noli me tangerine

“We don’t, especially in the US, want to look at poetry as something every student is capable of, because that would be dangerous to those who control the school systems. All students, regardless of their backgrounds, would realise that they are capable of speaking very well; that there are not certain individuals who control what constitutes good language. They would realise that language is not just this agreed upon set of constructed ideas, that it’s not an MLA citation or a five-paragraph essay, that everyone can create new and beautiful language. So it is very frustrating to me when people say, ‘I don’t like poetry,’ or, ‘I don’t understand it,’ because all of that seems the fault of a system that doesn’t want to give poetry its power, and that doesn’t want to give people their power either.”

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”

You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “i can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

“Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”

“i’m interested in death rituals. maybe that’s a weird thing to say. when i say interested i mean, i’ve compiled a list. on it are mourning practices gathered across time & continents. it’s long & oddly comforting how no one knows a damn thing about what follows. i won’t share it with you, only say, evidence suggests neanderthals were the first hominids to bury their dead. also, i’ll say they didn’t possess a written language, which points toward internment as a form of document. the body is ink in the earth. the grave marker, a gathering together of text.”

“The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing – the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.”