I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Sylvia Plath as an Old Story Title for Learning to Fight Depression Where the Semiotics Simply Suggest That a Garden Illustrates Peace as a Foreshadow Rather Than as a Vivid Depiction of an Ancestral Society of Sad Mothers & Helpless Fathers by Nome Emeka Patrick
Tell it this way: depression is the 30cm nail driving into the walls.
If you ever read about Plath, ever kept a lantern from dying,
ever tended a garden it grew so wild to swallow god, ever kept
dressing the fire in your bones, then you must know about grief,
possibly how to end it. Maami once stood in this garden. Now,
I stand in her shadow like a sphinx in a crusade of an inferno.
In Lagos, another news says a student of microbiology, 400L, took
a nook’s way to the sky, death could not stop for him—anymore.
Let’s agree: failure is the arm swinging the pendulum across the face
of every dream. These gardens grow wild & the birds unfurl their
wings into an offering of flight. My cousin knelt in this garden once.
I kowtow into his absence, my knees—eyes dressed in dust & dearth.
In my mouth, every name glistens with a beak. I owe every wall
a shadow, every bed a midnight of creaks & crimson, every heart
an arrhythmia twice the speed of a destrier. In the library, my finger
Canterburies through The Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath, for once in
my whole life, I recite “Lady Lazarus” & remember I have a father
growing in the garden. Do I terrify?—what fear sweeps this little life?
Tainted black & bruised, a chorus lifts itself onto my mouth’s blade:
dy—dying is an art, so just like everything else I do it exceptionally well, yelz
yet even with honey disguised in holocaust, who, tell me, wants to die this young?
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Each day, hot off the press from Moon & Son, “Knowing of your continued interest,” Here’s a new book — well, actually the updated Edition of their one all-time best-seller — To find last night’s place in, and forge ahead. If certain scenes and situations (“work,” As the jacket has it, “of a blazingly Original voice”) make you look up from your page — But this is life, is truth, is me! — too many Smack of self-plagiarism. Terror and tryst, Vow and verbena, done before, to death, In earlier chapters, under different names … And what about those characters? No true Creator would just let them fade from view Or be snuffed out, like people. Yet is there room (In the pinch of pages under your right thumb) To bring them back so late into their own? — Granted their own can tell itself from yours. You’d like to think a structure will emerge, If only a kind of Joycean squirrel run Returning us all neatly to page 1, But the inconsistencies of plot and style Lead you to fear that, for this author, fiction Aims at the cheap effect, “stranger than fiction,” As people once thought life — no, truth, was. Strange … Anyhow, your final thought tonight, Before you kiss my picture and turn the light out, Is of a more exemplary life begun Tomorrow, truer, harder to get right.
One of the things I love most about James Merrill, other than the fact that he was a wholly original and inimitable poet, was that he was openly gay in most of his circles. For someone born in 1926 to live so openly and so unashamedly despite the stigma and prejudice he no doubt dealt with on a daily basis is incredible to me. It’s truly a shame that he is not discussed more outside of the queer literati because he changed the landscape of American poetry for everyone that came after him, queer or not.
Do you have a favorite poem of James Merrill’s or even a favorite collection? Before reading today’s post, had you heard of him? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
This isn’t a great poem. I’m not writing this to write a great poem. I am writing this because I am one person. I am only one. I have a face and a front of my face. I have two shoulders and two hips. I’m living. I live. So what can I do with my face if it can’t see that person’s face? What do I tell my eyes to see? How do I let them know that when they see that face it is that person’s wish that they not know it? How do I tell them we have to go back into the world where no one knows us and we don’t know anyone? How do I tell them to stay there? There is nothing for them to see. How do I tell my hands they will never touch that person’s hands? How do I tell my ears that when that person says my name it is only a word? How do I tell my lips to make that person’s name another word so I can say it? How do I tell my neck that person cannot see it? How do I tell my hair that person cannot pull it? It is my hair. It is my head. How do I tell my teeth they will never strike that person’s teeth? How do I tell my thighs it does not matter what they do? They are the tops of my legs. They will fall apart. How do I tell my back it must never wait for that person? That person will not hold me. That person does not know where I am, does not think of me. Does not know I have exhausted every argument against him. That person does not know I no longer love freedom. That person does not know what it means when I ask for forgiveness. That person does not know I beg the world to let me change. That person cannot see my face. Knows a woman with my name and she is a woman. Does not know the word I hide behind my words. Does not know this face. Does not know this is my face. Says my name and looks at this person. How do I tell my feet to stand here? How do I tell my eyes to see? How do I tell the voice under my voice to keep on speaking? How do I tell my mouth to speak?
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), while frequently excluded from mention in conversations surrounding early twentieth century American poetry, was critically acclaimed and lauded by both her peers and the public alike during her lifetime. Her deeply personal and heartfelt poems charted the changing inner landscape of a woman living through one of the most turbulent periods in American history, and we would do well to re-examine her impact on her contemporaries as well as her successors. You can read more about her life and work here.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
They say willingness is what one needs to succeed.
They say one needs to succeed.
*
Our poets do not imagine a screaming
audience.
Our poets are used to padding,
vinyl, on the foldable chairs, bookshelves on casters moved aside to make space for them
A world polite for their words
A well-behaved. A world’s behavior
malformed and they step in as one steps in to a nursery and
quiet
calms the tantrum attempts not to wake the sleeping, the milk-drunk
and burped babe.
Our poets coo.
And beg their feet be placed in a large room.
*
Prize ring. Bull ring. Lion through the ring of flames.
Poets convinced they are ringmaster when it is with big brooms and bins, in fact, they enter to clear the elephant scat.
*
There was an inlet I pulled over once to watch the sunset, which was still another hour or so away, the light just low enough there to begin to change. I should’ve stayed. I should’ve stayed.
*
A life of idle, with money
doing the work. A life beholden, but bestowed. To make reformists of us all,
even the fascists. Especially
of the fascists.
*
But he’s a patron. But he makes a star of us, he makes us of rank.
But he’s a churchgoer
and they place their hands on him and pray and bountiful grow their wives’ bellies, a bully for each family. Exponential doom.
Singing to each other in the private gazebo of their youth.
*
Now sing.
*
I said what I meant but I said it
in velvet. I said it in feathers. And so one poet reminded me
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.
There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.
I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.
First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed
the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.
This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
The Voracious Bibliophile 