d i sq u ie t

"Literature encourages tolerance — bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities."

The horror of individuation becomes one's negative call to spiritual awakening, a call to greatness which is actually the paradoxical call for self-dissolution. Hence the horror with which one is plagued, that contemplative horror which prescribes the death of the self as individuation's own auto-fulfilling rite of passage, is the same and the earnest horror that actually brings one closer to accessing the absolute via their own negation. In this way, one can only think the absolute through the impossible conduit of horror itself: individuation is the perplexing instrument with which horror operationalizes and through which one becomes oneself. The horror of individuation, the horror of becoming oneself by leaving one's self, then, suggests a revelatory or epiphanic nature via its own doubleness. For the real horror is always reserved for those who remain ignorant of this mystical horror, who stay themselves without ever experiencing the intensity and corollary contentment of not being, or unknowing, themselves.

“We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen.”

Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.

A poem by Dorianne Laux

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

A poem by Alicia Ostriker

The Real Work

"I’m not for everyone. I really like my little world. It’s full of surprises, scattered words, and mixed colors. Sometimes there’s a blue sky, other times, a storm. Inside, there’s room for dreams of all sizes. But not for many people. Everyone who is in it is not there by chance. They are necessary."