A US readership may be seeking the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views, a challenge that will change them, but these poems are after something different.
Vol 2.1
Any one of us, faced with the comparative achievements and status symbols of the upper classes, can be overcome by a sense of envy and the unfairness of the world. There is always someone richer and more entitled who seems to have it all figured out.
To even be suspected of treasure—to be indistinguishable from those who possess treasure—is to become a target. This is the lesson of the oyster.
The opportunities my personal tragedies presented to me calcified around the time I emerged from Cornell with a degree and the minor acclaim I received as an undergraduate.
As early iterations of Guided By Voices began to play shows around Dayton in the early eighties, they were largely met with crushing indifference. They took it to heart.
The future novel resides with the fans. It will not be written from above or outside. Literature belongs to the davenport.
do we live here — wedreamstories
scenesbutwedontlivethem (Notley) — or here — ppleatcronuts
frankoceanieatbusily
betweenyourlegs (Chang)
Meanwhile, husbands everywhere felt vindicated. They flocked to the pubs to gloat. I told you I married an idiot!
There was one literary magazine that made you write “THE END” at the end of your story, to signify that when the writing was done, when there were no more pages or writing, it had ended to these idiots or robots.
This incessant, near compulsory recycling of the Midwestern flight narrative makes one thing clear: the story, the real story, begins upon departure.
A US readership may be seeking the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views, a challenge that will change them, but these poems are after something different.
Societally, there is a seemingly collective remorse for the treatment of women, but these memoirs are still, in ways I find unique to those of many other celebrity women, illuminating some of our culture’s most persistently problematic approaches to sex and sexuality.
I hang myself out of a self-inflicted predicament
I see the world from a new perspective
and don’t cry for me when you see me on the floor
I am awakened by a smell, sweet and smoked. Clouds brisketed above the lake. Startled and unsure, I close the windows. Check first on the children.
Waste is what an artist is and wants: too much. An abundance. It’s what we work to shape, what we can’t handle, what we haven’t yet made plans for.
“Elite” and “peers” are the key terms here, because compared to the rigid social divides in older and more traditional master/servant narratives, the class barrier between the protagonists of these novels and their employers is more porous.
To squabble over genre would be to take away from the very potent delight of these kinds of tales: a capacity to traverse an enormous affective range, to play lightly at the surface of life and to sink to tragic human depths.
If nuclear advocates are incapable of discussing who their chosen fuel sources have harmed and might harm, they are either ill-informed and not the experts they claim to be, or they are dishonest.
The flesh was intact but scarred, and the silvery ring of repaired skin at the base was numb. Rubbing it felt like touching someone else’s hand.
a continent, seedless and deep
ashes that fertilize nothing
but ashes, ashes that hold
the cool river of the mind
then sink it into ashes
Except, rather than sell the albums, I am buying more.
Wright’s architectural vision was a manifest destiny of the self, a frontier for every household, a westward expansion outside every door.