Nejma

our tragedy begins humid.
in a humid classroom.
with a humid text book. breaking into us.
stealing us from ourselves.
one poem. at a time.

it begins with shakespeare.

the hot wash.
the cool acid. of
dead white men and women. people.

each one a storm.

crashing. into our young houses.
making us islands. easy isolations.
until we are so beleaguered and
swollen
with a definition of poetry that is white skin and
not us.
that we tuck our scalding. our soreness.
behind ourselves and
learn
poetry.
as trauma. as violence. as erasure.
another place we do not exist.
another form of exile
where we should praise. honor. our own starvation.

~Nayyirah Waheed

Ode to a Nightingale

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To they high requiem become a sod.

~John Keats

The Argonauts

At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it.

~Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

I learned this scorn from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people's needs as repulsive. Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.

~Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

~Maggie Nelson

Why Poetry

I think if we are being honest, we probably would admit that at times we fear there is an unbridgeable gap between us and others--readers, friends, family, partners--that language cannot cross. Or maybe we fear the gap is in fact bridgeable by someone less damaged or more talented or attractive or authentic than ourselves. To cross this gap is the dream of all writers, and that dream is a kind of metonymy of the human dream to cross over into intimacy or connection.

~Matthew Zapruder

The Argonauts

In Arabic, the word for fetus derives from jinn, which means "hidden from sight." No matter how many ultrasounds you've had, no matter how well you feel you've gotten to know your baby's rhythms in utero, the baby's boy is still a revelation. A body! An actual body!

~Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

I didn't send the fragment because I had in any way achieved its serenity. I sent it with the aspiration that one day I might--that one day my jealousy might recede, and I would be able to behold the names and images of others inked onto your skin without disjunct or distaste.

~Maggie Nelson

Half Empty

Art was salvation, art was revolution. There was a war going on and the soldiers were those engaged in the deadly serious and downright heroic business of making art.

~David Rakoff

Paris Review Interview

In New York you may have the greatest and most congenial friends, but it's extraordinary if you ever know anything about them except that little wedge of their life that you meet with the little wedge of your life. You don't get that sense of a continuous narrative line. You never see the full circle. But in the South, where people don't move about as much, even now, and where they once hardly ever moved away at all, the pattern of life was always right there.

~Eudora Welty

The Life of Samuel Johnson: Dread of Solitude

"But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think; but that the thoughts of each individual there, would be distressing when alone."

~Samuel Johnson, recorded by James Boswell

Paris Review Interview

I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn't love one's country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don't think you can escape it. There isn't any other place to go--you don't pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you'll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere. If you try to pretend you don't see the immediate reality that formed you I think you'll go blind.

~James Baldwin

Pudd'nhead Wilson

Adam was but human--this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

~Mark Twain

The Little Prince

"Men?" she echoed. "I think there are six or seven of them in existence. I saw them several years ago. But one never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult."

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Virgin Suicides

The girls were monstrous in their formal dresses, each built around a wire cage. Pounds of hair were secured atop their heads. Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly percieved-- bound, in other words, for life.

~Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides

Demo explained it to us like this: "We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time."

~Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides

It's no different with the girls. Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all. It might just as well be a mouth, which is as wet and as warm. The scar might be over the heart or the kneecap. We can't tell.

~Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides

But now Mr. Bates didn't scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips--they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.

~Jeffrey Eugenides

The Elements of Style

Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

~William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

The Becoming of the Native: Man in America Before Columbus

When man set foot on the continent of North America he was surely an endangered species...He was almost wholly at the mercy of the elements, and the world he inhabited was hard and unforgiving. The simple accomplishment of survival must have demanded all of his strength. But he had certain indispensable resources. He knew how to hunt. He possessed tools and weapons, however crude. He could make fire...He had some sense of society, of community, of cooperation. And, alone among the creatures of the earth, he could think and speak. He had a human sense of morality, an irresistible craving for order, beauty, appropriate behavior. He was intensely spiritual.

~N. Scott Momaday

The Virgin Suicides

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

~Jeffrey Eugenides