Levar Burton Tweets

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery

-William Carlos Williams

[quoted]

Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do. And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what's too slippery or charged or difficult to touch. Will doesn't have much to do with this; I can't choose what's going to serve as a compelling image for me. But I've learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled attention (Look at me, something seems to say, closely) that indicates that there's something I need to attend to. Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.

-Mark Doty, Reflects on His Poem 'A Display of Mackerel'

I am not you, atheism.

[via]

About love and how to survive - not to make a living - but how to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something. Each one of us in some way at some moment a victim and in no position to do anything about it. Some child is always left unpicked up at some moment. In a world like that, how does one remain whole - is it just impossible to do that?

-Toni Morrison, in Conversations

Origins

I'm from touch football in parking lots and street corner Romeos
I'm from half-brothers and three-quarter nelsons
I'm from watered-down blue blood and finger-painting on subway walls
I'm from tongue kisses in stairwells and tequila sunsets in the closet
I'm from stealing the coins out of other people's wishing wells
I'm from jordache jeans and pick-up games in the twilight
I'm from Italian girls wearing murmurs I oh so badly wanted to speak
I'm from sidestepped obligations and nomadic fingertips
I'm from listerine in alleyways and whiskers in the vaseline
I'm from unreliable narrators and abandoned buildings
I'm from don't cross 24th Street because of the Irish and don't cross South Street because of the blacks
I'm from the merry-go-round where white guys in cars slow down after midnight to take a visual bite out of my twelve-year-old ass
I'm from fuck you when my friends are around, and please stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, when I'm alone
I'm from sucker punches and a mouthful of blood spit in my face
I'm from a nightgown breathing at the bottom of a staircase
I'm from I wished you died in that hospital
I'm from exit plans that involve shotguns
I'm from you gonna front like the hard guy, you better back that shit up

-Jeffrey McDaniel, in The Endarkenment

-Amy Bennett

After the search for meaning
bills in the mail

-George Swede

[quoted in 'Zen and the Art of Haiku']

Planetarium

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848),
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled


in those spaces          of the mind

An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

-Adrienne Rich

Someone put Three Approaches to Psychotherapy on youtube!

… Many of those who seek help in workshops in order get published have a dream, I think, not so much of devoting the most intense part of their lives to the hard, lonely. Glorious, transcendent work-play of writing poetry, but of appearing before the world as a poet. It is a dream of individual freedom, an unexamined, perhaps even unconscious need in a country where even the individualizing first name of a human being has been reduced to the uniformed and meaningless: "My name is Jean; I am your waitress for the evening." It does not in any way resemble the hippie rebellion in which youth divided itself from age by dressing alike, acting, talking, wearing their hair, eating, living alike. The point of this dream is the expression of freedom and uniqueness of a self. Need I say that, though some few professional poets have felt free to express outwardly their quirky selfness, it is the strong inner sense of self, usually protected from the public eye, saved from and dedicated to the poems, that is characteristic of most successful publishing poets/ Most of them are happy to be indistinguishable in public, leading quiet, domestic lives. The private aspects of the wild and the unique are saved for the poems. Iconoclasm is saved, hoarded, for language – for forms on the page.

-Mona Van Duyn, "Matters of Poetry"
[via Fort of Sand]