December 2011
46 posts
Happy new year, thank you for reading my rambles...
“What good is surviving if you lose your mind to the war?”
– Indigo Williams
“No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
“perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke quote
“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
“A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I recommend the book: Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Golden Shovel: attempt 1
The aim of the golden shovel form is to take a striking line or lines from another poets poem and each word of that line should read horizontally on the right side of your poem. This is my first attempt, unedited.
“and if sun comes how shall we greet him?“-Gwendolyn Brooks from the poem Truth
Our garden once rife with jasmine and
Lilac now bellows loss. The tree bereft of her...
“People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and...”
– The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, p. 220. (via thisisntlisa)
“Last love, everyday without you was a life I crawled out of.”
– Rachel McKibbens
Poets I recommend: Helen Mort
PHOTOGRAPHY
As if a single cord of wind
blew through your ribcage,
looped around your heart,
the photo catches you.
/
From now, your movement
is a kite’s: you have the sky
and yet you’re tethered
to a man below, an ancestor
/
who looks on plaintively
as if from an old print:
your face in his, or his in yours.
Even when he yields the string,
/
he’s set your course....
“Blood may be thicker than water but we are made up of 70% of water. Sometimes...”
– Indigo Williams
POETRYEATER: Elyse Fenton, "After the Blast" →
poetryeater:
It happened again just now, one word snagging like fabric on a barbed fence.
Concertina wire. You said: I didn’t see the body hung on concertina wire. This was after the blast.
After you had stood in the divot, both feet in the dust’s new mouth and found no one alive.
Just out of the shower, I…
When you comment on a post I can't reply to them,...
“Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing- peace is the...”
– George Melton
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of...”
– John Muir
“Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one...”
– Edgar Allan Poe
Dear Indigo,
Here is a list of the things you forget.
It is okay to fail. Your screw ups are never as bad as you think they are and even if they are, you are allowed to be bad. You are more patient with the world than you are with yourself, change that.
Don’t be so hard on yourself, it is borderline abuse. You can lock off negative relationships but you can’t get away from yourself. Be kind to...
ASK A POET: Dan “Sully” Sullivan
1) What are the most important qualities a poet should have? A desire to write, perserverence, a need to grow, willingness to receive critique, willingness to edit, time, and (maybe most importantly) a dedication to reading others’ work. 2) List 3 things you wish you knew when you started writing? a) Marc Kelly Smith, the father of the poetry slam, says “this art form cannot exist without...
Dan “Sully” Sullivan
is a Chicago based Stand-Up Poet. He has appeared on HBO Def Poetry and on stages all over the United States and Europe. He is a member of both the Speak’Easy Ensemble directed by Poetry Slam Founder Marc Kelly Smith and the duo Death From Below.
Sully has been published in several magazines & anthologies including The Columbia Poetry Review,Learn Then Burn: A Modern Poetry Anthology for the...
ASK A POET
Ever wanted to ask your favourite poet questions about how they craft their work but couldn’t because they’re out of reach?
Well, I’ve started asking them. I’ll be sharing the replies I’ve received under the new section ASK A POET so look out for that. Also, if you have any questions you would like me to ask send them in and I’ll feature them on the next one....
Home Grown
He travels because he has an appetite for exotic fruit. If he can’t find the type he likes, the brand new perfectly round, no blemish, supermarket shine kind, he returns home with foreign names in his mouth. My home- grown tomatoes don’t come from palm trees or grow under pelting heat, they’re just tomatoes. They look bruised and when ripe they look inflamed. They swell from black to...
“I only know a poem is finished when I get a release, until then all of me...”
– Indigo Williams
“Love means you breathe in two countries.”
– Naomi shihab Nye
poets I recommend: Naomi Shihab Nye
Two countries
Skin remembers how long the years growwhen skin is not touched, a gray tunnelof singleness, feather lost from the tailof a bird, swirling onto a step,swept away by someone who never sawit was a feather. Skin ate, walked,slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin feltit was never seen, never known asa land on the map, nose like a city,hip like a city, gleaming...
“The great ones always hurt the most, in life and in art.”
– Indigo Williams
A life for a life
I am very impatient and I don’t like pain.
However, my best work is often the most painful to write, which makes sense when you think about it, you are after all giving away pieces of yourself. You are giving life to that thing you are trying to create. A life for a life seems to be the way of art.
We are all in the continuous process of dying but an artist makes a living of it. I often...
“The best advice anyone can really give you about writing is to keep writing....”
– Indigo Williams
