"I'm a GAMP, and it's not a writer's cramp that makes me wanna be amp about it—I'm a straight champ who don't need a Virgin Mary bigot or a lick-spigot vamp to question my mastodon feed, or my literary, noumenon handstamp."—Max R. J. Ovbi
"so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale."
We talk about achievement. About goals. Setting them. Reaching them. About getting somewhere, becoming something. But what happens the morning after? What happens the next day? After the parade, the party. After they sweep the confetti away. What happens when the big moment fades? Maybe it's never been greatness we were after, but a baseline standard of enoughness brought to our days.
I was stupidly thrilled while reading my e-newsletter from @elcultural to find the word "letraheridos" (more or less "people hurt by letters") to describe what English might call #bibliophiles or #literature lovers—and now I'm wondering if the origins of this newer term have anything to do with #Auden declaring #Yeats was hurt into #poetry ... Wherever it came from, I'm declaring it the best word I've heard in ages.
"Poets are guardians
Of a shadowy island
With granges and forest
Warmed by the Moon."
Poems
British Writer Robert Graves died #OTD in 1985. His poems, his translations and innovative analysis of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life—including his role in World War I—Good-Bye to All That (1929), and his speculative study of poetic inspiration The White Goddess have never been out of print. via @wikipedia
Something happens when you're unhurried, when you escape from acceleration and speed. When you give way to haste-less activity.
Something happens when you tarry, when you linger, when you pause.
You were never trying to escape your life, only what you thought it was supposed to be. Your real life has always been in the attention you give to slow things.
"Everybody’s
busy, so distraught they forget to kill me,
and even that won’t keep me alive. I share
my home not with horses, but with a little dog
who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps,
makes her muscle known to every statue."
We collect the instances of what's expected of us. Air-quotes-normalcy. Air-quotes-conventionality. Air-quotes-respectability. In other unsaid words, side-eye-conformity. It’s the breakfast of champions, they say...