February Roses
February 23, 2019
My heart
Is full of February longings
I want to take it out
To make a wreath
To hold your heart
My love
Is pricked by the February roses
I want to swallow the pain
And brew red wine to moisten my lips
To seal your love with a kiss
February roses
I wish that I would be able to exchange with many a night’s waiting
For a moment to have a intimate chat with you
Hearts beat in unison, glances in communion
February roses
I wish that I would be able to exchange with many a day’s loss of wits
For a chance to have you appear in my dream
Without complaint or regret
February roses are like flames
That warm the cold Moon on a winter night
And burn the grey into multicolor
To set the ocean and the other shore ablaze
Rose Lu ( Bing Hua )
My Ego
February 23, 2019
Why should I fight against my ego when we get on so well together?
always voracious
February 23, 2019
The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.
A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.
Jess Zimmerman
Hunger Makes Me
writing imaginative material
February 23, 2019
Find your own writing time. Everybody will have a slightly different time of day, I have yet to meet the person who thinks the early afternoon is good, but I expect there is someone out there who thinks that that’s a good idea.
For me it’s very early in the morning, partly because the house is quiet and partly because I feel I’m stealing a march on things and that makes me feel good.
I think there might be some kind of hook up between what happens in our minds when we’re asleep and writing imaginative material. I think good poems get written, as no doubt good paintings get painted, as a result of these two things coming together in an appropriate way.
Andrew Motion
Top 10 tips for being a successful poet
the rhyme changed my life
February 23, 2019
When I was 12, I wrote a poem that concluded in a very simple rhyme. The poem was nothing special but the rhyme changed my life. My parents were string quartet violinists; when I made that rhyme, I thought, This is my music…
I pretty much write all the time and don’t follow any particular routine or practice. I almost always write the first draft (or two or three) in longhand and move to a computer later; this is true for novels, as well as for poems. I write in spiral notebooks – grabbing whichever comes to hand, which means the same notebook may hold paragraphs from different stories and lines from various poems and a book review or essay. I would so love to be more systematic but I work on a lot of things at once and the result is, paper everywhere, with no way to organize it.
Writing in any form is a “journey of discovery”. Writing poetry is how I think, and learning what one thinks is terrifically exciting: That’s the journey, that’s the illumination. In any given poem, I want to make the idea of it as clear as possible -which is not to say an exposition but an unclouded vision.
I also have a great desire to include all kinds of things in my poetry; that is, to take on, in my poetry, different worlds, as in science, history, language, philosophy, visual art, music, religion, etc. I am interested in all these things, and it seems natural to me to want to write about them.
Kelly Cherry
Interview with Maureen Doallas for tweetspeak
your poems
February 23, 2019
Spend time with your poems before you write them. Be patient, if they’re obscure. Calm, if they provoke you. Wait for each one to take shape and reach perfection with its power of language and its power of silence.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
In Search of Poetry
Saturday Morning
February 23, 2019
To A Lady With An Unruly And Ill-Mannered Dog Who Bit Several Persons Of Importance
February 21, 2019
Your dog is not a dog of grace;
He does not wag the tail or beg;
He bit Miss Dickson in the face;
He bit a Bailie in the leg.
What tragic choices such a dog
Presents to visitor or friend!
Outside there is the Glasgow fog;
Within, a hydrophobic end.
Yet some relief even terror brings,
For when our life is cold and gray
We waste our strength on little things,
And fret our puny souls away.
A snarl! A scruffle round the room!
A sense that Death is drawing near!
And human creatures reassume
The elemental robe of fear.
So when my colleague makes his moan
Of careless cooks, and warts, and debt,
– Enlarge his views, restore his tone,
And introduce him to your Pet!
Sir Walter Raleigh
longing for something
February 21, 2019
So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something..nothing – talking, working, eating, wondering always who am I?
Sylvia Plath
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
the poems that I like most
February 21, 2019
I never quite believe it when poets say that they’re not writing out of their own feelings, and when that is the case, I tend not to be terribly interested in what they’re doing.
I don’t mean to say that they are writing bad poems, but those aren’t the poems that I like most. The poems I most like are where the engine is a very emotional one, where the warmth of strong feeling is very powerfully present in the thing that is being given to us. I think poetry is a rather emotional form and when it isn’t that, I’m not very interested in it.
Andrew Motion
Top 10 tips for being a successful poet
