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emiliosandozsequence · 1 year

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the borgias / moments of being, 'a sketch of the past', virginia woolf / dune (2021) dir. denis villeneuve / house of the dragon / sisters, daisy johnson / we are missing a present; the butterfly’s burden: selected poems, mahmoud darwish / cynthia ozik / my name is memory, ann brashares / the piano teacher, elfriede jelinek

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soracities · 11 months

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Got any fave bits of literature by west asians? Poems quotes books its all good im just hungry for good literature!

yes, a few!! some of my faves here:

The Pages of Day and Night (Adonis)

Without an Alphabet, Without a Face (Saadi Youssef)

Nostalgia, My Enemy (Saadi Youssef)

Paris, When It's Naked (Etel Adnan)

The Cost of Love We Are Not Willing to Pay (Etel Adnan)

Barefoot Souls (Maram al-Masri)

A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (Maram al-Masri)

The War Works Hard (Dunya Mikhail)

Beyond the Walls: Selected Poems (Nazim Hikmet)

The Corpse Washer (Sinan Antoon)

Alligator and Other Stories (Dima Alzayat)

Memory for Forgetfulness (Mahmoud Darwish)

The Neverfield (Nathalie Handal)

Flawed Landscape (Sharif Elmusa)

A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini)

Poems (Kajal Ahmad)

Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Arab Women's Poems

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan

some individual pieces:

"My Mother's Kitchen" by Choman Hardi

"A Woman Cleaning Lentils" by Zahrad

"I Break My Thirst with Flame by Sherko Bekas (and three more of his poems here)*

"Who Am I?" by Nazik al-Mala'ika

"Thieves of Youth" and "Tears of the Telephone" by Osama Alomar (link includes 5 other short stories)

"The Footsteps of Water" by Sohrab Sepehri

also adding these, which I haven't read but they've all been on my list ever since I stumbled across the authors and some of their other work

Revolt Against the Sun (Nazik al-Mala'ika)

The Butterfly's Burden (Sherko Bekas)

The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories (Osama Alomar)

The Abduction (Maram al-Masri)

Louder Than Hearts: Zeina Hashem-Beck

#ask #anonymous #book recs

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llovelymoonn · 1 year

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favourite poems of february

brian gyamfi the almost love poem of eloise and kofi

angela jackson and all these roads be luminous: “angel”

sharon olds the promise

laura ma fossil record of a drowning carp

mahmoud darwish the butterfly’s burden: “i didn’t apologise to the well” (tr. fady joudah)

jimmy santiago baca immigrants in our own land: “immigrants in our own land”

james richardson essay on the one hand and on the other

john kinsella peripheral light: selected and new poems by john kinsella: “drowning in wheat”

twyla m. hansen the other woman

monica sok abc for refugees

sumita chakraborty most of the children who lived in this house are dead. as a child i lived here. therefore i am dead

chaelee dalton blood type personality theory

tj jarret of late, i have been thinking about despair

zubair ibrahim siddiqui sun, suna, sunaofying

sun yung shin skirt full of black: “immigrant song”

richard eberhart a dublin afternoon

louise glück aboriginal landscape

michelle cadiz oil and other drugs

hafsa zulfiqar small nightmares i dream in a foreign country

james richardson fire warnings

alberto rios not go away is my name: “immigrant centuries”

n.s. ahmed on becoming memory

andrea krause for our anniversary next year

ajanae dawkins blood-flex

ananya kanai shah my girls & i

aleda shirley the glass lotus

mahmoud darwish almond blossoms and beyond: “think of others”

robert américo esnard dendrochronology of a family tree

buy me a chai latte

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laylatnahar · 5 months

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Poem of the Day!

Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian), from Sonnet VI; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems

#avpol #jojo zine #jojo fanart #jojo no kimyou na bouken #jojo's bizarre adventure #jojo no kimyō na bōken #jjba #jjba fanart #jojos bizarre adventure #jjba avdol #muhammad avdol #mohammed avdol #avdol

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brandonshimoda · 4 months

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THE BOOKS I READ IN 2023

*I read it before

**I read it more than once this year

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Common Grace

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English

Alison Lubar, It Skips a Generation

Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary

Brynn Saito, Under a Future Sky

Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

*Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

Chanté L. Reid, Thot

*Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

Christine Shan Shan Hou & Vi Khi Nao, Evolution of the Bullet

Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths (with Paths of Thunder)

Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer

Dionne Brand, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun

*Dionne Brand, No Language is Neutral

Dionne Brand, Primitive Offensive

Édouard Louis, Who Killed My Father, translated from the French by Lorin Stein

**Emily Lee Luan, 回 / Return

Erin Marie Lynch, Removal Acts

Fady Joudah, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

Farid Tali, Prosopopoeia, translated from the French by Aditi Machado

Gabriel Palacios, A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth Is Sign (coming out 2024)

Ghayath Almadhoun, Adrenalin, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

Hauntie, To Whitey & The Cracker Jack

Hervé Guibert, To the friend who did not save my life, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Hiromi Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, translated from the Japanese by Jon L. Pitt

*James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

*James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

*James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

James Fujinami Moore, Indecent Hours

Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

Jawdat Fakhreddine, Lighthouse for the Drowning, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen

Jed Munson, Commentary on the Birds

Jennifer Hayashida, A Machine Wrote This Song

Jenny Odell, Inhabiting The Negative Space

Jenny Xie, The Rupture Tense

*Joy Kogawa, A Choice of Dreams

Joy Kogawa, A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems

**Joy Kogawa, From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems

Joy Kogawa, Gently to Nagasaki

*Joy Kogawa, Jericho Road

*Joy Kogawa, Obasan

Joy Kogawa, The Rain Ascends

Joy Kogawa, The Splintered Moon

*Joy Kogawa, Woman in the Woods

Juan Felipe Herrera, Akrílica, eds. Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, Anthony Cody

Kamo-no-Chomei, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, translated from the Japanese by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins

Keorapetse Kgositsile, Collected Poems, 1969-2018

*Kiku Hughes, Displacement

Kōno Taeko, Toddler-Hunting, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North

Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary, as told to George Hajjar

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Kaan and Her Sisters

**Lindsey Webb, Plat (coming out in 2024)

Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living

Liyana Badr, A Balcony over the Fakihani, translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark with Christopher Tingley

Lucille Clifton, An Ordinary Woman

*Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats

Lucille Clifton, Good News About the Earth

Lucille Clifton, Good Times

Lucille Clifton, Two-Headed Woman

Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine as Metaphor, translated from the Arabic by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, You Can Be The Last Leaf, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Maya Marshall, All the Blood Involved in Love

Michael Prior, Model Disciple

*Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes and Other Poems

Mitsuye Yamada, Full Circle: New and Selected Poems

Mohammed El-Kurd, RIFQA

**Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif

Mourid Barghouti, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Mourid Barghouti, Midnight, translated from the Arabic by Radwa Ashour

Na Mira, The Book of Na

Najwan Darwish, Nothing More to Lose, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, translated from the Japanese by Edwin McClellan

Nona Fernández, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Noor Hindi, DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene

Osamu Dazai, The Flowers of Buffoonery, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett

The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, edited and translated from the Arabic by A.M. Elmessiri

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kappa, translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell

Salim Barakat, Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen

Samih Al-Qasim, All Faces But Mine, translated from the Arabic by Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a

Samih al-Qasim, Sadder Than Water: New & Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Nazih Kassis

*Saretta Morgan, Alt-Nature (coming out in 2024)

Satsuki Ina, The Poet and the Silk Girl (coming out in 2024)

Sawako Ariyoshi, The Twilight Years, translated from the Japanese by Mildred Tahara

Shailja Patel, Migritude

Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, City of Pearls

Sharon Yamato, Moving Walls

Shivanee Ramlochan, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting

**shō yamagushiku, shima (coming out in 2014)

Shuri Kido, Names and Rivers, translated from the Japanese by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander

*Solmaz Sharif, Customs

Stella Corso, Green Knife

*Taha Muhammad Ali, Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story, translated from the Arabic by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin

Terry Watada, The Game of 100 Ghosts (Hyaku Monogatari Kwaidan-kai)

Victoria Chang, Obit

*Wong May, Superstitions

THE BOOKS I'M CURRENTLY READING, THAT I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET

Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, The Portal (not yet published)

Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

Eqbal Ahmad, The Selected Writings

Essays, ed. Dorothea Lasky

Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography, translated from the Arabic by Olive Kenny

James Welch, Winter in the Blood

Lan P. Duong, Nothing Follows

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Touching the Art

Preti Taneja, Aftermath

Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment

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roseverie · 1 year

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pierced petal 💞

which line of prose or poetry would you have inked into your skin without hesitation ?

“She was like a flaming rose. I thought that she would burn away into perfume” - Heinrich Heine, from The Selected Prose Writings; “Reisebilder,”

“The flowers full of night… like sacred smoke” - Nina Cassian, from “Part of a Bird”

“Only fallen blossoms know the heart of those who roam.” - Su Shi, from Selected Poems of Su Shi; Silk-washing Stream.

“A flower of flame. A blossom of blood.” - Cecilia Woloch, from Reign of Embers.

“The world did not begin with me / it will not end with me / I am / one pulsebeat in the throbbing river” - Octavio Paz, from “Identical Time”

“We will meet again in the lake you as water I as lotus blossom You will carry me I will drink you” - Rose Ausländer, Love VI

“Dew-drinker, opium-eater, […]” - Bethany van Rijswijk, from ‘Opium-eater’

“… your flesh is lilies / Under a frozen moon,” - Arthur Symons, from Poetry & Prose; “Morbidezza”

“The moon-drunk, haunted, pierced soul,” - Isaac Rosenberg, from The Collected Poems; “Midsummer Frost,”

“—everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of “Love Song”

“I bow to the daydreams I buried myself in,” - Hannu Mäkelä, from Contemporary Finnish Poetry: “Dream On Happiness Number 5,”

“Out of jasmine the night’s blood streams white.” - Mahmoud Darwish, from Sonnet V; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems

“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I’m making myself. I’ll make myself until I reach the core.” - Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“ […] so that roses may bloom in the blood of our wound.” - George Seferis, from The Cistern

“you were the bride of mysteries adorned with lilies of shadow” - Nelly Sachs, from Night, night; O the Chimneys: Selected Poems.

“And no one is me. No one is you. This is solitude.” - Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“The shadow is a narrow ribbon. I dip my hand in it as if I were immersing it in water.” - Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, from Marine Rose; “The Art of Poetry”

“You bring the siren note, the lotus-land;”— H.D., from “Morpheus”

“Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.” - Milton Acorn, from “Live with Me on Earth under the Invisible Daylight Moon,”

Orpheus: how will you remember?

Eurydice: that I love you?

Orpheus: yes

Eurydice: that’s easy. I can’t help it.

- Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl

“Your heart is uncut jade,” - Han Yong-un, from The Silence of Love: “I Love Love”

“I walk with my dream unfurled, and lose myself in my own labyrinths, and the dream unfurled carries me.” - Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. II

“You and I have almost achieved that which is never achieved: we sit in each other’s souls.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a letter to Arthur Davison Ficke

“I am captured in dreams of pearl,” - Maximilian Voloshin, from “I Looked Eye to Another Eye,”

#replied #would I get all of this? probably not. But am I extremely indecisive and couldn’t just pick one? yes.#also this is a good way for me to keep all my fave fragments—#but I would definitely get a couple of these as tattoos!#thank you for asking 🖤#fave

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simpingcowboy · 1 year

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Circles

Pairing: Frankie Morales x GN!Reader, established relationship, no use of Y/N

Word Count: 900+

Warnings: description of mental health episode, disassociation, allusion to selective mutism, allusions to death (?)

Summary: Your boyfriend Frankie helps you manage a mental health crisis (happy ending I pinky promise)

A/N: Hi! This is alot more experimental and poetic than most of my work here, but I hope you enjoy! Inspiration taken from John Donne's poem A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning of which I've written a short explanation of the borrowed imagery here :) Can be read without reading the poem! All you need to know is that this is referring to a drawing compass not a directional compass. As always I tried to be mindful of warnings but please let me know if I missed anything!!! Thank you <3

Twin Compass

"Where are you Baby?" Frankie called to you.

"Everywhere." Burdened with all the terrors of the past. Under the crushing pressure of the future. Pinned to the present like a pinned butterfly, slowly letting life leave its body. You couldn't lie if you tried. Everywhere. You were everywhere.

"Can I be everywhere with you?" He asked, slowly breaching your space. Careful not to make any quick movements.

You manage to lift your head from the pillow. Barely peeking up at Frankie, through your tear stained eyes. Everything ached. It felt as if your heart itself weighed too much. Leaving you helpless and alone on your bed, head tucked into a pillow, knees curled into you.

"Baby…" you cried for him, beckoning him near you.

He continues to move slowly, not wanting to startle you. "I'm here. I'm right here." Frankie sits at the head of the bed.

Instinctively, you move to put your head in his lap. The rough fabric of his jeans rubs abrasively against your cheek. Frankie lets his hand travel to your back, rubbing up and down your spine with each rigid intake of air you take.

"In and out. Just keep breathing." He reminds you.

"Frankie-" you choke out.

"Shh it's okay Baby. I know." And he does. For he's been here many times before.

'A compass' you once said. 'We're like a compass.'

The Fixed Foot

Frankie would stay as long as you needed. He'd feed you. Wash you. Tend to you. Care for you in whatever way you need. He would be here. Or there. Or wherever it was you needed him the most.

It was ritualistic, the ways in which he watched over you. Your breathing. How much you ate. How much you drank. Everything was dutifully monitored by Frankie. He could not always ease the suffering of your mind, but the body you inhabited he could care for until you returned.

You knew how he felt. Lowly. Helpless to stop your aimless wander. An undercurrent of anxiety cautioned his every move. During the worst of it, he'd wonder if you'd ever come back. In the quiet moments, you'd hear him plead to the empty air that you'd return. And you would. As you had so fatefully before. As you knew you always would.

"Frankie?" You called to him, still in that far off spot in your mind.

He tilts his attention back to your face, your eyes still heavy with tears, "Yeah, Honey?"

"You…don't have to-" You whimper meekly.

Frankie cut you off with a smile with a solemn nod. "I know." He responds, "I know."

No matter where you were, Frankie would follow. Though right now he knew you were far far away, he still hearkened after you. Leaning into the darkness with you. He believed it his duty to remain firm for you. Frankie would wait. A million days he'd wait. You would return and when you did, you'd need a safe place to land. Need a home to return to after your treacherous journey.

'You make no show to move'

The Traveling Leg

Even in the vase emptiness, Frankie remained. A lingering figure out of the corner of your agony. The one you circled and circled. Orbiting his existence. Entrusting him to bring you back to where you'd begun. Your agony. Your love. Your joys. Your sorrows. You offered it all to him. Each time, against all odds, he stayed. With no ulterior motives than loving you, he stayed firm.

Still- you both were powerless to stop your aimless wander. So, you'd cycle. Sometimes minutes, often hours, occasionally days. Your mind being dragged through a million days already lived, weighed with the concern for the next million you'd be expected to have. Trudging from one state of existence to the next. Everything felt a blur, emotions only half-felt. Your body suspended in an alternative reality all together.

Frankie's would hum, a fact you usually found endearing now merely reduced to a meaningless buzz void of any discernable pattern. In the far recesses of your mind, you did know the song. A part of you can recall. Subconsciously, you hum along with him. Between sobs and desperate murmurs, you hum. And Frankie knows, your love's not endured a breach- but an expansion.

And then you'd hear it. That call. Time to come home.

'When I obliquely run'

The Circle

Slowly you'd feel it. The circle, nearly complete. A hunger. A pain. An ache. The need to stretch. A desire to go outside. And tea. You always wanted tea first.

"F-Frankie?" You mumbled, readjusting to using your voice again. "Tea?" You ask in a hushed voice, eyes much clearer than they'd been before.

Frankie perks up at your request, relief settling into his old bones. "We can get tea. Come on, Baby. Let's get you some tea." He'd say, moving you both steadily into the kitchen.

Together you sat. Drinking tea. Stretching. Frankie takes a tissue to clear your face of the remaining tears. His big brown eyes meet yours. And he's so grateful. To have you. To see you for who you were, and not all the things you believed yourself to be. But his praise would have to wait another day.

"Where are you, Baby?"

"Here. I'm right here, Frankie." You nuzzle your head into his neck. The scruff of his beard tickles your cheek.

"And I'm right here with you." He said, a subtle smile steadily growing across his face.

'Your firmness makes my circle just

And makes me end where I've begun'

#Am writes #frankie morales #frankie morales x you #frankie morales fanfiction #frankie morales fanfic #frankie 'catfish' morales

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ladychlo · 2 years

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Hiiii Chay, how are you??? Hope you’re doing great!✨ But now that Harry is being sap on main and talking about poetry, can you recommend me/us your fav poetry books? Thanks❤️

Hi love ❤️ I'm doing fine how about you? hope you're having a lovely day!

okay, I'm gonna try to mention some of poetry collection/books I love and poems by some poets I really love, but these the only ones I could find the translation of, and I have so many other in mind 😭

Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan

Adonis: Selected Poems

A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor by Maram al-Massri

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish (anything actually by this poet is to be read. I love one of his poems called Rita and the Rifle)

also his other book called The butterfly's burden : poems

Arabian Love Poems by Nizar Qabbani

Listen to the Mourners by Nāzik Al-Malā’ika

A Season in Hell by Rimbaud

Letters To Lou by Apollinaire

Capital of Pain (Capitale de la douleur) by Paul Éluard

Defy the Silence by Rasha Omran

My Friend by khalil gibran

To A Girl Sleeping In The Street by Nāzik Al-Malā’ika

First Kiss by Tim Seibles

Numerical conjecture by Fowziyah Abu-khalid

from The Book of Games by Rana Al Tonsi

The Ship Of Love by Salma Jayyusi

Ghazal by Edil Hassan

obsession by Doria Shafik

Bermudas / South by Kamau Brathwaite

To A Friend by Parveen Shakir

Enivrez-vous (drink) by Charles Baudelaire

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W. B. Yeats

Accents By Denice Frohman

The Bond By Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

#I have so many others in mind #but I cant find the translation nor can I find a proper one that convey the right meaning #library #poetry

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89rooms · 3 months

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A wilderness of your beauty dozes off, and a moon out of your shadows wakes to guard its trees.

Mahmoud Darwish - Sonnet VI; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems (translated by Fady Joudah)

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blurrymerzsblog · 11 months

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"A wilderness of your beauty

dozes off, and a moon out of your shadows wakes to guard its trees."

Mahmoud Darwish, from Sonnet VI; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems (tr. by Fady Joudah)

Artist: @yaozh.i

#art #drawings #literature #quotes #poetry #paintings

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megairea · 3 years

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And from one moon to another I leapt.

Mahmoud Darwish, from In Her Absence I Created Her Image; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems (tr. by Fady Joudah)

#mahmoud darwish #Palestinian literature #the butterfly's burden: selected poems #poetry #literature

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citylightsbooks · 3 years

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5 Questions with Michael Palmer, author of Little Elegies for Sister Satan

Michael Palmer is an American born in New York City in 1943 and long resident in San Francisco, nearly all of Palmer's poetry is published by New Directions: At Passages (1995); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998); The Promises of Glass (2000); Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001); Company of Moths (2005); and most recently, Thread (2011). He is the translator of works by Emmanuel Hocquard, Vicente Huidobro, and Alexei Parshchikov, among others, and the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. For over thirty years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

His newest book of poems is Little Elegies for Sister Satan (also published by New Directions). Michael Palmer is reading from his new book, along with Erica Hunt (who is celebrating her new book of poems, Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, May 4th!

*****

Where are you writing to us from?

I am writing to you from a secret location not all that far from City Lights as the Dream Drone flies. In 1963, before I lived anywhere, Allen Ginsberg brought me to City Lights for the first time, where I purchased a copy of Michael McClure’s Dark Brown (Auerhahn Press), shelved then in the locked room among the works subject to possible criminal prosecution.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I’d like to know who’s accusing me of being sane? I will be taking names.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

As an act of self-abnegation, throughout the lockdown I have limited my reading (and rereading) to bestsellers. It seems that every day, I read at random from Wisława Szymborska’s collected and last poems, Map (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak), as well as Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden (tr. Fady Joudah). I am finding my way back through Nate Mackey’s various prose and verse sequences, written across an illuminated lifetime. Of the several hundred other books of fiction, philosophy, writings on art, interviews, poetry, and social and political theory that I’ve begun, perused or read through during the lockdown, I have mostly fond if fading memories, like loves from an earlier life. Oh yes, and one day a week I’ve been reading aloud from The Decameron to friends in my pod. Yesterday we reached Day 8, Story 4.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

I am a magpie in this regard, stealing from my betters, living and gone, as I try in vain to listen to the Book of the World and record its echoes. And when I confront the artificial barriers, the walls, erected between nations by the corrupt and corrupting forces of power, I do my best to fly over them. From Szymborska’s “Psalm”:

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states! How many clouds float past them with impunity; how much desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil in provocative hops! Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers or alights on the roadblock at the border?

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

Poets should never open bookstores, only patronize them as often as possible, while neglecting what others erroneously consider to be real life. It was in 1953 (I was ten) that Ferlinghetti came to me in a vision and asked whether he should invest in a bookstore with Peter Martin. I warned him in the most strenuous terms not to become involved, that it would be the ruin of him, and that nobody reads good books. And so it came to pass.

#michael palmer #little elegies for sister satan #new directions #poets #5 questions #author interviews

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llovelymoonn · 2 years

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words by mahmoud darwish

memory for forgetfulness: "august, beirut, 1982: (tr. ibrahim muhawi) \\ the butterfly's burden: "maybe, because winter is late" (tr. fady joudah) \\ almond blossoms and beyond: "like a hand tattoo in an ode by an ancient arab poet" (tr. mohammad shaheen) \\ why have you left the horse alone: "i see my ghost coming from afar" (tr. joanna bell) \\ almond blossoms and beyond: "think of others" (tr. mohammad shaheen) \\ almond blossoms and beyond: "counterpoint (for edward w. said)" (tr. mohammad shaheen) \\ now, as you awaken: "i have the wisdom of one condemned... (tr. omnia amin & rick london) \\ unfortunately, it was paradise: selected poems: "the strangers' picnic" (tr. carolyn forché) \\ memory for forgetfulness: "august, beirut, 1982" (tr. ibrahim muhawi)

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laylatnahar · 5 months

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Poem of the Day!

Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian), from Low Sky; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems

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cajon-desastre · 4 years

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There’s nothing left of me but you.

Mahmoud Darwish. Who Am I, Without Exile? The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems

#Outlander #Jamie Fraser #season 3 #3x01 #quotes and gif

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cloudbeam · 6 years

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I'm not the one who asked the original question, but I would love if u could give some poetry recommendations? :-)

i adore your bio! beyond howl, of course, and in no particular order:

revolutionary petunias and other poems by alice walkerthe collected poems of audre lordekingdom animalia by aricelis grimaycrush by richard sikenthis way to the sugar by hieu minh nguyen our poison horse by derrick c. brownpole dancing to gospel hymns by andrea gibsonthe crown ain’t worth much by hand willis-abdurraqibnight sky with exit wounds by ocean vuongprelude to bruise by saeed jonesanything by hafizheroin & sugarcane: they all call me baby* by giana angelilloselected poems by anne sextonthe glimmering room by cynthia cruzthe butterfly’s burden by mahmoud darkishtoday means amen by sierra demulderblud by rachel mckibbensautopsy by donte collinsand a million more i’m sure i’m forgetting. happy reading!

#lit #recs #ask

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