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Poems + quotes for new year

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Life by Jim Harrison

I’m not so good at life anymore.
Sometimes I wake up and don’t recognize it.
Houses, cars, furniture, books are a blur
while trees, birds, and horses are fine
and clear. I also understand music
of an ancient variety—pre-ninteenth century.
Where have I been?
Recounting flowers from the train window
between Seville and Granada, also bulls and olive trees.
I couldn’t sleep in Lorca’s room because it was haunted.
Even the wine I carried was haunted.
Spain has never recovered from this murder.
Her nights are full of the red teeth of death.
There were many who joined him. You can’t count,
up and down, birds and flowers at the same time.

dear baby bird by Bud Smith

grown my hair long and half silver
disowned all art, thrown the books away
fed the record player to the wood chipper
the shirts I used to wear  are flags now
protesting whatever shows up in my newsfeed

I dunno

there’s a rumour that everything we do
is meaningless and one day the planet
we live on will be crushed flat
like a grape in the hand of a kid like me
who never went to college
think I read that on a patch
sewed on someone’s daughters jean jacket

dats fine, open the wine, dump the sauce over the steak
inflate the basketball, slip your world-famous red dress on
take off your red dress, shoot every bird out of the sky
bake a fucking pie, walk in the park fully chemically spun
and eyes beyond cartoon wide, all the flowers
and specs of garbage on the ground, life confirming

dear baby bird
let’s live to 135.

Zona by Jim Harrison

My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me –
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.

I Sat At My Desk And Contemplated All That I Had Accomplished by James Tate

I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished
this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest on Rhode Island.
No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm wrestling champion
in Portland, Maine. False. I caught the largest boa constrictor
in Southern Brazil. In my dreams. I built the largest house
out of matchsticks in all the United States. Wow! I caught
a wolf by its tail. Yummy. I married the Princess of Monaco.
Can you believe it? I fell off of Mount Everest. Ouch! I walked
back up again. It was tiring. Snore. I set a record for sitting
in my chair and snoring longer than anybody. Awake! I set a record
for swimming from one end of my bath to the other in No Count,
Nebraska. Blurb. I read a book written by a dove. Great! I slept
in my chair all day and all night for thirty days. Whew! I ate
a cheeseburger every day for a year. I never want to do that again.
A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I couldn’t catch
him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize anyone. That’s
how long it’s been. A policeman stopped me on the street and said
he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like
me and had the same name. What are the chances?

One Source of Bad Information by Robert Bly

There’s a boy in you about three
years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand Years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

The child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

Happy Birthday To Me by Heather Christie

I know where I’m going to die     right here    in my
own honest body     I avoid my body by sleeping
for instance I’ve just woken up     now here come
my galloping arms      my head the malletless gong
so many days I do not understand      one plows
forward      one gathers      it rains      each month
maintains its own atomic number      a year does not
have a skeleton      it has an uncracked egg      I have
to eat it      I have to get married     my friend the
golden onslaught married stuff in bloom      every
action has a speed and a direction      love goes down
and sometimes slowly      but death can come from
inside or without      for my birthday      I would like
to be an airplane      an airplane with no pilot and no
wings

You Think You Are Something Less Real Than You Are by Wendy Xu

You put on some new pants. I put
on some sunlight. I put on a coyote. You
put on a bigger coyote. You put on all
of the coyotes! You put on the sand as it flies
beneath your incredible little paws. I put on
rain not reaching the desert. You put on how we
feel sad after this. You put on the sadness. You
put on methods for dealing with it. The sadness tries
to put you on but you say No! You wrestle
the sadness to the ground. You are big and need
large wings. You put on the large wings. You are still
a coyote. You put on the howling. You put on
things that howl back. There is nothing
you won’t put on. You put on the darkness.
You put on some stars and even what
is between them. You put on the moon. The moon
that shines! You put on how we want
to stay here! You put on how we forget where
we were before. You put on the earth how
it cracks. You put on its face when it sees us.

“I got down on myself a lot, thinking, Everybody’s going to think this sounds stupid! But it came down to: What are you going to do? This is you. This is what you can do. This is the kind of music you can make. And that’s great. The most important thing is that I’m not trying to be anybody other than myself. And this is what I sound like.”

—Fiona Apple

“Fiction is fiction, and not “about” any real person’s life. And because of the mysterious process of writing fiction, and its special integrity, I wince a little when people describe my novel as “based on.” Publishers rely so heavily on back-story to promote novels these days– because they think it sells, and maybe it does– but novels don’t simply enact the real as it took place. They do something else, stranger and more complicated.”

Rachel Kushner

“Writing in Italian is a difficult path, a very private one, where I have the feeling that I’m never truly safe. But this is how it should be; the sensation is good for me, and it’s important for me to go on.

As a child and then as an adolescent I was very insecure, lost, shy. But shyness often blossoms into a creative calling. Actors are often shy people, for example. And writers too, because they mostly are people who, in their childhood and adolescence, have read a lot, alone and in silence. Solitude is an essential element for a writer.

[…] This sense of expectation is a heavy burden, and takes away my appetite for writing. I would rather find another job. Because to me, writing means freedom, and therefore when I find myself in a cage, in a trap, or in front of someone who tells me “No, you have to write like this, in this language, about these subjects and conditions.” I get a very unpleasant feeling. Of course, one always has to expect to be judged, but some judgements can be damaging.

“You have to follow a path, you have to obey, you have to write for others.” Well, I don’t think so. I know that writing is a way of expressing oneself, of communicating. But it’s not made for the reader. Of course there will always be a reader; but when I write I don’t think about that hypothetical person.

I believe that many successful writers do write keeping the reader in mind from the beginning, and this is very dangerous. When I first started talking about this project of mine, a few years ago, many told me: “Don’t do this, this is a misstep, you don’t have to, don’t”. And I’m not talking about Italian writers: most of them were American writers. I asked them: Why, why can’t I? I didn’t understand this preconception. And they said “The reader doesn’t need this experiment.” Well, I don’t agree, because I think that writing must also be a selfish act. A book might reach out to someone else at some point, after years, or maybe never at all, but it is not up to me to write with this idea in mind. Writing is, above all, an internal dialogue.

[…] I feel exposed, vulnerable, as it should be. An artist has to experience this condition. At some point I became a successful writer, and I’m grateful, but when I write, when I try to write, I always feel uncomfortable. You need to dig where you don’t feel comfortable. In this book, I ask myself: what am I running away from, why this metamorphosis, why this escape, where do I have to get to, what am I trying to leave behind?

The answer, I believe, is that I’m seeking the freedom to write in my own way, to write whatever I want in whichever language, form, length, and without any pressure.

Jhumpa Lahiri

“I’ve never been an optimist. But I cannot see this obsession in my novels with Colombia other than as an act of faith. If my novels deal so obsessively with my country, it’s because of this deep need to understand. I have nothing else to offer. In my columns I try to contribute in a more practical way to the debate, I try to convince people; not so in my novels, which are born out of questions, doubt, uncertainty. But I think that effort may be useful to somebody reading my novels silently in a room: I’m taking them by the hand and I’m saying, let’s get into this mess together and try to understand it. It’s a consolation that literature can offer.”

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

“It’s not necessarily that I believed in myself, but rather that I believed in the work.”

Karen Jennings

“My wish is for my 40s to be fun and full of freedom. I want to feel the same freedom I feel on stage every day of my life. I want to explore aspects of myself I haven’t had time to discover and to enjoy my husband and my children. I want to travel without working. I want this next decade to be about celebration, joy, and giving and receiving love. I want to give all the love I have to the people who love me back.”

Beyonce

“I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.”

—James Joyce, Portrait of the artist as a young man

Writing helps my recovery in many ways. By writing notes and occasionally rereading them, I expand my time context, which helps me stay calm and undiscouraged and gives me perspective. Writing and editing sentences and paragraphs about books that I’ve read — and embedding these sentences and paragraphs into my fiction and nonfiction books — helps me understand and remember and integrate and deepen what I’ve learned. Writing and reading chronological narratives of my own life helps me stay focused on and interested in my long-term process of changing my mind and life.

[…]

When I’m reading a nonfiction book about ancient partnership societies, I’m leaving society. When I’m viewing a tree instead of an advertisement, I’m leaving society. When I’m meditating instead of ruminating on negative thoughts, I’m leaving society. When I’m asleep and dreaming, I’m leaving society. When I’m working on my garden or playing with my cats, I’m leaving society. … When I’m being kind or patient or compassionate or tolerant or calm or rational, I’m leaving society.

—Tao Lin

“I got to know grief very well – a real, irremediable and incurable grief that shattered my life, and when I tried to put it together again I realised that I and my life had become something irreconciliable with what had gone before. Only my vocation remained unchanged. At first I hated it, it disgusted me, but I knew very well that I would end up returning to it, and that it would save me. But you have to realise that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing.”

—Natalia Ginzburg, “My Vocation

“Don’t write so the world can see you, write so you can see the world.”

Cat Marnell

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”

Ernest Hemingway

“”I was told I was talented. I don’t know that it did much except make me lazy when I should have worked harder… I know untalented people who did become writers, and who write exceptionally well. You can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and learn to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, if you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer… the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.”

—Alexander Chee

“I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes”

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