June 2011
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Dear all,
I need to pause posting and following this space the way I have been, at least for a while— I will still post on pauses and silences and the final sentence from time to time as the comfort of collective tumblr projects is something that’ll be good.
I feel that I really need to preserve my energies at the moment in order to be there for my partner Ben, as his dad is dying...
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“Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the...”
– Fernando Pessoa, from A Factless Autobiography in The Book of Disquiet
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“To the as-yet unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness:...”
– Kurt Vonnegut (with thanks to whiskeyriver)
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And—I’m just realizing this—memory is what people are made of. After skin and bone, I mean. And if memory is what people are made of, then people are made of loss.
Challenging the Limits of Memory, posted by ahuntersheart
We are not only made of our own memory but also of the memory of those who love us. I disagree that people are made of loss: we are an individual conglomeration of our...
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“I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same...”
– Albert Camus, The Stranger
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“Look,” Mother Says
by Anna Kamieńska
“Look,” mother says in my dream, “Look, a bird soars up to the clouds. Why don’t you write about it, How heavy it is, how swift?
“And here on the table—the smell Of bread, a tinkling of plates. You don’t need to speak of me again. There is no me where I rest. “I’ve passed, I’ve ceased, It’s enough for me: goodnight!” So I write this poem about birds, About bread … Mama....
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“And time
salvaged, like a pulse between
stillness and change. Late afternoon....”
– Louise Glück, from Island (posted by puddlenotes on pausesandsilences)
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“Something in both of us
never got born:
too late to hack it out,
or to...”
– Jay Macpherson, from Old Age of the Teddy-Bear (posted by watercolournights)
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“Die versunkene Stadt
für mich
allein
versunken.
Ich schwimme
in diesen...”
– Hilde Domin, Köln/ Cologne, translated by Eavan Boland
This poem means so much, more than I could ever express— Köln is part of me, I swam its streets, and a dark past is a part it. People disappeared like ghosts, were tortured and killed within its walls and the city will eternally remain...
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“What absorbs me is not the fear of falling
It is the fear of not being able, of...”
– Marion
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“silence
.is
a
looking
bird:the
turn
ing;edge,of
life
…”
– e. e. cummings, from as if as (from No Thanks, 1935 Manuscript in Complete Poems 1904 - 1962) - posted on pauses and silences
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This Low by The Swell Season (Live)
Thread the...
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26th June
Questions:
What do you say to a man when he is dying?
What do you say to your man when his dad is dying?
Conclusions:
There are no words.
No human has ever uttered these words through speech, or if they have it has remained a secret or is only spoken in a language preserved by a few.
What remains:
Holding,
of hands and bodies.
of hearts and souls.
What always remains:
The omnipresent...
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“I want to
let her know
though
that all the nights
sleeping
beside her
even...”
– Charles Bukowski, from Confession
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“I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of...”
– The Hours (thank you for reminding me, meltinglight)
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I Wished On The Moon (1935) by Billie Holiday
I...
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“This phantasm
of falling petals vanishes into
moon and flowers”
– Okyo, 1890
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pauses and silences - a tumblr collaboration
A collective place for poetry, in its many forms. A space for intertwinings and inspirations. A collaboration. An idea for now.
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“I am always wandering,
remembering, how time is both forgiving
and washing...”
– Santiago
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“Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart’s
curtain? It rose: the...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Fourth Elegy (in Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell)
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I’m not holdingmyself
very well together
lately
I’m f
a
l
l
i rs and all these invisible s p a c e s
n i
g a
down w-o-r-d-s and st
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The Sound
by Kim Addonizio
Marc says the suffering that we don’t see still makes a sort of sound—a subtle, soft noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we might think of—more the slight scrape of a hat doffed by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back to let a lovely woman pass, her dress just brushing his coat. Or else it’s like a crack in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress and...
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“You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word
you don’t recognize, a...”
– Dorianne Laux, How It Will Happen, When (excerpt), from Smoke: Poems by Dorianne Laux
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“We have forgotten that poetry is not in what words say but in what is said...”
– Octavio Paz, in the essay Elizabeth Bishop, or the Power of Reticence, 1975 (adapted from ahuntersheart)
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