“I am drunk but miss you all the time”
Sometimes nonpoets
write better poems
than poets
Category: ain’t that the truth
Advice from Robert Frost (hand-lettered image).
(via illustrator Lisa Congdon’s lovely blog “Today is going to be awesome.” She’s doing a project where she hand-letters 365 days in a row, and she uploads what she’s drawn. This is day 115.)
James Baldwin wrote it; Heather Garner sewed it (image).
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
-James Baldwin, from “Giovanni’s Room”
Thank you, Heather, for the beautiful present.
(You can buy Heather’s handcrafts on her etsy site. She might even take embroidery requests!)
And here’s a painting of Baldwin, by Beauford Delaney, that I especially love.
Have you read “Giovanni’s Room” yet? Please do.
Poem with a strawberry in it (mine).
Poem
A child was made to stand alone
on the outskirts of the market
stall, his father scolding him
into stillness. I asked him
if he’d like a strawberry;
I brought him the biggest one
I could find. “Oh thank you,”
he said. “Strawberries are my
favorite food.” “What other foods
are your favorites?” I asked
jauntily; I love to talk favorites
with children. He shook his head.
“No other foods, “ he said.
“Strawberries are my only
favorite.” I nodded. He stood
reddening his face with strawberry
with me crouched to his level.
Soon his mother took his hand
to exit. “Thank you so much
for the strawberry,” he said.
I too have only one favorite.
(illustration via “color my life with the chaos of trouble“)
For Misha (illustration).
Ain’t that the truth (quotation by Elspeth).
“You know how there’s all those hipster cupcake shops? There should be hipster donut shops. Hipsters would make fucking delicious donuts.”
Uh-huh.
(photo found at wanderlust, where you can get high on food images.)
Bird poem by Sean T. Randolph (he’s my friend!).
Thoughts like ill-fitting socks
Many people write about birds
but not about birds’ thoughts.
I guess it doesn’t interest people
that all pigeons dream of living
in Paris, Texas and most penguins
prefer the look of mourning-men
to mailmen when given the choice.
When people write about birds
they often think only of themselves
wishing they could be birds.
(That’s Sean T. Randolph with his eyes all squinty from laughter, and that’s his girlfriend Hellen who is hilarious on Twitter. I took this photo in my kitchen over a year ago and both of them will say “shucks i look terrible!” when they see this, but GUYS, YOU LOOK GREAT. You look like life is funny. Which it is.)
“We sleep like wine in the conches” (poem) (Paul Celan).
Corona
Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.
In the mirror it’s Sunday,
in dreams there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.
My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.
We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.
It is time.
“Straight up gangster celery” (poem) (Nick Demske).
…From Otis Henry
Otis Henry is a straight up gangster.
Everything Otis Henry does, he does gangsterized
Because he is such a straight up gangster.
When Otis Henry walks, he walks gangster.
Look at Otis Henry’s walk—
Oh Lord, it is too gangster!
When Otis Henry is hungry, he gangster eats.
Eating hard!
Ripping the celery from its stalk.
For that is what true gangsters eat.
Straight up gangster celery.
When Otis Henry drives a car—you guessed it:
Gangster.
How do gangsters drive cars, you ask?
Answer: just like Otis Henry.
Superduper gangster.
After washing his hands, Otis Henry straight up gangster dries his hands.
He dries his hands like a straight up gangster
On a gangster hand towel
Monogrammed with a G.
Cause everybody needs to know that this is a straight up gangster hand drying party
And Otis Henry
Is the original
Straight up gangster.
And when I say gangster
I mean gangster gangster ass gangster.
And when I say gangster gangster ass gangster.
I mean poet.
***
(via pank, where you can find more of Nick Demske’s Otis Henry poems.)
“You’re a Genius all the time” (list) (Kerouac).
Here’s a list that Jack Kerouac titled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” He enclosed it in a letter to Don Allen, written in 1958. Here are his essentials, each of them so very Kerouac, each of them reminding me to be just as wild as I want to.
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
(list via a great new site I just began loving, lists of note. photo of jack kerouac, lucien carr, and allen ginsberg, in the middle of being geniuses all the time, via tumbling dice.)
panache, perhaps 