thewriterscaravan

[thewriterscaravan]

We command the pain to remain in the words. not in us.

Alice Notley, Iphigenia (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

« For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. Teachers bid young writers to follow the arc. If you ask Google how to structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs.

And it is an elegant shape, especially when I translate arc to its natural form, a wave.Its rise and fall traces a motion we know in heartbeats, breaking surf, the sun passing overhead. There’s power in a wave, its sense of beginning, midpoint, and end; no wonder we fall into it in stories. But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. […]

Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.”

SPIRAL: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus.

MEANDER: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens.

RADIAL or EXPLOSION: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite.

BRANCHING and other FRACTAL patterns: self-replication at lesser scale, made by trees, coastlines, clouds.

CELLULAR patterns: repeating shapes you see in a honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool […].

These patterns aren’t just around us; they inform our bodies, too. We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolas, irises, and sneezes; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, and fists. We invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds, too: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander [..]. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Why wouldn’t they form our [literary] narratives, too?

A digressive narrative meanders; at times it flows quickly and at times barely at all, often loops back on itself, yet ultimately it moves onward. A spiraling narrative might move around and around with a system of rhythmic repetitions, yet it advances, deepening into the past, perhaps, or rising into the future. A radial narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence, horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time. A fractal narrative could branch from a core or seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core […]. And cellular narratives come in like parts, not moving forward in time from one to another but creating a network of meaning. […]

In this book I’ll look at ways that writers have done all of this, finding patterns other than the arc inside their stories. This will be a museum of specimens. »

— Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

[thewriterscaravan]

“Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.” 

―Mary Szybist

[thewriterscaravan]

I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.

Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

There should be a word for when blue goes from powder to midnight. From sea to vein. From origin to eclipse. How should we confirm the missingness of everything we haven’t ever been allowed to speak into a shape?

Scherezade Siobhan, Radius  (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

“Anger and tenderness: my selves. 

 And now I can believe they breathe in me 

 as angels, not polarities." 

 —Adrienne Rich, ‘Integrity’

Happy 36th to me. 

[thewriterscaravan]

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

David Whyte, “Everything Is Waiting for You”

#poetry #poems #lit #quote #writing #poets #intimacy #surroundings

[thewriterscaravan]

“We move like a platoon of silhouettes balancing sledge hammers on our heads, unaware our shadows have untied from us, wandered off & gotten lost.”

Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

You sit on on your own, like an idea unencumbered by argumentation

Mahmoud Darwish, ‘If I were someone else’ (A River Dies of Thirst, Journals)

[thewriterscaravan]

I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening’s guests.

Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

A very good reading list to understand race, privilege and solidarity. 

[thewriterscaravan]

A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies" (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

[thewriterscaravan]

I walked away with your face stolen from a crowded room, & the sting of required memory lived beneath my skin. A name raw on my tongue, in my brain, a glimpse nestled years later like a red bird among wet leaves on a dull day.“

Yusef Komunyakaa, Providence (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

But I remained captive to the ancient tenderness.

Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

Could I frame an empty boat for this old body's frame?

Thomas Heise, Horror Vacui (via viperslang)

[thewriterscaravan]

from a drowning

All night the wind shapes ellipses From the sacrum of sea-husked boats

Water narrows the paisley of its tongue As if a Persian blue hyphen—

All distance is an emptied hourglass, An Alice universe too luminous in its lie

Men with hands like leather-bound bibles tease the weeded augury of conch-songs

Maghrib is a drooping sonance, a mapless gull        —a compass breastfed on ambergris

These are the roots I can’t be clawed from I can’t perfume my throat with Calo or Pashtu

Just like I can’t liquor the blackout of my father’s Suicide. Leaving is cloudless – the sky always

Barefoot, ennobled

by its own alizarin calligraphy

Ancestors of rock salt cathedrals. Ancestors of storm-chasing caravans

What am I if not splintered phosphorescence? A gasp of voltage. Trickled Trout.

The spine of God filigreeing the coral Cave of my mouth. The chambered echo

Of my heart flowering inwards Into a hungry anemone

Scherezade Siobhan