Hello lovely people of tumblr-land! I know I’ve been terribly neglectful of this account, and I’ve decided it’s time for my newly-pink hair and I to make a fresh start. I’ll be doing so over at lilroseridinghood.tumblr.com, and I’d be delighted if you saw fit to join me :)

7knotwind:

JERRY SALTZ
advice for artists
(quote found via:toddahh)

As a grad student in theatre, this is one of the best things I’ve ever read.

(Reblogged from tousledbirdmadgirl)
“
Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look

Kim Addonizio, For Desire (via yesyes)

UNF. Yes, absolutely yes.

(Been a while, y’all! But I’m still here.)

(Reblogged from yesyes)

poetbabble:

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. 

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “A Sensible Thing”

(Reblogged from poetbabble)

Jack Gilbert, "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"

poetryeater:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

(Reblogged from poetryeater)
“
there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver (via cartographe)
(Reblogged from cartographe)
“

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver, from When Death Comes (via cartographe)
(Reblogged from cartographe)

8/30

at first i could not extricate you from my words. like trying to report on a train crash without describing the train. at first i tried to speak & found you stuck at the back of my throat like splintered matches threatening to ignite. now i write about you like a paleontologist unearthing fossils. when centuries of dust are brushed from their spines the dinosaurs do not feel pain. when i walk into the cave of what used to be our love it is with torches held high & blazing. i am only here to salvage myself. your wreckage can no longer wound me. at first everywhere i went i became lost in the sorrow of you, dark & drowning. now i am like the sign outside the baptist church downtown: “i go but i do not disappear.”

five--a--day asked: I've been looking through your writing tonight and I can't tell you how magnificent you are. And I hate words like that. I hate to say you're "magnificent" or "beautiful" or even "talented." Those words don't seem real. Instead I want to tell you that your words are the pulse that beats in my wrist.

if only i had the words for how much this means to me! i’m always so deeply moved by your writing, & it’s beyond flattering to know that the resonance exists in both directions. i just want to put this message on my wall & look at it every time i’m feeling stuck. thank you, thank you, thank you. <3   

“
When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what’s inside me—the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory—and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning.
Because poems are meanings, even the saddest poem I write is proof that I want to survive. And therefore it represents an affirmation of life in all its complexities and contradictions.

—Gregory Orr, from “The Making of Poems,” as heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, February 20, 2006.

via A Poet Reflects

(via whiskeyrobot)

(Reblogged from whiskeybot)