dreams on trial, Irina Piperin,” I answer her.
“Nor does it save us from nightmares,” she retorts.
Valerian intervenes: “I didn’t know you two were acquainted.”
“We met in a dream,” I say. “We were falling off a bridge.”
And she says: “No. Each has a different dream.”
(Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler)
about suffering, they were never wrong:
Just re-read this incredible essay in the New Yorker and saw Auden’s poem in it.
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(Source: english.emory.edu)
I’m giving these books to @longislandfnb (Long Island Food Not Bombs). For right now, though, they’re in my car.
