January 2012
2 posts
“all, animal, ashes, back, bark, belly, berry, big, bird, bite, black, blood,...”
– The 200 words chosen by linguist Morris Swadesh as the basic vocabulary template for all human languages (as reported in John D’Agata’s endlessly fascinating About a Mountain, which I devoured on a three-hour bus ride home from Calgary earlier today).
Notice that why isn’t included. Nicely echoes a...
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the...”
– Albert Einstein. (via ecantwell)
December 2011
6 posts
“If you asked me to draw a picture of myself I’d draw two. One would be a...”
– DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #92: Your Invisible Inner Terrible Someone - The Rumpus.net
Oh & also:
“You don’t have to read to write poetry, you do for anything else.”
Something from my student's statement of progress:
“In this class I feel my writing skills as far as poetry go have not improved, perhaps there is no room for improvement.”
packing up summer clothes, taking out winter ones
season’s finally changed. the end of this semester marks my being halfway through with my mfa program. crazy, crazy, crazy the things time does.
what i’m saying is, there’s a comfort to the rhythm of folding clothes and stacking them. i hope i find something i’d forgotten i own.
"Her my body," by Bob Hicok
ecantwell:
The dog licks my hand as I worry about the left nipple of the woman in the bathroom. She is drying her hair, the woman whose left nipple is sore. We looked this evening for diagonal cuts or discoloration or bite marks from small insects that may be in our bed. It is a good bed, a faithful bed. A bed that won’t be hurt by the consideration we gave to the possibility of small though...
November 2011
2 posts
dear students:
please stop making me want to kill myself, so I can be properly benevolent & nurturing
October 2011
1 post
“The only security you will ever have with me is what you have now: the fact that...”
– Hunter S. Thompson in a letter to Sandy Conklin dated October 1, 1960. It must be October that brings about this kind of rampant longing. (via beautifulordinaire)
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
What I hate about writing:
So much of it is just staring at a computer screen or the wall in frustration. I have to have a 15-page memoir essay by tonight & all the words are terrible (when they even bother appearing at all). I bought a fancy cupcake to reward myself with when I finish but it’s starting to look like I’ll never get to eat it.
"Ghost Poem," Matthew Dickman →
every once in awhile you get a poem in your email inbox that’s intense and awe-inspiring and terrible and wonderful and I guess what I’m saying is, shit, you guys. this killed me.
2 tags
You Are the Greatest Writer of All Time: A Lesson... →
katiecoyle:
Here’s this slightly deranged thing I wrote for Hot Metal Bridge about learning to be full of yourself:
If I have learned one thing from the two-thirds of a graduate degree in fiction writing that I’ve completed so far, it’s that the odds are against my living the exact life I want to live, which is that of a wildly popular writer of short stories who resides in a castle and is...
2 tags
I don't know if you already know this but
You guys. Teaching. It’s just making things up! Making things up for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week!
August 2011
10 posts
1 tag
Jesse Pinkman is the best character on television, ever. And I love him. More than I love chocolate, even.
The series finale of Ally McBeal is the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen.
1 tag
Mmm La Crema...
Happy Monday to me!
2 tags
Poem for Jack Spicer
It’s the start of baseball season, and I am thinking again as I do every year in early April now that I live in California where afternoon is a blue span to languidly cross of those long ones you used to sort of sleep through getting drunk on many beers, lying next to your radio on a little square of grass in the sun, listening half to the game and half to the Pacific water...
well, i guess this syllabus isn't going to write...
powerrrr power! i have all the power!
(wonder how long it’ll take them to figure out i’m faking all of the things i know)
July 2011
13 posts
You know, legally blonde was the first movie I went to with a boy.
1 tag
I felt restless, and bored, and I tried to start reading like 5 different books and didn’t love any of them and it was looking like it might be a fairly crappy night…but then I flipped on the tv and legally blonde was on and I thought, yes yes this was exactly what I needed and now I’m drinking a cocktail and eating cheese and crackers and watching Elle show up to a law school...
The Millions : Scared Straight: Writers and The... →
Oh hey I just spilled boxed wine all over my parents fridge and kitchen floor. They are so lucky to have me as a dogsitter.
2 tags
Spending my Sunday evening reading Joan Didion (& only crying the tiniest bit).
anyone have a delicious restaurant in georgetown to recommend?
1 tag
“A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It takes on a life and a will...”
– Stanley Kunitz, from a 1982 interview in The Paris Review (via proustitute)
“We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or...”
– Cheryl Strayed, The Love Of My Life
Oh, oh, you should read this.
(But not in public.)
i read this in my kitchen this morning, from start to finish without really taking a breath. at the end of it, i inhaled again and all i could think was my god, ow. ouch. hurt, ow, my god..
(via julyonfire)
...
1 tag
1 tag
Frank O'Hara, "Nocturne"
sharingpoetry:
There’s nothing worse than feeling bad and not being able to tell you. Not because you’d kill me or it would kill you, or we don’t love each other. It’s space. The sky is grey and clear, with pink and blue shadows under each cloud. A tiny airliner drops its specks over the UN Building. My eyes, like millions of glassy squares, merely reflect. Everything sees through...
1 tag
things that have happened:
I moved into a new apartment. It is wonderful.
But we don’t have internet until Wednesday, so I haven’t been around.
Also, I’m reading The Hunger Games trilogy while I work out and it makes the hour go by SO fast. I don’t usually read YA books, because I’m a snob. But gosh I love this series—it’s so exciting, and the prose isn’t awkward in the way...
June 2011
20 posts
Ally McBeal’s hair in season 3 is driving me crazy. They curled it, but her hair isn’t curly so in some scenes it has fallen flat, and then in the next scene—which chronologically is mere minutes later—her hair is freshly curled and bouncy. Come on, tv maker people. Hair can go from bouncy to flat but not the other way around!
3 tags
This afternoon, I’ve decided: I’m boycotting scales.
The last time I got on a scale and felt anything other than horror was in my last year of undergrad, in the months after my boyfriend had broken up with me, when anything I ate tasted like nothing and I had to chew it forever. When I felt nauseated most of the time, and so never felt hunger. It was a terrible overwrought ridiculous...
[The Airborne Toxic Event,...
Girl Talk's Ultimate Summer Playlist →
The History of Dialogue: Other People's Papers →
I find this interesting but also super-depressing. Why oh WHY do we live in a society where people who aren’t capable of college-level work have to get college degrees so they can get jobs that you shouldn’t have had to go to college to get? People are smart in all kinds of different ways; academics isn’t indicative of everything. People who aren’t interested in learning,...
1 tag
on the one hand, I can’t stop watching ally mcbeal on netflix and I kind of love it. on the other hand, I want to cut out vonda shepherd’s voicebox.
2 tags
just decided to spend today at busboys & poets!
it’s at least a 45-minute metro ride from the boyfriend’s place in arlington to u-street. don’t care. gonna be worth it.