'The Epigraph of Moby Pussy', by D.M. Rice
The following is the epigraph of D.M. Rice’s debut collection, Moby Pussy.
Epigraph
Paul Holdengraber
JAMES JOYCE
Born on this day, in 1882
“Every life is in many days, day after
day. We walk through ourselves,
meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old
men, young men, wives, widows,
brothers-in-love, but always meeting
ourselves.”
from “Ulysses”
*photo emoji* Berenice Abbott
[photo of James Joyce]
Ilya Kaminsky and 5 others liked
Philip Metres
“First Memory” by Louise Glück
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning
of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved
It meant I loved.
senteniae antiquae
Technology ruining life:
“He calls the Sintians the first
inventors. For they developed every
art from fire, and thus harmed all life
and all people. Before the
development of these arts there
was no war, no slave, no master, but
all lived freely in concord.” #Tzetzes
[photo of the above passage in the original greek]
Ilya Kaminsky
“Do you know what people really
want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody
in the world is thinking: I wish there
was just one other person I could
really talk to, who could really
understand me, who’d be kind to
me. That’s what people really want.”
– Doris Lessing
Moby Dick
The White Whale swam before him
as the monomaniac incarnation of
all those malicious agencies which
some deep men feel eating in them,
till they are left living on with half a
heart and half a lung.
luke kennard liked
la peste
Landlord inspections on the mind
[image of the following text:
landlord - dog - doglord - landpig
When we came into your house there was a dog in one of the bedrooms. It shook its head slowly and we died. Nowhere in your contract does it say that dogs can shake their heads slowly in the bedrooms. We had to leave a member of our team in there. We went into your garden and found evidence of burial where other inspectors have died at the sight of a dog wagging its tail and welcoming us into the underworld where you, quite frankly, live like pigs. A blanket that looks very warming has been left in the rain for weeks. We cannot handle you anymore. We found that you have nailed dioramas of the estate agents’ office into the walls, but instead of estate agents, small dogs are depicted bleeding on rugs and ignoring the contracts. Please, can you make sure the small pretend dogs send out those contracts and that the inventories of the small pretend houses in the imagination of the evil pretend dogs are up to date. We also believe that your carpet tried to make us socialists by being so determining of our feet. We do not like to be able to recognize our own feet when inside our properties. We prefer to be able to kick each other during inspections. We had to leave a member of our team on the stairs. We discovered you have removed the batteries from the smoke alarm and have replaced the smoke alarms with screaming heads. We found this shocking, especially when we tried to cook all of your bacon. We had to leave the melted arms of one of our team in the kitchen. We opened a small cupboard behind your personal lives and many moths came out. We have added each mo th to the inventory. Some moths went into our eyes and played out scenes from the beheading of Simon of Sudbury. Other moths got in the ears of one of our team so the ears and some memories of that team member have been added to the inventory. As one of the memories involved an extremely erotic eviction this has increased the value of the property. Please stop the dog from shaking and bring us back to life, then send us the discrepancy in the newly inflated deposit. Please erase the image of Saint Michael from the black mould.]
Paul Holdengraber and Empty Mirror liked
Ilya Kaminsky
“Magic is speech liberated from
language.”
–Agamben
Jackson Fronz
[image of the following text:
3 a.m. in New York (by Jean Valentine)
I have been standing at the edge
of this green field all night.
My hand is sticky with sugar.
The village winks; it thinks it is
the muscle of the world. The heart.
The mouth.
The horse is sanding across the field, near the fence.
He doesn’t come any closer,
even in the dark, or run away.
Blood memory:
fixed on vacancy:
coming back and back for a sign–
the flats on his coat,
the shut out of his eye.]
Lacan sans contexte
I make an image; I incurve my
thought. You do not realize that that’s
not quite how understanding comes
about.
Sappho Bot
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
Anna MacAskill
This is just to say
I did not read
that article
published in
*that* magazine
which every
other poet
already
hates
Forgive me
I like my happiness
cold
and ignorant
anne carson bot
Hence the notion found early in
ancient thought that all poets are
liars.
Jamel Brinkley
“I am built for bed”
Garth Greenwell
Jean Stafford attended the
University of Iowa, briefly, as a
doctoral creative writing
student in 1938. It did not go
well.
Show this thread.
[image of the following text:
In addition to worrying about her personal problems that fall, Stafford also had to deal with the stresses of being in an academic environment once more. Almost as soon as she arrived at the University of Iowa, she realized she had made a big mistake in going there. Feeling intellectually inadequate, she exclaimed to Hightower, “I hate all this. I hate it like hell and I shan’t like it any better as time goes on. I am not smart enough for this place.” She described her male colleagues as “intense, erudite young men with PHD’s” who made jokes about Gothic verbs.66 Finding them aloof, she complained that they were not impressed at all by her.67 Her “de-ovarized, dessicated” female colleagues were also not to her liking.68 “I have examined the other women in the eng. department (darling, you can’t let that happen to me!) and I have found that I am superior to them in only one way—physically. I am built for bed, not for a classroom,” she insisted.69 Furthermore, she disliked having to live in a small, drab room without a real desk or adequate lighting;70 and she did not enjoy teaching composition to “apathetic football material and militant women.”71 Though she was pleased with the seminar she was taking on Carlyle and Newman, she was distraught because she was scheduled to give a seminar paper on Newman’s Apologia the following month and had not yet read even one page of the book. A visit from Mr. and Mrs. McKee only added to her woes: they insisted on speaking about the events that had led up to Lucy’s suicide, and reminding Jean of the money she still owed them, they berated her once again for being a “dreamer.”72]
Lacan sans contexte
Plato and Hegel will be showing up
any minute now.
Ilya Kaminsky
If I don’t answer for myself, who will
answer for me?
If I answer only for myself–am I still myself?
–Babylonian Talmud
Poetry Køan
Watching/listening to a lot of Merwin interviews at the moment. In every one, he mentions this poem of Hadrian’s, the only poem the Emperor wrote. WSM speaks of it as a koan, as if trying to fathom something in it which he’ll never fully understand. I am haunted by his haunting.
[image of the following text:
Little Soul
Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all aline
after the way
you used to make fun of things]
Paul Holdengraber retweeted
Ana Gavilá
“I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin.”
-Zbignew Herbert
*photo emoji* Eduardo Fujii
[image of a wilting flower]
Christopher
!
[image of the following text:
Shamash-shumu-ukin, my unfaithful brother
... forgot these acts of kindness that I had
done for him and constantly sought out evil.
Aloud, with his lips, he was speaking
friendship, but deep down in his heart
was scheming for murder.
King Ashurbanipal, ruled 669-631 BC]
senteniae antiquae
“Why Vergil’s poems have for the
last two thousand years exercised
so great an influence on our
Western culture is, paradoxically,
because he was a renegade to the
true Muse. His pliability; his
subservience; his narrowness”
sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/11/07ver…
[link to the article
“Vergil Was a Sycophantic Hack”
sententiaeantiquae.com]
Emir Han
“Men who are unhappy, like men
who sleep badly, are always proud
of the fact.”
—Bertrand Russel
The Conquest of happiness
[image of Bertrand Russell]
Samantha Rose Hill
Theodor Adorno: Is not memory
inseparable from love, which seeks
to preserve what yet must pass away?
Walter Benjamin: Memory is not an
instrument for exploring the past,
but rather a medium.
Hannah Arendt: Memory is the
mother of the muses.
Vita & Virginia Bot
9 August, 1932
And––I forget how the sentence
ends. I daresay you’ve got enough
scenes stored in your great
forehead to finish all my sentences.
-Virginia
Moby Dick
Already we boldly launched
upon the deep; but soon we shall be
lost in its unshored, harbourless
immensities.
Dana Levin
...seek and learn to recognize who
and what, in the midst of inferno,
are not inferno, then make them
endure, give them space.
–Italo Calvino
Anne Louise Avery
My small son, who is very, very
poorly at the moment, nevertheless
just won his first prize haiku award
at his Japanese school.
I’m so proud of him. Here’s his poem
(foxes are very loved in my house):
Cold day, Midwinter
Snow falls on my lawn
The fox stays hidden
[image of a fox]
poem.exe
a quick inspection
the grasses bloom...
the cicada’s voice
a quick inspection
anne carson bot
Her marble tears run down her
marble face.
Paul Holdengraber
*diamond emoji* LANGSTON HUGHES
Born on this day, in 1902
“I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?”
sententiae antiquae
“Medicine can cure the sickness of
the body, but death is the only
doctor for diseases of the soul.”
[above text in original greek]
#EpsistlesofPhalaris
david wheatley
Browning’s translation of Aeschylus
‘has generally found to be
unreadable.’
[image of the following text:
The Hermeneutic Motion 313
and Browning himself termed it a ‘somewhat tiresome, perhaps fruit-
less adventure’.1 Take the pronouncement of Kassandra (Browning
insisted on the K) in lines 1178-97:
Well, then, the oracle from veils no longer
Shall be outlooking, like a bride new-married
But bright it seems, against the sun’s uprisings
Breathing, to penetrate thee: so as, wave-like,
To wash against the rays a woe much greater
Than this. I will no longer teach by riddles.
And witness, running with me, that of evils
Done long ago, I nosing track the footstep!
For—the same roof here—never quits a Choros
One-voiced, not well-tuned since no ‘well’ it utters:
And truly having drunk, to get more courage,
Man’s blood—the Komos keeps within the house-hold—
Hard to be sent outside—of sister Furies:
They hymn their hymn—within the house close sitting—
The first beginning curse: in turn spit forth at
The Brother’s bed, to him who spurned it hostile.
Have I missed aught, or hit I like a bowman?
False prophet am I,—knock at doors, a babbler?
Henceforth witness, swearing now, I know not
By other’s word the old sins of this household!]
Dana Lee Alsamsam and 65 others follow
Adrian Ernesto Cepeda
“Please, I want so badly for the
good things to happen.”
–Sylvia Plath
[image of Sylvia Plath]
Ilya Kaminsky
Rosh Hashanah
i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate
i bear witness to no thing
more human than love
apples and honey
apples and honey
what is not lost
is paradise
–Lucille Clifton
sententiae antiquae
“Enjoy yourself: the years move like
flowing water, and no wave, when
once it has passed, can ever be
called back again.”
Ludite: eunt anni more fluentis aquae;
Nec quae praeteriit, iterum
revocabitur unda #Ovid
Regina Kenny
Don’t bend, don’t water it down;
don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit
your own soul according to the
fashion. Rather, follow your most
intense obsessions mercilessly.
–Franz Kafka
#WritingCommunity #AmWriting
[image of Franz Kafka]
Sandra Isabel and 7 others liked
Brandon Shimoda
Today my daughter (1½) pointed at
a cigarette butt and said “starfish,”
pointed at a statue of Saint
Augustine and said “Buddha,”
and pointed at a picture of four
penguins standing around a small
pond in a zoo and said,
“government."
Caroline Bird
‘It’s not a metaphor that bees make
honey of themselves’
-Maya C. Popa (from
@scoresjournal)
[image of the following text:
Wound is the origin of Wonder
The bee that worshiped the mouths of those flowers
dropped from your window like a spent priest,
its thud comedic in the coded silence.
You were making a change to the order of your hours,
had announced as much in the prior moment,
and if I thought of Virgil’s Georgics, it was only
not to mention them. I brought my eye
to its abdomen, offered an ounce of my human life.
What would you do with the knowledge
that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me
could be played by the threat of endings.
I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always,
a long ongoing Westwardness of thought,
my Blue period; oh fond, formidable ghost.
It’s not a metaphor that bees make honey
of themselves while language only dreams
the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little
while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.]
Evan liked
Dolt
Fun fact: Vergil is, in fact, better
than Homer, because Homer didn’t
exist.
sentintiae antiquae and 8 others liked
caleb smith
Tyler the Creator
Chance the Rapper
Bartleby the Scrivener
Paul Holdengraber liked
sven birkerts
“To be happy is to be able to
become aware of oneself without
fright.”
-Walter Benjamin
Aidan Ryan liked
Moby Dick
I am the architect, not the builder.
Paul Holdengraber retweeted
Melissa
“Silence can be complex, too
but you do not get far / with silence.
Begin again. / It is like Homer’s / catalogue of ships:
it fills up the time.”
—William Carlos William’s fr. Asphode
[image of the following text:
to
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death’s
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
Begin again.
It is like Homer’s
catalogue of ships:
it fills up the time.
I speak in figures,
well enough, the dresses
you wear are figures also,
we could not meet
otherwise. When I speak
of flowers
it is to recall
that at one timewe were young.
All women are not Helen,
I know that,
but have Helen in their hearts.
My sweet,
you have it also, therefore
I love you
and could not love you otherwise.
Imagine you saw]
Dr. Sarah Bond liked
Dr Hannah Ċulíck-Baird
Mosaic depicting the poet Vergil
holding a scroll containing a line
from Aeneid Book 1. Left, Clio,
muse of history; right, Melpomene,
muse of tragedy (holding a tragic
mask). 3rd century CE. Discovered
at Hadrumentum in 1896. National
Bardo Museum, Tunisia #worldofrome
[image of Vergil seated between Clio, muse of history
and Melpomene, muse of tragedy]
Ilya Kaminsky
let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end
–Lucille Clifton
anne carson bot
her marble tears run down her
marble face.
myth.txt
tell me the story of deucalion,
survivor of the Flood.
sentiniae antiquae
Saying there is no #Homer
–prob. true, but unprovable
–limits conversational options
–matches words to world
–v 20th century: not Homeric
Saying there is no Iliad or Odyssey
–enigmatic and interesting
–invites intense questioning
–fits world to words
–hyper-#Homeric
Paul Holdengraber and Linda Chown liked
Marcel Proust
No doubt very few people
understand the purely subjective
nature of the phenomenon that we
call love, or how it creates, so to
speak, a supplementary person,
distinct from the person the world
knows by the same name
Aidan Ryan liked
Moby Dick
Already we are boldly launched
upon the deep; but soon we shall be
lost in its unshored, harbourless
immensities.
Paul Holdengraber and *plant emoji* vol. 6 liked
Vita & Virginia Bot
22 August, 1927
I like your energy. I love your legs. I
long to see you.
Your Virginia
Paul Holdengraber retweeted
lumière.et.obscuritè
“The grammatical tense of their
obscene dreams was the FUTURE.
This grammatical future converts
dreaming into a constant promise.
A promise that loses its validity at
the moment of sobriety, but since it
is never forgotten becomes a
promise again and again.”
–Kunadera
Paul Holdengraber and 2 others liked
Ilya Kaminsky
I often write on a subway or in
buses or in planes. I do not know
why I feel safe when in motion
–Meena Alexander
“There is a loneliness that can be
rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn
up, holding, holding on, this motion
–Toni Morrison
Tom Snarksky and 2 others liked
Caroline Bird
‘A poem should end/ better than a life’
–Adam Zagajewski (trans. Clare Cavanagh)
[image of the following text:
Next Spring
The nations were exhausted after many wars
and lay serenely in their marriage beds
vast as the Danube river basin.
Spring had begun, the first ecstasies.
In the boughs of trees, still naked,
Turkish turtle doves were cooing.
No one knew what to do, what to think.
We were orphans, since winter
had left us no testament;
a young butterfly studied flying
haphazardly, from scratch.
Butterflies lack tradition.
But we must die.
This is an inelegant
way to end a poem,
R protests. And adds:
A poem should end
better than a life. That’s the point.]
sententiae antiquae
“Whoever happens to have practiced philosophy correctly will
likely surprise everyone else because they are practicing dying
and being dead.”
#Phaedo
The Paris Review
“I am quite agoraphobic. I don’t travel easily. If I can get
into a library–public libraries or even a bookstore–I feel safe.”
–Susan Howe
[link to ‘Susan Howe, The Art of
Poetry No. 97 at theparisreview.org]
Paul Holdengraber retweeted
Literary Vienna
“A great book should leave you with
many experiences, and slightly
exhausted at the end. You live
several lives while reading.”
William Styron
[image of William Styron]
Lacan sans contexte
There is no whole. Nothing is
whole.
Paul Holdengraber
*diamond emoji* BERTOLT BRECHT
Born on this day, 1898
“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
Paul Holdengraber liked
sven birkerts
“To be happy is to be able to
become aware of oneself without
fright.”
-Walter Benjamin
Vita & Virginia Bot
21 August, 1928
I don’t care about what is ‘better,’ for
however many resolutions one
makes, one’s pen, like water, always
finds its own level, and one can’t
write in any way other than one’s
own.
Your Vita
Ilya Kaminsky
“I came into poetry feeling as
though, on some level, these words
were not just mine but my grandparents’, their parents’.”
–Joy Harjo
*
“they visited/ me in a stanza where
we could be nearest each other /
breathing”
–Layli Long Soldier
Caroline Bird
Malena Mörling just lightly
destroying me
[image of the following text:
Traveling
Like streetlights
still lit
past dawn,
the dead
stare at us
from the framed
photographs.
You may say otherwise,
but there they are,
still here
traveling
continuously
backwards
without a sound
further and further
into the past.]
sententiae antiquae
From Charlotte Brontë’s “The
Professor”:
[image of the following text:
‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I am not bound to help you, but I have a place here vacant, if you are qualified for it, I will take you on trial. What can you do? Do you know anything besides that useless trash of college learning – Greek, Latin, and so forth?’]
sentintiae antiquae
“They gave a kind of voice to the
voiceless”
[original greek text] #Sophocles
Paul Holdengraber
*diamond emoji* GERTRUDE STEIN
Born on this day, in 1874
“There is a famous story about the
writer Gertrude Stein, as a Harvard
Student, taking a philosophy final...”
Her professor was William James.
[image of the following text:
There is a famous story about the writer
Gertrude Stein, as a Harvard student,
taking a philosophy final whose single
question was, “What is the meaning of
life?” She wrote, “The meaning of life is to
be outside on such a beautiful day,”
handed that in and went outside. Her
professor supposedly gave her an A,
saying that she truly understood philosophy.]
Ulysses Reader
Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the
bog of Allen, the Henry Street
Warehouse, Fingal’s Cave–all these
moving scenes are still there for us
today rendered more beautiful still
by the waters of sorrow which have
a strange voyage
The cold ocean. Foreboding cliffs
carved with faces of mercenaries.
Paul Holdengraber
“I am rooted, but I flow.”
~ Virginia Woolf
thanks to @style_minds
[image of Virginia Woolf]
Lacan sans contexte
The truth speaks. Since it is the
truth, it has no need to say the truth.
Paul Holdengraber liked
Sappho Bot
May I write words more naked than flesh,
stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew,
sensitive than nerve.
S t a r d u s t
Wandering around the garden of my feelings, broken stems and rose
thorns everywhere, a universe of stories hidden inside the whispers
of branches, somewhere between the cool breeze.
Moby Dick
beyond all hum of human weal or
woe
Moby Dick
in that dreamy mood, losing all
consciousness, at last my soul went
out of my body
HannahTM and Aidan Ryan liked
Moby Dick
Ahab answered –“Aye.”