Category: studio

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Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Success is counted sweetest (112), Emily Dickinson

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As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Hysteria, T. S. Eliot

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Another end.

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She laughed and leaned back in her chair. Crossed her legs at the ankles. Her trim dark jeans were cuffed primly back over brown wool socks. She had on half boots, all scuffed worn leather. Her jean jacket had a shearling fringe, mottled white and green.

Colonial Conditions, Brandon Taylor (The Yale Review)

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The Aesthetics of Resistance. Peter Weiss. “The three volumes of the novel were originally published in 1975, 1978 and 1981. English translations of the three volumes have been published by Duke University Press, in 2005, 2020 and 2025.”

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I
Translator: Joachim Neugroschl
Foreward: A Monument to Radical Instants / Fredric Jameson

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He lies if they ask him
how he does it.

To leap on top
or to the side.

To dodge the ceaseless
lottery.

Imperceptible,
in the back patio
of his mind,
a plant opens,
a succulent
of accomplishment.

I., Luis Muñoz. Translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

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From no nowhere not near the sea
on blue field flax
the cemetery's absolutely solitary
you and you and a third

of a pound of bread
for supper in the refectory
where I would die of hunger
if you--if soon--if on this unday--one

undoing would be undone

Unday, Fanny Howe

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What is poetry? Is it a mosaic 
Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought 
Into a pattern? Rather glass that’s taught 
By patient labor any hue to take 
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make 
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught, 
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught 
With storied meaning for religion’s sake. 

Fragment, Amy Lowell

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We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d, Walt Whitman

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Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

Wild Nights—Wild Nights! (249), Emily Dickinson

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I chart the psyche,
observing how I 
force myself to speak
to you, imagining that
together we might
transform a life.  

Why this need
to document change,
to reverse a mood, 
to carry forward the time
when magnolias bloom?

Let’s follow the itinerant we
up and over the jonquil’s back,
treading on its spilled bullion.

April, Sally Van Doren