sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation

Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning. Louise Bourgeois

Photo Robert Mapplethorpe

some days i have an obstinate fondness for all my poems

Some days I have an obstinate fondness for all my poems. Other days I dislike them intensely. Stanley Kunitz in The Paris Review

Photo Edward Weston 1979

and today

at Clara's graduation from SJSU, 24 Japanese American students who were forcibly removed from California universities to be interned during World War II were honored with degrees as part of the California State University's Nisei Diploma Project.

Photo Dorothea Lange

here's the thing

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. JD Salinger

Photo via Nearness of Distance

good morning

via Native Kee

hunger is a funny thing

It has a kind of intelligence all its own. My Side of the Mountain (1959)

Photo: Ashley Helvey

there is a time

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams

Maria Munoz on Jak & Jil

what is it you plan to do

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver

Milano and Sydney

maps of the world in its becoming

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees, 1987

summer's coming

and I'm hoping for road trips and time, time in the hot black sand.

via Forty-Sixth at Grace

whatever it is you're seeking

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting. Haruki Murakami

Double shawl collar jacket from Assembly New York
via Nivaldo de Lima

not Roi, by the way, a blonde

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal...It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages... "Personism," Frank O'Hara

piano key house

Erie Basin

the writer's body

The internal pressure of a poem seems to take over the pulsation of the writer’s body. The beat of a 4 or 5 stress line, though variable, is synchronous with the heart-beat, and the line itself is often synchronous with the breath. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ has 5 stresses and a rising emphasis on the second syllable of ‘compare’ which is synchronous with the usual in-breath and slightly longer (ratio 2 to 3) out-breath. I have no idea why (did the Italian inventors of the sonnet work this out?), but a sonnet contains 14 lines (breaths), each of 5 stresses which equals 70 beats a minute. The average adult human breathes 12 to 15 times a minute with a pulse of 68-72 a minute… A sonnet is a minute! And by the way, since early renaissance hour-glasses could not measure seconds, Galileo timed his experiments with falling objects by counting his own pulse beats. Paradoxically poems create time (although they predate clocks), while they can seem ‘out of time.’ Sean Haldane's blog

Prime numbers arranged in a spiral, Dr. Yuen, University of Kentucky via Alexander Kruel

the verb gossip

first appears in Shakespeare.

Andrew Bush via i heart photograph

so soundly slaps

...there’s no accounting for lust, my friend, and nothing that so soundly slaps together the nasty with the desirable. Amy Letter, Poem I Love in The Rumpus

Untitled by Vivian Maier

good morning

Via Miles

she bears them unknowingly

Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.

I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.

I am worn out with desire.

From The Lover, Marguerite Duras

The Little Mermaid Dissolved in Foam, 1911. Edmund Dulac via even*cleveland

what I really wanted was every kind of life

It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments. Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Annie Leibovitz Susan at the House on Hedges Lane, 1988

the ones we love

John Von Pamer's photographs of his wife for The Ones We Love.

descartes went to sweden and died of cold

The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them. From "Being Foreign" The Economist via M. Dash.

"The View Outside" from Berlin guide

the thing about jennifer

is that she thinks I look like Josephine Baker.

this hour of clear coolness

Plastiki.

blow up

william gedney

knows his way around a kiss. via zoobezoobezoo.

listening

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am. Sylvia Plath

Photo of Egon Schiele

a time long

The book took a time long to finish because it took a long time to finish. There was a lot of it I didn’t understand. It often takes me a long time to write. Jamaica Kincaid, Salon, 1996 (via Maude)

Sophie Calle, Les Dormeurs, 1979

the future is unwritten

than all the sky which only

at garance doré.

it is more mad and moonly

it is more mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

from [love is thicker than forget] e.e. cummings
Photo: Larry Bercow

dizzy for president, 1964

Ramona Crowell was by this point Dizzy's vice-presidential running-mate. Miles Davis was penciled in as director of the CIA, Louis Armstrong as Minister of Agriculture, Thelonious Monk was to be Roving Ambassador Plenipotentiary, and other cabinet members were to include Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Woody Herman and Count Basie. According to Dizzy, the drummer Max Roach wanted to be Minister of War, but was overruled, because, said the candidate, "We're not going to have any." The Library of Congress was to be in the charge of Ray Charles, and Charles Mingus was to be Minister of Peace, "because he'll take a piece of your head faster than anybody I know".

yes, yes

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes. Samuel Beckett

Rachel Comey Brogues at Creatures of Comfort via WikstenMade

puff

via Curious Pages. Also and unrelated: Summertime 1966, Giza, and ama.

an apache dance

CHARACTERS
ROBERTA: 31 years old. Blue jeans, a cheap dress-up blouse that's gotten ratty. She's physically depleted, with nervous bright eyes.
DANNY: 29 years old. Chinos and a pullover shirt. He's dark and powerful. He finds it difficult to meet Roberta's gaze.
About both characters: They are violent and battered, inarticulate and yearning to speak, dangerous and vulnerable.

A DEFINITION
An Apache Dance is a violent dance for two people, originated by the Parisian apaches. Parisian apaches are gangsters or ruffians.

STYLE
This play is emotionally real, but it does not take place in a realistic world. Only those scenic elements necessary to the action should be on stage. Only those areas that are played in should be lit.

Stage directions for Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, An Apache Dance
Photo from Hedi Slimane Diary

I cast toward her and drift back

I know a guy who knows a guy who caught a couple off the point. Way off the point. So far off he couldn't see the point anymore. He caught them using what works way out—the only thing that's ever worked that far out, according to the guy I know who knows the guy who knows.

From "Fishing Report" by Ben Jahn in Panorama.

Photo, 2008, Porter Hovey Polaroid Project

sometimes

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. Ernest Hemingway

Photo via Miles Westwood's tumblr

perfect sunday morning

Writing and procrastinating by listening to Frank O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You." Over and over. And thinking if I were to excerpt it here, I would choose this line

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

or

I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

or

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

or maybe

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience which is not going to go wasted on me

that is just what it isn't

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth. Jean Rhys

Painting by Mark Rothko

how it is

Nothing matters but the writing. Samuel Beckett

Mark Under Breaking Wave by Wayne Levin

you won't be awake

It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Jonathan Safran Foer

Swimmers, Ironman Trialthalon by Wayne Levin via lost

what it is

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

David Foster Wallace

DFW's copy of DeLillo's Ratner's Star via this is sippey.com.

I was sentimental about many things

I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee…”; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, seeing it through…Charles Bukowski via Melancholia.

Painting, Alyson Fox

middlesex

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Bracelet from Southwestern Jewelry