"And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for"
#poetry
#liberation
#south africa
#women
"
“So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.”
"
Anne Michaels, “Phantom Limbs”
#poetry
#cities
"power is not an institution, and not a structure, neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1, trans. Robert Hurley
#power
"Silence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses."
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1978)
#silence
#discourse
#speech
#power
"
“but if there is anything
I learned, it is the danger of looking
too closely, should one’s life appear
less than art.”
"
Hilary Vaughn Dobel, “On the Distance of the Painter’s Arm” The Kenyon Review, Spring 2013
(Source: kenyonreview.org)
"We have been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal and we have been disregarded a great deal. It is our weakness that has led to our being oppressed, exploited and disregarded. Now we want a revolution – a revolution which brings an end to our weakness, so that we are never again exploited, oppressed, or humiliated. […] But it is obvious that in the past we have chosen the wrong weapon for our struggle, because we chose money as our weapon. We are trying to overcome our economic weakness by using the weapons of the economically strong – weapons which in fact we do not possess."
Julius Nyerere, then President of Tanzania, Arusha Declaration (1967)
(Source: en.wikisource.org)
"Talk to me instead of the cultures generally—
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire."
Lakdasa Wikkramasinghe “Don’t Talk to me About Matisse” (19??)
(Source: drunkenboat.com)
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Anatole France, Le Lys rouge (The Red Lily) (1894)
#law
#equality
#poverty
#class
"Maybe I can’t find the beginning because we exist
perpetually in the story’s end"
Victoria Lynne McCoy, “He Visits Your City Briefly,”
Boxcar Poetry Review Summer 2012.
(Source: boxcarpoetry.com)
"It’s easier to blame geography than to forgive
myself, so tonight I will take them all into me, every street
that goes on being a street in the wake of his leaving."
Victoria Lynne McCoy, “He Visits Your City Briefly,”
Boxcar Poetry Review Summer 2012.
(Source: boxcarpoetry.com)
"Be wingspan. An eagle never
underestimates its reach, it must open full to fly."
Heather Askeland, “Reconciliation,”
Boxcar Poetry Review Fall 2012.
(Source: boxcarpoetry.com)
"I plant myself, my wife, my dogs—bury arms, legs, paws and tails; the flakes of dead skin from our bodies feed apple trees"
Sushil Sivaram, “Apple Farming” in Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry, Issue 4 | Winter 2012.
(Source: lanternreview.com)
"i bear witness that god has no country"
Rajiv Mohabir, “for what loses shape,”
Lantern Review: Journal of Asian American Poetry, Issue 2, Winter 2011.
(Source: lanternreview.com)
"And I only mention it to point out that every moment that you hesitate, every moment that you do not write what you see before you EVERY DAY, is a moment that you become more and more the cubicle-jockey, temp-wage, toner sniffing, mutant foot-soldier that you currently are, instead of the beautiful, instinctive, coltish, Kung Fu master-artist that I know YOU CAN BE!"
John Hodgman, “Another Example of the Illuminating Correspondence Between John Hodgman, Professional Literary Agent, and His Cousin, One ‘Josh,’ Who Aims to Be a Man of Letters” (1/31/2000), McSweeney’s.
(Source: mcsweeneys.net)
"Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about."
Colin Nissan, “The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do.”
(Source: mcsweeneys.net)
