We are what suns and winds and waters make us

Image: Richard Leach, 7 Words, Distressed page from old poetry book on playing card.


Title: Found in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1904

The sight of morning

“A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! 

As if cycles and children and islands weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough.

She thinks she can warn the stars.  A writer is essentially a spy. 

Dear love, I am that girl.”

-Anne Sexton

Image: Emon Toufanian
Title: W.S. Merwin

Words Hazard All

              I’ve never thought of counting words. I’d rather not

              know.
-Iris Murdoch

      Title: Ronald Johnson

Music is the space between the notes

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
 

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: David Hurn, Cactus nursery, Arizona
Title: Claude Debussy

The past and the future pressing so hard on either side

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

-Clarice Lispector
 
Image: Kerry Murray, Penhas Douradas, Serra da Estrela
Title: Evelyn Waugh

A Word

I used to think when I turned thirty I would become a writer.

Thirty passed.

I wrote here then, daily. Poems. Essays. Words like leaves on a page curling, turning over in the wind.

I wrote before that, too. Decades before: shelves, walls, boxes of words.

I didn't know what blogger meant. Monetize, followers, trolls.

And then erasure happened.

It swept.

My knees became my feet, my eyes like the closing flowers, unseen.

I have dwelt in caves dripping.

Time has passed. The sun is higher.

I write.
I want you to know I am still writing.

Yes, my answer will always be yes,

I am writing.

Image: John Bridges, Embrace
Text: Terresa Wellborn

How Far is Far?

    In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

  -May Sarton

  Image: Richard Avedon, 1968
  Title: From a book by Alvin Tresselt and Ward Brackett

My Own Desert Places

     "For the desert is simply that:… an ecstatic form of disappearance."

  -Jean Baudrillard

   ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

   "You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors."

-Kōbō Abe

    ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

You are there
for an instant Blue desert
with dunes of rain Thirst is granted
Space is a breach You burn in the night
whose walls are down I see by your oil
by the wick in the middle where a flame blossoms

-Edmond Jabès, excerpt from “After the Deluge,” If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Image: Max Scheler, Art Class for Retired Ctizens, Sun Valley, Arizona, 1962
Title: Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

That Very Elsewhere

The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty.
Teeming with emptiness. Knotted on emptiness. Immodest in its
emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful.
“I am not here. I am not here and never will be.”
You can pull it out endlessly.

Anne Carson, from Semaine d’Artaud 

Image: James Kao, Tablescape, 2004
Title: Judith Butler on “the poetics of non-arrival,” excerpt from Who Owns Kafka?

I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move

     We are pressed flowers in heavy books.

-Andrea Gibson

Image: Unknown (India)

Title: Georgia O’Keefe 

An invincible summer

    
Sometimes, a seemingly insignificant detail reveals a whole world. Like the messages hidden by spies in the dot of an i.

-Pierre Cordier

Title: Albert Camus
Image via

Looking from outside into an open window

“I think that poems that have direct meanings—that’s a very dull poet, an extremely dull poet, and a person who is writing like he or she sees. That isn’t what you’re ever writing. You never write what you see. You see it, you just don’t write it. You write something else. And there’s always something else.”

-Barbara Guest
Image: Cristian Schloe, Portrait of a Heart
Title: Charles Baudelaire, Windows

I ‘saw’ the canvas turn blue as I put the paint down

“I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn’t understand, and I understood almost nothing.”

-	César Aira

Image: Gerhard Richter, Iceberg in the mist

Title: Sargy Mann

Blind as we are to Seeing

     All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

  -Steven Millhauser


Image: Claudia Drake, Moira, 2007
 

Title: Miguel Hernández

Deep down and deep inland

"You think I’ll be happy?" 
“Yeah, you just won’t know it.”

-	Alec Baldwin & Kevin Bacon, from the movie, She's having a baby

Image: Argyle Plaids, Left in her Wake

Title: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

Willing to Sail

Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.
-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight, 1825-30 
Title: from John Macdonald's, A Naval, Military and Political Telegraphic Dictionary, Numerically Arranged on a Very Comprehensive Scale, 1817

The silence of untranslated stars

     …you can look at something, close your eyes, and see it again and still know nothing – like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

     -Ann Beattie, Jacklighting

     Image:  Laure Albin-Guillot, Planche XVI Diatomée, 1931

               Title: e.e. cummings, adapted from "Summer Silence"

An archer in cover

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is 

 

nothing that does not require his attention.” 

-Flannery O'Connor

Picture: Flor Garduno, La pavo real (2008)
Title: Dorothy Dunnett

Hymns you haven’t heard

“What one ought to capture in beauty is that which is 

 

treacherous and irresistible...” 
 

-László Krasznahorkai, War and War


Image: Adelaide Hanscom, Plate XV, 1905
Title: Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 40

A gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence

“I write to discover what I know.” 
-Flannery O'Connor

Image: Found
Title: George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader"