Category: language

What must be valued–spaces where … thought, sunshine, flowers, intangibles, necessities, time, freedom … are held.

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“What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Here—in a poem?
And elsewhere”

– Jenny Johnson, Spaces

“Thought, sunshine, flowers: they wanted intangible as well as tangible goods, pleasures as well as necessities, and the time to pursue them, the time to have an inner life and freedom to roam the outer world.” (Solnit, Orwell’s Roses)

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indeterminacy, not fixed, not precise, not known.

Untitled (A place to stand and stare; Aubade East–Today’s the day, I can taste it / This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do)

Untitled (A place to stand and stare; Aubade East–then play the rest of the day / as it comes see where it goes / feeling good / feeling good)

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Aubade: East by Rita Dove

Harlem, a.m.

Today’s the day, I can taste it.

Got my gray sweats pouting in a breeze

so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping

as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,

bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.

This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

This is my territory, I know all of it—

ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.

Walking any Avenue is like riding

a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave

of the goddam century, the East River

twerking her bedazzled behind

while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed

Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today

I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:

hook up with my buds to drop

a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,

then play the rest of the day

as it comes                see where it goes

feeling good

feeling good

somewhere over the Hudson

the sun                      heading home

via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.

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“And if a glass of ice tea and an anthology
of seventeen century devotional poetry
with a dark blue cover are available,
then the picture can hardly be improved

All I wanted was to be a pea of being
at rest inside the pod of time”

-Billy Collins, The Moment

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“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.”

– John Keats, Hyperion.

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“But you offer, saturnine traveler,
with what eloquence in mute space
consolation to him whose life is broken”

-Luis Carlos López, Versos a la luna

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“… did not need much
To make us laugh instead, and touch,”

-A.E. Stallings, “Recitative,” from Poetry (April 2005).

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Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,   
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,   
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?   
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?   
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons   
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?   
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,   
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

-A. E. Stallings, “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther” from Poetry, April 2005.

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Tar babies are
not the children
of tar people.
It is far worse.
The tar baby occurs
spontaneously
nor do we adhere
at first. There is
an especially
unperverse
attractiveness
to the tar baby–
although currently
she is a little sick.
When you start
to help her
is when she
start to stick.

Kay Ryan, “Tar Babies“