Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
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Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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enkidu. enkidu.
they do not know you
as i knew you.
transboydororo
cmon.
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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
— “Little Gidding”/Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
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Rural Boys Watch The Apocalypse (rough draft) by Keaton St. James
garfieldthedealsbarbarian
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Poem Without a Hero & Selected Poems, Anna Akhmatova
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Torrin A. Greathouse, Medusa with the Head of Perseus
Florence Welch, Useless Magic: Lyrics and Poetry
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Octavio Paz, tr. by Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Poems, 1957-1987
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“the traitor as an allegory the traitor dead the traitor forgotten, other important things taking precedence. the traitor’s death is a footnote no villainous defeat, no evermarching war just his own hands his own guilt the tree, growing innocently. the traitor spans centuries and reappears when we need someone to blame we do not call his story gospel we call it a warning. the traitor as my lover soft in my morning bed he sleeps later than me I watch over him as he watches over me. the traitor as a symbol of love forgetting everything he knows throwing his hands against the snow of destiny to try to stop an avalanche he thought would suffocate me.”
— Traitors (a.v.p)
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every so often i remember this poem by langston hughes & am inconsolable
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April is the cruelest month…and also National Poetry Month! So I’m celebrating with T.S. Eliot.
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love is buying someone a book and writing a note to them on the first page
the amount of people who reblogged this saying “don’t write in books!!! grrr!!!! stupid person writing in books!!!” you guys are truly something else 😭 where’s that post that’s like i will eat every page after i’ve read it..... cos i feel that every time i look in the notes .... please grow tf up
A dog eared book is a loved book and y'all can FIGHT ME
Should’ve dumped my ex the minute I gave him a cheap paperback of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with a love note written in the front and his response to the gift was to say he hated it when people wrote in books; I could’ve saved myself one messy-ass divorce five years later.
Obviously don’t write in BORROWED books, but come on. How cool is it to open a paperback from the used bookstore and find where someone’s marked up the words they cared about?
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive – “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” – that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote “Don’t be a ninny” alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s. Another notes the presence of “Irony” fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, hands cupped around their mouths. “Absolutely,” they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. “Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!” Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written “Man vs. Nature” in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page– anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil– by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet– “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
- Billy Collins
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“It is dark, Yeshua, in Jerusalem tonight, and it is cold without the others here. A bright-eyed convert came seeking Jude today, and I had to tell her. It never stops hurting, relating how it took eight Roman arrows to drive him to his knees, where he venerated your name with cracked lips and grit teeth. A man should never abandon faith in his god or hope that his brother will one day return home, he said. Denying his messiah would betray both principles, he said. The soldiers claim that was the last thing he said, but I know it was a hoarsely murmured Hebrew prayer that your father taught the both of you when you were small. The people of this city delighted in bludgeoning Matthias folding stones into their children’s hands and cheering as his sacrificial blood stained the cobblestones. Forgive the Armenians, they didn’t mean to kill Bartholemew, but the strips of flesh their whips tore from his body did not prove blessed or impervious to attack. He bled out raw and battered and sick with the thought of you. Andrew showed more resolve, singing hymns as he blistered spread-eagled in the Greek sun, and Peter never lost an ounce of his zealotry, demanding to be crucified upside down so none may say he was worthy of your death, Yeshua. Phillip followed in their suffocating footsteps, unremarkably. Mark fell in Egypt, dragged behind a chariot, Luke, near the Mediterranean, blue faced and tightly noosed, and Matthew in Ethiopia, run through by foreign steel. They perished in the hope that you would return any day now, any instant. I do not think they understood. I am the only one left, an old man with nothing to give but fairytales bearing your name, with no company but visions of the end and the hope that soon, the end will find me. So you must understand, Yeshua, that I cannot grant your wish. I will pen revelations and prophecies until my bones turn to dust, But you cannot ask me to recall Simeon’s laugh, Peter’s infectious scheming, the tenderness of your mother, the dark gleam of Mary’s hair as she danced in the firelight. Your voice still rattles in the hollow spaces between my ribs, I see the lines of your face in the paths of the stars and that is pain enough, I think. I am too old to argue, rabbi, and do not wish it on tonight of all nights. Ask me tomorrow, when the moonlight does not make the river look so much like the blood of my comrades. Perhaps then I will not wish so much to join them. Perhaps then I will be able to compose a gospel worth the telling.”
— Lamentation of John (alternately titled Some Manuscripts Read: The Prophet does Not Come)