A poem,
like trying
to remember,
is a movement
of the whole body.
Rosmarie Waldrop, from “The Ambition of Ghosts: I. Remembering into Sleep” (via proustitute)
Posts tagged poetry.
A poem,
I will write about us all at a table eaten bare
and about you and me and the fishbones in our throats
Gunter Grass, The Flounder (via iista)
1 year ago on August 21, 2011 at 12:30am
Everything the night conceals from us is yet alive. Even the rocks are when they’re stuffed into a rattle and the sound they make surrounds us as the shadow of a cloud might on the way to night. Here in our final home machines like living things cast shadows also, and the year ends with a lonely rattle sound. Spooks bearing bundles run from everything like shadows where we wait and dream.
Robert Kelly, from “Variations on a Round of Rattles” (via proustitute)
The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking
white thoughts you rain down.
Carl Sandburg, from “Back Yard” (via proustitute)
In creating, you create the origin that swallows you.
Edmond Jabès, quoted in Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lavish Absence (via proustitute)
To bequeath to some wild violin
One’s horror and despair.
Anna Akhmatova, a fragment from 1958, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (via proustitute)
When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand, from “Seven Poems” (via proustitute)
this tongue, these
lips the lightning
over the unchartered
landscape of your
thigh: successive
terra nova to
resist the still
life of the body
Roberto Tejada, from “Still Life” (via proustitute)
While for Heidegger poetry is historical because it attends to and opens up the withdrawing-sending of Being in a ‘founding’ of historical essence, for Hölderlin poetry is tethered to the specificity of historical moments, which both articulate the movements of a Geist and also remain at the level of the merely particular. Poetry is historical because it is an enacting of the movements of spirit, one that, in the harmonious opposition of alternating tones, opens moments within which freedom, love, and community appear possible; and yet Hölderlin escapes a ‘geschicht-sphilosophisch’ narrative that subordinates these elements to a (Hegelian) teleological or (Heideggerian) seinsgeschichtliche structure. Poetry is the longing for and mourning of the unattainable; but at the same time it is the accidental and analeptic glimpse into what is withheld, a glimpse that is inextricable from the nontotalizable singularity of life…
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (via proustitute)
