middle cyclones and other references

"He slept that night in his own country and he had a dream wherein he saw God's pilgrims laboring upon a darkened verge in the last of the twilight of that day and they seemed to be returning from some deep enterprise that was not of war nor were they yet in flight but rather seemed coming from some labor to which perhaps these and all other things stood subjugate."
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy


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Posts tagged "poetry"

theatlantic:

From 1919, A Haunting Take on Edgar Allen Poe

Somewhere between Henry Holiday’s weird paintings for Lewis Carroll and Edward Gorey’s delightfully grim alphabet fall Harry Clarke’s hauntingly beautiful and beautifully haunting 1919 illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination—a collection of 29 of Poe’s tales of the magical and the macabre.

So lavish was the artwork that a copy of the “deluxe” Clarke-illustrated edition went for 5 guineas in 1919, or about $300 in today’s money. The book, an epic volume of 480 pages, was eventually reprinted by Calla Editions in 2008, and is now available for the much more reasonable $27, or free with a trip to your local public library.

Eerie and erotic, Clarke’s illustrations bring his Edwardian-era aesthetic and early Art Nouveau influences to the post-Victorian liberated fascination with sensuality.

See more. [Images: Calla Editions] (via Brain Pickings)

Photoset

theatlantic:

libraryjournal:

To celebrate National Poem in Your Pocket Day, the Library Journal tumblr offers Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” 

Nice one! Christopher Hitchens wrote about Philip Larkin, “the impossible man,” in the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic.

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bbook: oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

bbook:

oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed

and drink too much coffee

and smoke too many cigarettes

and love you so much

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It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
- Marie Howe
Liz Your Best Life: Part of Eve’s Discussion 
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skibinskipedia: My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. —Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency, 1957.

skibinskipedia:

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.

—Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency, 1957.

(via bbook)

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(via libraryland:allthenight-tide:mythologyofblue) “In the mountains, there you feel free.” -T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land [photo via]

(via libraryland:allthenight-tide:mythologyofblue)

“In the mountains, there you feel free.”

-T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land

[photo via]

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“Safe Sex” by Donald Hall

libraryland:

If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;

if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other

as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,

no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated

apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge

Text
csebastian: Elizabeth Bishop ’34, with Tobias in 1954. An exhibit and a symposium mark her centenary, and Vassar’s premier collection of her papers. Robert Pinsky gives the symposium keynote, Sep. 24, 2011. Photo: J.L. Castel September, 2011 - Vassar Homepage Archive She is an amazing poet. You should read something she’s written. ”The Art of Losing” is a favorite.

csebastian:

Elizabeth Bishop ’34, with Tobias in 1954. An exhibit and a symposium mark her centenary, and Vassar’s premier collection of her papers. Robert Pinsky gives the symposium keynote, Sep. 24, 2011. Photo: J.L. Castel

September, 2011 - Vassar Homepage Archive

She is an amazing poet. You should read something she’s written. ”The Art of Losing” is a favorite.

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theatlantic: inothernews: The story of In Flanders Fields, one of history’s most memorable wartime poems. (h/t brnttecnfessns) One of our favorites here at The Atlantic

theatlantic:

inothernews:

The story of In Flanders Fields, one of history’s most memorable wartime poems.

(h/t brnttecnfessns)

One of our favorites here at The Atlantic

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Yes, actually. Exactly this.

Yes, actually. Exactly this.

(via acreage)

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My fiancée left me, and I thought about villanelles. Whether you read poetry or not, you probably know at least one villanelle. Two of the most famous poems of the last 100 years are villanelles: “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas and “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. A standard one is composed of five tercets, or three-line stanzas, and a concluding quatrain, or four-line stanza. The first and third lines in the opening stanza both rhyme and become refrains that alternate as the last line of the four successive tercets; through the course of the poem, those two lines acquire something like a character, and they build between them a tremendous, heartbreaking relationship as they move towards the final quatrain, where the distance between them is exploded, and they end together in a final couplet. Regardless of the content, a villanelle is about entropy. The slow disordering of love.
A literary form designed to break your heart - National Post, August 27th, 2011
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I don’t speak of vengeance or forgiveness; forgetting is the only vengeance and the only forgiveness.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Fragmentos de un evangelio apócrifo”, Elogio de la sombra, my transl.(via tragos)

(via murmurandshout)

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“Men at Thirty”, by Donald Justice

Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles upon a cake
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash
Yet there was time to wish

Before the break light could die
If I had known what to wish
As once I must have known
Bending above the clean candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath

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oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
Frank O’Hara (via nomadic-revery)

(via bbook)

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The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people.
She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she will become.

confectionary & arsenic: The Gift Outright by Robert Frost

 
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