November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.

◆  @aryasnow​​  | “Trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind was cleansing the bones.” (Anne Carson, The Glass Essay) //  “A starlit or moonlite dome disdains all that man is, all mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins.” (W.B. Yeats, Byzantium) // “Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.” (Louise Glück, Snowdrops)

◆  @artauds  | “We found each other / hungry / and we bit each other as fire bites, leaving wounds in us.” (Pablo Neruda, Absence) // “It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain… remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.” (Sylvia Plath, Journals) // “I long for secret sunwalked places, and a god to take me up high.” (Euripides, Hippolytos) 

◆  @artbreaths | “To imagine that the burning of Rome […] can only take place now within us…” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters) // “The weeping blood that adorns an unplucked lyre.” (Federico García Lorca, Sonnets of Dark Love)

◆  @athenaefilia | “Lips shine softly, and the shadows bright, round hollow eyes. The midnight skies light this face – and out of dark of night, one thing alone grows darker – our eyes” (Marina Tsvetaeva, Insomnia) // “Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell – a smell of dying moons and shadows.” (Zelda Fitzgerald, Letters)  

◆  @antigonick  | “There is no ground on which your soul and mine can meet.” (Anton Chekhov, The Seagull) // “I was exalted above a waste of almost waveless sea, palish grey, & dented with darker shadows for the small irregularities, the little ripples which represented character & life love & genius & happiness. But “I” was not exalted; “I” was practically non-existent.” (Virginia Woolf, Diaries) //.”When you are corn and roses and at rest I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost, to haunt the scene where I was happiest, to bend above the thing I love the most” (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Sonnets) 

◆  @boykeats | “No, poets – real poets – do not hate the other, it’s impossible, how could they give up half their language, why would they want to cut their tongue in two and spit out one half.” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata) // “Something illuminating and hovering in the purest painless ecstasy, a shining vision to contemplate with eyes wide open.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy) // ”You smile at everyone, like a seraph” (Marina Tsvetaeva, Insomnia) “You are like an angel, nothing touches you…” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)    

◆  @barcarole | “How much we both love to work on living, palpitating stuff, at white heat only. But I believe it is only after the white heat that the story really ripens. The white heat re-creates the emotional experience, but understanding does not crystallize at white heat.” (Anaïs Nin, Letters) // “To let it all soak in, to let it mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself.” (Etty Hillesum, Diary) 

◆  @bironism | “Finally all this inconvinient, invincible pain, this agression, this displeasure that twists its great vital nerve, this martyrdom without malady, this voracity for meat, with hesitation we call it love.” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata) // “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it become the blood of paradise?” (Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning) //  “Even you, if you knew how this darkness soaks me through and through, and infuses holy fear in my vapour, you would pause to distnguish what hurts, from what amuses.” (D.H. Lawrence, Under the Oak) 

◆  @dearorpheus | “With an old red hook in her mouth, the mouth that kept bleeding, into the terrible fields of her soul….” (Anne Sexton, Consorting with Angels) // “The heart threading a tunnel, a dark, dark tunnel: like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul” (Pablo Neruda, Death Alone) //  “In the shivery depths I saw a great heart bright as a ruby suspended in the vault by a huge web. It was beating and with each beat there fell to the ground a huge gout of blood. It was too large to be the heart of a living creature. It was larger than the heart of a god. It is like the heart of agony.” (Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi) 

◆  @dearestwatson  | “I’m no more a woman than Christ was a man.” (Anne Sexton, Consorting with Angels) // “Horror cannot be spoken because it is alive; because it is silent and is going forward; it drips into the day and it drips into sleep. Sorrow-recalling pain.” (George Seferis, Last Stop) // “I said it again: come with me, as if I were dying, and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth or the blood that rose into the silence.” (Pablo Neruda, Come With Me)  

◆  @hamlets-father | “Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.” (Margaret Atwood, Temptation) // “Your life is a painting in a dark museum and sometimes you examine it closely” (Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone) // “How he gave himself to it – Loved. Loved his inward world, his inner wilderness, that first world within”. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies)

◆  @lennuieternel | “My coal, my soul; the domes wash us in their darkgold.” (Marina Tsvetaeva, Poems for Moscow) // “I am still blazing in my golden hell” (Sylvia Plath, To A Jilted Lover) // “In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and fron the depths I hear that I am damned”. (Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal) // “And I wander in a land of barren boughs: if I break them, they bleed; I wander in a land of dry stones: if I touch them they bleed”. (T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral)

◆  @liminalhorror |  “I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth” (Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary) // “We melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory”. (Virginia Woolf, The Waves) // “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul”. (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

◆  @malglories | “Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver in some stagnant lake, your tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances to fantastic tunes, your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your black throat is like the hole left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic tapestries.” (Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx) // “I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown”. (Mary Szybist, Hall)

◆ @nehmesis | “She wanted many more things than the love of one human being – the sea, the sky. She turned again to look at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human being”. (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out) // “What do you want asks the sunbeam and what do you want asks hope lowering her white blouse”. (Odysseus Elytis, Clepsidras of the Unknown) // “The rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian.” (Robert Lowell, Man and Wife)

◆ @provst​ | “She laughed and said: unlike the beauties of this world, in the curtain I am manifest and without the curtain I am hidden” (Jadi, Untitled Quatrain) // “This is my swan song. This is my double curse: I can never escape. I can never come near.” (Anne Sexton, Journal) // “I become a myth more radiant than any and, sculpted in dust, I am and am not, but I am. (Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Field of Flowers)

◆ @romanceangel | “This time I know – the love isn’t sick… no, indeed, it is health, the giving force, the outward reach instead of the inward grab.” (Anne Sexton, Letters) // “I recognize that I love – you – by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace. (Jacques Derrida, The Postcard) // “Then you kissed me – I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end. (Louise Glück, Marathon)

◆ @sirenoirs | “Deafening voices of wild seas broke your infant breast, too human and too soft;” (Arthur Rimbaud, Ophelia) // “…the sad and beautiful moonlight, which makes the birds in the trees dream and sob with ecstasy the water streams, the great slim water streams among the marbles…” (Paul Verlaine, Clair de Lune)  // “She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver” (Oscar Wilde Salome) // “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity”: (Sylvia Plath, Elm)

◆ @serpenstiarae | “Your body is suffocating snow, as brightness, pouring itself out of you, as if you were burning inside. Under your skin the moon is alive” (Pablo Neruda, Ode To A Naked Beauty) // “Swan-white of heart; I smile not ever neither do I weep. I am as lovely as a dream in stone”. (Charles Baudelaire, Beauty) // “It’s funny, but I like being “pink and helpless” – When I know I seem that way, I feel terribly competent – and superior. I keep thinking, “Now those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re just fools for not knowing better” – and I love being rather unfathomable”. (Zelda Fitzgerald, Letters)

◆ @stabernatty | “His Apollonian consciousness was, like a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of him” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy) // “Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.” (Anne Sexton, The Saints Come Marching In) // “The sky darkens. Then begins the mystery, the gods of night, the beyond-pleasure. But how to translate this? (Albert Camus, The Return to Tipasa) 

◆ @soracities | “The once-known way becoming wholly other, and ourselves estranged, changed, suspended where angels are rumored” (Sylvia Plath, The Great Carbuncle) // “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. […] We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” (Franz Kafka, Letters)

◆  @sobforsirius | “You can see my thoughts immersed in roses” (Guillaume Apollinaire, Palace) // “A single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down.” (Sylvia Plath, Winter Landscape With Rocks) // “Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such a thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance – that is all.” (Oscar Wilde, Letters)

◆ @thefuryofrainstorms | “Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle? (Sergio Chejfec, The Planets) // “Of what secret lights are we made?” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata) // “Inside of the being there is a deflective mirror, a mirror distorted by the fog of solitude, of shyness, by the climate inside this particular being.” (Anaïs Nin, Winter of Artifice)

Brothers Karamazov: orthodox monasteries, deep woods, starry nights, the sound of paper being torn, dimly lit rooms, withered roses, an unfinished letter, piles of books, the sound of shattering glass, ticking of clocks in a silent house, heavy wooden furniture, the air before a storm, the smell of earth, a crowd of people dressed in black, distant murmurs, emptied streets, the fear of walking alone in dusk

Crime and Punishment: coldness of the skin against a blade, slender pale fingers and slightly shaking hands, a red stain blooming on white fabric, lonely steps in a corridor, the slow dripping of water, looking out of the window into the thickening darkness, a single dying candle on the table, listening to one’s breath and counting heartbeats, too many stairs, the desire to be invisible, a subtle memory of kind word

The Idiot: classical statues, wealth covered with dust, a dark house tainted with inherited madness, an unsettling feeling, long walks in a park, useless chatter, a silken ribbon forgotten on a bench, a melancholic face, an unexpected spring rain, the joy of reading one’s favorite book, the clarity of mind after fully perceiving the world around, looking at cloudless sky  

Anna Karenina: fields of crops, flowers brought from an early morning walk, the wind caressing a girl’s hair, a bowl of fruit, the smell of ripe pears, the clatter of a spoon against porcelain when stirring tea, children’s laughter coming from the garden, soft sunlight and white curtains, the sensation of velvet against skin, pearls from a ripped necklace spilling on marble floor, a sudden silence in a room full of people

War and Peace: a glass of wine, the brightness of  a crystal chandelier, white lace, a raging snow storm, the sound of a door being gently closed, the moment of holding one’s breath before walking in a ball room, indulging in looking at a beautiful earring against light, the sound of a saber being drawn, closing one’s eyes for a moment while dancing, the sweet smell of strawberries, a pair of gloves left on an armchair, light scent of powder

The Master and Margarita: the chaos of a lively city, ambient jazz in expensive restaurants, jumping on a moving tram, the sight of Moscow from the roof of a house, yellow flowers in a vase, leaning out of the window, shelves stacked with books, a small tin box with old photographs, strange shapes in the night sky, laughing in the middle of the night on a balcony, colorful posters for a surreptitious magician’s show floating in the wind

Eugene Onegin: a lonely mansion, reading a book in the parlor, faint piano melody lingering in falling silence, long evenings, passing seasons, discussing french novels of the moment, unspoken thoughts, leaning against the door frame, quickly averted glance, eating a peach absent-minded, bright mornings, footprints in snow, a loud gun-shot terrifying a flock of birds nearby   

A Hero of Our Time: byronic boredom, getting up late in the afternoon, the hidden unspeakable sadness of existence, shakespeare’s tragedy opened next to untouched breakfast, cigarette smoke, polished boots, walking with one’s coat wide open letting the night chill break through to the bone, carved wooden chair, fading warmth of the ashes late in the evening, the thought of farewell  

Fathers and Sons: birch groves, morning mist, moss covered stones near a  moor, scientific books, white roses, cheap champagne, shabby pocket-watch, light-hearted irony, a maladroit cello sonata, freshly mowed grass, leaving thoughts come and go, a slow yawn, picturesque plates and bowls filled with traditional dishes, drinking tea on the porch, longing for the future   

Doctor Zhivago: a strange feeling of loss, writing poems in a diary, traveling by train, the hesitation before touching someone’s hand, the gaze of one lost in thought, the warmth of cinnamon, a scarf brightly embellished with flowers, a glass of water, two people listening each on the other side of the door, a threadbare jacket, the tempting void, the evanescent serenity of yesterday  

Dead Souls: horses in a merry gallop, delicious smells mingled, grotesque and bizarre tragedy, luxurious attire cheap soul, masks, a perfumed love letter, the triumph of sarcasm, an unattached wheel rolling down a dusty road, the atmosphere of commedia dell’ arte, puzzling speeches, a baffling caricature drawn on a handkerchief   

Nancy Willard, a Knopf poet and novelist, and a beloved author of books for children, whose 1982 picture book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn received the Newbery Medal, died in February. Today we remember her with a pair of poems which remind us that the child’s view is essentially poetic, while the poet’s view retains something of the child’s curiosity and hope.

Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him

1. Do gorillas have birthdays? Yes. Like the rainbow, they happen. Like the air, they are not observed.

2. Do butterflies make a noise? The wire in the butterfly’s tongue hums gold. Some men hear butterflies even in winter.

3. Are they part of our family? They forgot us, who forgot how to fly.

4. Who tied my navel? Did God tie it? God made the thread: O man, live forever! Man made the knot: enough is enough.

5. If I drop my tooth in the telephone will it go through the wires and bite someone’s ear? I have seen earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel. It loves what lasts. It does not love flesh. It leaves a ring of gold in the wound.

6. If I stand on my head will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head? Does the dream know its own father? Can bread go back to the field of its birth?

7. Can I eat a star? Yes, with the mouth of time that enjoys everything.

8. Could we Xerox the moon? This is the first commandment:

I am the moon, thy moon. Thou shalt have no other moons before thee.

9. Who invented water? The hands of the air, that wanted to wash each other.

10. What happens at the end of numbers? I see three men running toward a field. At the edge of the tall grass, they turn into light.

11. Do the years ever run out? God said, I will break time’s heart. Time ran down like an old phonograph. It lay flat as a carpet. At rest on its threads, I am learning to fly.

Swimming Lessons

A mile across the lake, the horizon bare or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches. No sand. No voices calling me back. Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair  push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns, an inch here. Or there.

You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life vest for your lazy little daughter. Under me, green deepened to black. You said, “Swim out to the deep water.” I was seven years old. I paddled forth

and the water held me. Sunday you took away one block, the front one. I stared down at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale, not fit for a place without roads. Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them except the toeless foot of the snail.

Tuesday you took away two more blocks. Now I could somersault and stretch. I could scratch myself against trees like a cat. I even made peace with the weeds that fetch swimmers in the noose of their stems while the cold lake puckers and preens.

Friday the fourth block broke free. “Let it go,” you said. When I asked you to take out the block that kept jabbing my heart, I felt strong. This was the sixth day. For a week I wore the only part of the vest that bothered to stay:

a canvas strap with nothing to carry. The day I swam away from our safe shore, you followed from far off, your stealthy oar raised, ready to ferry me home if the lake tried to keep me. Now I watch the tides of your body

pull back from the hospital sheets. “Let it go,” you said. “Let it go.” My heart is not afraid of deep water. It is wearing its life vest, that invisible garment of love and trust, and it tells you this story.

More on this book and author:

Browse other books by Nancy Willard.

2016 was mostly a miserable year for the Earth, but it was a brilliant, bountiful year for poetry. In the glut of major releases, here are some important titles you might’ve missed, in no particular order. 

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francine j harris, play dead “and we were not winter. all dark and thick and full of mouth. // We were not wonder. all dark and thick. our mouths / got us kicked.”

Jos Charles, Safe Space “what chemicals are in ur body / today” 

Tommye Blount, What Are We Not For “I have the tongue / of some endangered animal. No one can understand me.”

Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor “We are a colony of one.”

Zeina Hashem Beck, 3arabi Song “One has to dress / for this earth. You still haven’t seen my wings.”

Marie Ponsot, Collected Poems “We make love and other excuses.”

Tiana Clark, Equilibrium “Took me thirty years to say / I’m glad I don’t pass for white.”

Nicole Sealey, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named “Two of nothing is something, if they’re white.”

Philip Metres, Pictures at an Exhibition “Every empire dies, entering its own dilated eyes”

Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade “How will you spend your courage?”

Jane Wong, Overpour “For certainty, I knock softly / at my fate. For grief, I listen with all my limbs.”

Luis Muñoz translated by Curtis Bauer, From Behind What Landscape “The rocks, much more, / the chestnut trees, plenty. / The rushes, the wasps, / much less.”

Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior “what is this art if not the hunt / for meat, the animal lanced / & hauled across the tundra”

Fanny Howe, The Needle’s Eye “The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger.”

Mohsen Emadi translated by Lyn Coffin, Standing on Earth “Death is when the heart does not beat and the clock beats. / Love is when the heart beats and the clock does not beat.“

Gretchen Marquette, May Day “I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.”

Anaïs Duplan, Take This Stallion “Choose your own / disappointments. Amass them in your secret place.”

Marianne Boruch, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing “Because it’s ancient: there is / no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.”

Justin Boening, Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last “When I say I / I mean the things I do.” 

Cynthia Cruz, How the End Begins "What ruined me once / Will ruin me always.”

Donika Kelly, Bestiary “There isn’t an abstraction you believe in and you are sad for it.”

Lewis Mundt, The God of the Whole Animal “People are also, rightfully, terrified of poison.”