Have you ever read sentences so potent that the words seem to tremble because they can’t bear the weight of the meanings they carry? Have you ever comHave you ever read sentences so potent that the words seem to tremble because they can’t bear the weight of the meanings they carry? Have you ever come across poetry that’s so soft yet so feral that you aren’t sure if you’re being eaten or if you want to tear up the pages, crumple them, stuff them into your mouth and swallow the words whole? Are you the hunter or the hunted? Are you simply being haunted by the ghostly contours of the poem or are you gasping at every word, chasing after each line until you’re breathless?
Dreams of your sister’s birth your mother dying in childbirth over and over not knowing how to stop bearing you over and over
The words are purposes, the words are maps - for labyrinths long-lost and long-forgotten with hungry, desperate minotaurs in them, waiting and waiting. Reading Rich’s poetry is like running towards the minotaur and running away from him all at once. She teaches us to look at intently while also being looked upon with unfathomable hunger.
Madness. Suicide. Murder. Is there no way out but these?
Reading Rich’s poetry is like emerging out of the surface of the sea after being nearly drowned – choking on water, flapping your arms, trying to get a hold of yourself only to drown again. It’s like falling and falling endlessly, like you do in your dreams, only to wake up before the crash because your brain cannot really comprehend death. It’s like diving into the wreck.
these scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know...more
This poem was written in acknowledgment of, solidarity with, and in conversation with the police violence perpetrated against all black and brown peopThis poem was written in acknowledgment of, solidarity with, and in conversation with the police violence perpetrated against all black and brown peoples in the United States.
All of the poems in this book are written in solidarity with and in conversation with the oppressed across the world, but especially with black and brown people. There's something so beautiful about the way Diaz maps fetishised, pathologized bodies in her book, particularly the bodies of latinx women. There's also something so telling about the way she writes of bodies in the way one would about open wounds, there's so much tenderness, pain and the possibility of healing.
As I read some of these poems, I watched my own hands and thought about what they're capable of, what they've been subjected too. I reflected on my own body, its curves, dips and contours. I wondered if I've already become a museum of myself, collecting and exhibiting all my trauma over the years so that now it's a labyrinth even to me. My appetite, my hunger waxing and waning as the poems holler, reach a crescendo and go forward, always down. We've performed our lives as the fables they wrote for us and these poems are a revolt against those fables.
We are deserts and deserted, our bodies temples for a runaway god we don't understand and don't obey. These poems had me by the throat, strangled me as I struggled to say choke me. I am eaten and full.
This collection is an Odyssey, a search for and a return home, a return to the brother and a return to the mother....more
Langston Hughes has a way of writing about black women and their pain and suffering (especially in the series of poems called 'madam to you') that's aLangston Hughes has a way of writing about black women and their pain and suffering (especially in the series of poems called 'madam to you') that's almost songlike, that's also so full of vulnerability and identification. These poems enrapture you, and you know they come from a place of close association.
She stands In the quiet darkness, This troubled woman Bowed by Weariness and pain Like an Autumn flower In the frozen rain, Like a Wind-blown autumn flower That never lifts its head Again.
He also has a way of writing about death, grief and sorrow, particularly the black man's sorrow, that brilliantly showcases the universal within the particular. I don't mean to appropriate the black man's pain here, I cannot lay any claim to it. I only mean to say that Hughes conveys the sentiment within a black man's heart so well, that we cannot help but feel as though our hearts are being squeezed.
But most of all, Hughes dreams and sings of freedom. Because that's all the dispossessed first think of - freedom.
There were slaves then, too, But in their hearts the slaves knew What he said must be meant for every human being— Else it had no meaning for anyone. Then a man said: BETTER TO DIE FREE, THAN TO LIVE SLAVES. He was a colored man who had been a slave But had run away to freedom. And the slaves knew What Frederick Douglass said was true.
Love shook my heart like wind on a mountain punishing oak trees.
I read all the poems of this book in less that half a day, even while taking breaks in Love shook my heart like wind on a mountain punishing oak trees.
I read all the poems of this book in less that half a day, even while taking breaks in between to complete chores and not because I possess astounding reading prowess, but simply because most of these poems are just fragments consisting of two or three lines. Recent trends in minimalism have renewed interest in Sappho's poems. However, scholarly speculations are that these fragments were originally parts of larger poems swallowed by history, but mostly by book-burning religious authorities.
The language and metaphors Sappho uses are very simple and therefore the bones of each poem are laid bare for the reader. Well, I cannot actually speak for the original language used, but the translation sure is simple and I have to make the very reasonable assumption that the translators preserved the form and content in a way that did justice to the original poetry.
Therefore, there cannot be many questions as to the content and intention behind these poems, it does not seem like Sappho made any attempts to conceal either. But of course, for centuries there have been debates as to whether Sappho was a lesbian - in both the geographical and sexual sense. While today historians vouch that she was both, there have been many attempts at an erasure of Sappho's sexuality driven by ignorance and/or prejudice. And this erasure has been so ingrained into historical narratives about Sappho that it's almost comical now. After all, it has led to the modern coinage of the sarcastic phrase "Sappho and her friend" to refer to people who deny that many famous/historical figures were queer despite abundant evidence. I mean, we somehow have a flat earth society, so what can you say? People see what they want to see.
When it comes to Sappho, I suggest that any non-believer just read what survives of her poems, because really, she couldn't have made it any more obvious.
Some say there are nine Muses. Count again. Behold the tenth: Sappho of Lesbos. Plato, in The Greek Anthology 9.506...more
Not that I plunged into its pages expecting pornography. Okay, I did expect a little pornography. ActuallThis wasn't as sexy as I thought it would be.
Not that I plunged into its pages expecting pornography. Okay, I did expect a little pornography. Actually, more than a little. Except, it was a lot more nuanced than simple pornography. Some of it was exciting, arousing even, and the rest of it was vastly disappointing.
Interestingly, I did notice that poets with Latin American and Eastern heritage/influences imbued the 'erotic spirit' into their writing in a markedly more complex and confident manner than the Western poets. Eastern and Latin American poets were a lot more lucid about their longings and the metaphorical devices they used to unravel their passions were strikingly beautiful. They also seemed a lot more comfortable with blasphemic writing, many of them eroticizing the divine and sometimes fetishizing the Gods (which was a complete turn-on by the way.)
Consider for example:
his penis a gourd into which the universe flows, and his entry like the moment of death—
This is about Shiva - a prominent Hindu deity often referred to as "the destroyer" and these lines were penned by Maurya Simon, an American poet who studied Tamil in India and has extensively studied early Hindu and Buddhist traditions along with her own Jewish heritage.
Or consider:
“drink the wine from between my lips” & the moon was a yod drawn on the cover of dawn—in gold ink
These lines are by Samuel ha-Nagid, who was "vizier to the King of Granada and, for eighteen years, commander of his armies. Ha-Nagid is known in Arabic as Ismai’il ibn Nagrela. Some say it was the influence of the more accepting attitude toward homosexuality in Arabic cultures that allowed ha-Nagid, who was Jewish, to write openly of his homosexual love."
A lot of the Western poets were so dull in their writing, it almost seemed lazy. Well I guess I know where to look for erotic poetry now.
Consider:
The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn, I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings, I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now, I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now, I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now.
Ugh. Boring. And who on earth wants to be reminded of procreation while being turned on anyway? And these lines are from a poem by Walt Whitman - the quintessential American poet.
This is not to say that all poets of western heritage were boring or bad at writing erotic poetry. I loved poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Dorianne Laux and Olga Broumas. I just think there is an unmissable connection between poetry and culture that is very evident in this collection....more
Sue me. I think T S Eliot was a petulant whiner. Go ahead, call me a philistine. Because the truth is, I hated this collection. This is a huge confessSue me. I think T S Eliot was a petulant whiner. Go ahead, call me a philistine. Because the truth is, I hated this collection. This is a huge confession for me because I've obsessed over T S Eliot's writing all my life. During my undergrad days, I often read his poetry for comfort and joyously thought "dude gets it." I was convinced that no person, alive or dead, could ever articulate the essence of the gruelling modern human condition better than T S Eliot. But now I'm in my mid-twenties and I've seen too many things, especially in the past two years, and I'm so done with lamentations for lost 'meaning.'
The only reason I'm giving this book three stars is because I understand its literary merit and because I've enjoyed many of these poems individually at various phases of my life. But when I read all of them collectively, I could no longer deny that this was mostly an old, privileged man complaining about life, loss of spirituality (whatever that means), modernity and change.
I think what bothered me the most was the fact that Eliot seemed to bestow people with an agency that we don't really possess - he seems to be of the opinion that as a species, we are entirely capable of attaining spiritual enlightenment (again, whatever that means) but choose not to simply because we are lazy. Ugh.
Eliot is a master of metaphor and therefore, by extension, a master of language. His ingenuity shines through in his use of poetical forms, references to eclectic texts and of course in his use of words as mere tools to associate disparate ideas seamlessly. I only wish he wouldn't whine so much....more
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