Riddle

I am the mirror breathing above the sink.
There is a censored garden inside of me.
Over my worms someone has thrown

a delicately embroidered sheet.

And also the child at the rummage sale –

more souvenirs than memories.

I am the cat buried beneath
the tangled ivy. Also the white
weightless egg
floating over its grave. Snow

where there were leaves. Empty
plastic cups after the party on the beach.

I am ash rising above a fire, like a flame.
The Sphinx with so much sand
blowing vaguely in her face. The last

shadow that passed
over the blank canvas
in the empty art museum. I am

the impossibility of desiring
the person you pity.
And the petal of the Easter lily –

That ghost of a tongue.
That tongue of a ghost.

What would I say if I spoke?

Laura Kasischke

linguistic expression

Poetry is the most versatile, ambidextrous and omnipotent of all type of speech or writing, yet, paradoxically, it is the only one which is unified by a single exclusive feature, that which enables us to identify it and which separates it from every other kind of linguistic expression. This element is the keystone of my definition of poetry and it is called ‘the double pattern’…. One half of the double pattern is made up of devices, effects, habits and frames of reference that poetry shares with all other linguistic discourses….The other half of the pattern pulls against this, it announces the text as a poem by marshalling aspects of language into patterns that serve no purpose elsewhere in language yet which play a role in the way the poem is structured and, most significantly, in how it discharges meaning.

Richard Bradford

Poetry: The Ultimate Guide

Absolutely drained

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great.

Roald Dahl
Boy: Tales of Childhood

The Great Goddess

Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch. . . . Once the relevance of coition to child-bearing had been officially admitted . . . man’s religious status gradually improved. . . The tribal Nymph, or Queen, chose an annual lover from her entourage of young men, for sacrifice at mid-winter when the year ended; making him a symbol of fertility rather than the object of her erotic pleasure. His sprinkled blood served to fructify trees, crops, and flocks, and his flesh was, it seems, eaten raw by the Queen’s fellow-nymphs priestesses wearing the masks of bitches, mares, or sows.

Robert Graves
The Greek Myths vol. one

darkness inside

Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.

Jasmine Warga
My Heart and Other Black Holes

easier ways to make money

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us. That is also why we pretend to be hard-boiled, saying things like: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’ (Samuel Johnson). Not true. No one except a blockhead ever wrote except for love.

There are plenty of easier ways to make money. Almost anything is less labour-intensive and better paid than writing. Almost anything is safer. Reveal yourself on the page repeatedly, and you are likely to be rewarded with exile, prison or neglect. Ask Dante or Oscar Wilde or Emily Dickinson. Scheme and betray, and you are likely be reward with wealth, publicity and homage. Tell the truth and you are likely to be a pariah within your family, a semi-criminal to authorities and damned with faint praise by your peers. So why do we do it? Because saying what you think is the only freedom. ‘Liberty,’ said Camus, ‘is the right not to lie.’

In society in which everything is for sale, in which deals and auctions make the biggest news, doing it for love is the only remaining liberty. Do it for love and you cannot be censored. Do it for love and you cannot be stopped. Do it for love and the rich will envy no one more than you. In a world of tuxedos the naked man is king. In a world of bookkeepers with spreadsheets, the one who gives it away without counting the cost is God.

Erica Jong
Doing it for love