My postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.”

-Carlos Fuentes, RIP (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012)

Image: Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, drawing of a microscopic section through one year old ash wood

Title: Nod to Anne Sexton

Trembling Emblems

Life is it’s own rescue, for we — at our supremest, are but it’s trembling Emblems
 

-Emily Dickinson

[Note: I've replaced Dickinson's love for life]

Image: Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970

Read Obituaries

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

-Charles Wheelan

Image: Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Mountain, 1980-1982

The Poet & Nonrecognition

-Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

Foreignness

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: Georgiana Kelly, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Over your body the clouds go high

 All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.

—Richard Brautigan

Image: Charles Cushman
Title: Sylvia Plath (from Gulliver)

Cézanne on Nothing

 
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

-Paul Cézanne

Photo: Imogen Cunningham

It is commonly thought

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.
-Agnes Martin

Image: matchbook

Each poem is a resurrection

 Each poem is a resurrection, but one that engages us with a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion.

-Jacques Derrida

Photo: Carolin Gutt, Shock

What are those things?**

— What are those things
that shine in the sky,
— I asked my mother.

— Bees, she answered

Every night since then,
my eyes eat honey.

-Humberto Ak abal

**NOTE: April is National Poetry Month. Do yourself a favor and read a poem today. 


Image: Hollie Chastain, Fresh Courage

When the words become palpable

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands

and keeps it.

—Lorine Niedecker

Image: Adolf Wölfli, Rosalia Walther, Owner of the Grand-Hotel on Mount Neveranger, 1911

Title: Nod to John Ashbery

A miracle unfolding in the dark

The world is a miracle unfolding in the pitch dark. We are lighting candles.

-Barry Lopez

Image: Vija Celmins, 1996