to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive

Visual-Poetry: bedenkt

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:00:32 +0200

bedenkt, dass jetzt um diese zeit, der mond die stadt erreicht.
für eine kleine ewigkeit sein milchgebiss uns zeigt.
bedenkt, dass hinter ihm ein himmel ist,
den man nicht definieren kann.
vielleicht kommt jetzt um diese zeit
ein mensch dort oben an.
und umgekehrt wird jetzt vielleicht
ein träumer…

"He is exactly the poem I wanted to write."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 06:00:44 +0200

“He is exactly
the poem
I wanted to write.”

- Mary Oliver (via savvysmilinginlove)

"What I would call living is pure idiocy: speak and be burned."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:00:59 +0200

“What I would call living
is pure idiocy:
speak and be burned.”

- Mary Ruefle, from “Alive and on Earth” in The Adamant (via proustitute)

personal hero

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:00:41 +0200

personal hero

lightlythrown: a whole new world #2 - Hideaki Hamada

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 06:00:24 +0200

lightlythrown:

a whole new world #2 - Hideaki Hamada

"The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one…..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:00:26 +0200

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one… If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”

- William Faulkner (via writingquotes)

sirvam-se: MY HEART IS A HOTEL (Picture: Homopatik Berlin) one...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:00:58 +0200

sirvam-se:

MY HEART IS A HOTEL (Picture: Homopatik Berlin)

one of my favorite places

theparisreview: Why do they lie downwhen I shoot them?Such...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:00:56 +0200

theparisreview:

Why do they lie down
when I shoot them?
Such open,
willing obedience
seems to come

from an inclination
to serve. I wish
I could control
myself better,
but I am not grown yet,

and the mystery
of death means
nothing to me.
Perhaps it is better
to be feared than loved.

—Henri Cole, from “Self-Portrait with Rifle”
Photography Credit rAndom International

"I got all hung up on Cezanne around 1949 in my last year at Columbia, studying with Meyer Shapiro. I..."

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:00:21 +0200

““I got all hung up on Cezanne around 1949 in my last year at Columbia, studying with Meyer Shapiro. I don’t know how it led into it- I think it was the same time that I was having these Blake visions. So. The thing I understood from Blake was that it was possible to transmit a message through time which could reach the enlightened, that poetry had a definite effect, it wasn’t just pretty, or just beautiful as I had understood pretty beauty before-it was something basic to human existence, or it reached something, it reached the bottom of human existence.””

- Allen Ginsberg Interview

Paris Review Spring 1996

(via grolierpoetry)

"That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:00:31 +0200

“That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

- Haruki Murakami (1Q84)

"A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:00:51 +0200

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

- Albert Camus (via artemisdreaming)

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:00:27 +0200

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

- David Foster Wallace, This is water (via pavorst)

theparisreview: I am trying to imagine that I am someone else,a...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 06:00:21 +0200

theparisreview:

I am trying to imagine that I am someone else,
a grocer, an aerialist,
a young viola player who travels
around the country in a bus full of musicians,

but difficulty lurks at every turn.
I am not really sure what a viola looks like,
plus, I have become so used to being me
that I have become an assistant professor of myself.

By the time I have learned to play
the viola, even badly,
I would be close to death at best.
And I am so happy when I can stay home

and pass the time in a leather armchair,
volumes of Diderot on the shelf above me,
some jazz low on the radio,
slow waves of memory washing over me

and desire passing through me
like the tiny amount of electricity
that flows through the night-light in a bathroom.
So maybe the way to overcome the ego

is to start small, to imagine that I am still me
only I was born in Columbus, Ohio,
and I go to the gym three times a week.
Or, better still, I do not go to the gym at all—

it is up to me after all.
Maybe I stay home and listen to the news
with an uncooperative look on my face,
a smoker who likes to look out the front window

as I do, or to sit in a leather chair
under a long shelf of French literature,
a fellow who gets tearful
whenever the wind stirs up the leaves,

who gets tearful thinking about his parents
buried under tall drifts of snow
in a large municipal cemetery
somewhere on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio.

—Billy Collins, “One Self”
Photography Credit Joyce Kim (via)

sirvam-se: (via Taksim Square Protests: 13 Photos Showing...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:00:24 +0200

sirvam-se:

(via Taksim Square Protests: 13 Photos Showing Severity Of the Protests)

"The way to hold on is afterwords so clear."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:00:32 +0200

“The way to hold on is

afterwords
so
clear.”

- Anne Carson, from “New Rule” (via the-final-sentence)

"As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:01:06 +0200

““As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”

- Haruki Murakami (via flyawayyyhome)

poetsorg: Fire Island by May Swenson

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:00:26 +0200

poetsorg:

Fire Island by May Swenson

"Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 06:00:19 +0200

“Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”

- Allen Ginsberg

congrats on graduating tufts. im looking into applying there. any plans post-grad?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:24:57 +0200

Hey! I’m glad you’re looking into Tufts. If you want any advice on your application, come off anon and I’d be glad to help. My post-grad plans right now are that I’ll be abroad in Austria on a teaching Fulbright, assistant teaching English.

why do you hit on straight guys?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:23:22 +0200

I don’t, Anna.