Tag: quotes

Ta-Nehisi Coates, on not letting them take it from you

Coming up on hip-hop really taught me the beauty of poetry. Reading comic books taught me the beauty of poetry. Studying poetry after that, I had this obsession with how language sounded.

Do you worry about going further than your audience is ready to go?

“No, because I wrote for 12 years and had no audience. I’m prepared for it to go. I loved writing before this and I will love writing after this. I loved it when it made no money. I love it now that it makes more money. I will love it when it goes back to making no money again. It’s not for that. And the minute you let them take it from you, the minute it becomes for them, you are lost.“

— Ta-Nehisi Coates interviewed by Playboy

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

― Wendell Berry 

 

Friday whimsy

Today:

    • Eileen Myles’s The Art of Poetry interview appears in the Fall issue of The Paris Review (excerpt here)

I like the idea of writing a poem I could have written thirty years ago. I’m the factory. My writing fears manifest more on the order of my inability to stop being Eileen Myles. I guess I don’t worry about my poems so much. I worry about me.

  • Missy Elliot’s WTF return (NPR’s All Things Considered and Vox)
  • The New Yorker on The Curious Persistence of Poetry Shops
  • One Bouquet of Fleeting Beauty, Please – Modern Love piece contemplating the “startling beauty of impermanence.” Thanks, Kristan!

    Why do we send flowers? To make up for what is intangible? Those feelings we can’t hold in our hands and present as a gift to our loved ones? And why is it that the placeholders we choose — the dozen red roses, the fragrant white lilies, the long-stemmed French tulips — are so fleeting?

  • Caitlin Moran’s Posthumous Advice for Her Daughter

    Nine times out of ten, you probably aren’t having a full-on nervous breakdown – you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit. You’d be amazed how easily and repeatedly you can confuse the two. Get a big biscuit tin.

    Choose your friends because you feel most like yourself around them, because the jokes are easy and you feel like you’re in your best outfit when you’re with them, even though you’re just in a T-shirt. Never love someone whom you think you need to mend – or who makes you feel like you should be mended.

    Stay at peace with your body. While it’s healthy, never think of it as a problem or a failure. Pat your legs occasionally and thank them for being able to run. Put your hands on your belly and enjoy how soft and warm you are – marvel over the world turning over within, the brilliant meat clockwork, as I did when you were inside me and I dreamt of you every night.