Category: studio

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Small Oscillations Among Ordinary Forms.

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It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

The Patience of Ordinary Things, Pat Schneider

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Poetry and the Turning World: Money, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar.

I have yet to read An Uncomplicated Man, Emily Wilson. I’m sure it’s a good read.

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“Let us,” he said
“make man,”

as if ?he had to ask
someone’s permission

even if always
only

his own.

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To practice is to repeat
what has not yet
occurred.

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We get signals
from the future.

We’re invited to grow
by entwining,

twinning.

Being duplicitous?

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A rose by any other
rose

is its own
paradise

of luminous
folds.

The Fold, Rae Armantrout

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Heart free, hand free,
    Blue above, brown under,
All the world to me
    Is a place of wonder.
Sun shine, moon shine,
    Stars, and winds a-blowing.
All into this heart of mine
    Flowing, flowing, flowing!

Mind free, step free,
    Days to follow after,
Joys of life sold to me
    For the price of laughter.
Girl’s love, man’s love,
    Love of work and duty,
Just a will of God’s to prove
    Beauty, beauty, beauty!

Sic Vita, William Stanley Braithwaite

In the avoidance of that which we seek––
The sudden silence and reserve when near––
The eye that glistens with an unshed tear––
The joy that seems the counterpart of fear, 
As the alarmed heart leaps in the breast,
And knows, and names, and greets its godlike guest––
               Thus doth Love speak.

[…]

Glance strikes with glance, swift flashing high and higher, 
Like lightnings that precede the mighty storm; 
In the deep soulful stillness; in the warm, 
Impassioned tide that sweeps through throbbing veins,
Between the shores of keen delights and pains;

Love’s Language, Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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(Belleau Wood, 1917)

“A soldier waits until he’s called—then
moves ass and balls up, over,
tearing twigs and crushed faces,
swinging his bayonet like a pitchfork
and thinking anything’s better
than a trench, ratshit
and the tender hairs of chickweed.
A soldier is smoke
waiting for wind; he’s a long corridor
clanging to the back of a house
where a child sings
in its ruined nursery…
and Beauty is the
gleam of my eye on this gunstock and my spit
drying on the blade of this knife
before it warms itself in the gut of a Kraut.
Mother, forgive me. Hear the leaves? I am
already memory.”

Alfonzo Prepares to Go Over the Top, Rita Dove

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"Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said, 
"and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever, 
his remark which first explained the use of the lever 
was an academic joke. But if that dead

sage could return to life, he would find a clear 
demonstration of his idea, which is not 
pure theory after all. That putative spot 
exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.

What could be more immovable or stronger? 
What becomes more and more secure, the longer 
it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point 
from which to move a world that is out of joint, 
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.

Sonnets on Love XIII by Jean de Sponde, translated by David R. Slavitt.

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Jason Hirata on Louise Lawler. Dia. Birdcalls (1972/1981) (Audio recording and text, 7:01 minutes).

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“Yáng Shu?ng-z?’s Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize.” “It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” (NPR)

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery

Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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“Because survival is insufficient.” (Emily St. John Mandel)

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“earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it”

“The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm.”

(TM)