― Emily Dickinson

When I’m with you... that is the only time I feel alive.

a year. 

january calls me a coward, L.H.  /   february, N.T.  /  to march, emily dickinson  /  an ode to april, @written-honey  /  daydreaming of may, @still-untitled  /  the truth the dead know, anne saxton  /  everything changed when i forgave myself, charlotte eriksson  /  will you be quiet, please? raymond carver  /  turquoise silence, sanober khan  /  untitled, @nightb-us  /  tristesse, gottfried benn (trans. david paisey)  /  the month of december, @voddxa

Gays looking at each other while laying on a bed is something that can actually be so personal

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to William Austin Dickinson (Amherst, late March 1851)

I will never let go of you again.

i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.

they were ignored.

instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.

tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.

her sister did not listen.

we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.

kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.

my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.

no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.

i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.

-

asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?

said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.

“sweet and soft as summer, darlings, maple trees in bloom and grass green in the sunny places—”

peter s. kroyer // willard metcalf // daniel garber // emily dickinson, in a letter to susan gilbert

so my english teacher put up new posters in her class and

I promise you that.

by Emily Dickinson

emily dickinson / van gogh’s bedroom (1888)

Normalise liking poetry because you like the way it sounds and art because you think its beautiful. You don’t have to understand the deeper meaning of something to appreciate it - poetry is bloody difficult to analyse and art requires an extensive knowledge of movements and artists to properly get - so please just wonder around art galleries and decide which pieces you’d buy if you could, and read out lines of poetry simply because they have a nice ring to them.

Emily & Sue

Dickinson s01e01

The Letters of Emily Dickinson

Are you dying? I hope so.

Here is THE ultimate John Mulaney moodboard

“I am all the things I have ever loved”

- Toni Morrison

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mary Bowles (about December 1858)