— CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ, from “Ars Poetica?,” trans. Czesław Miłosz

 & Lillian Vallee.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters, 1902-1922

Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life's work. Even if it turns out that I don't have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there's nothing I can do about this feeling. I can't make it go away.

— Mieko Kawakami, in Breasts and Eggs

Cecily Brown (British, b. 1969), Untitled, 2000-01. Oil on canvas, 152.5 x 178 cm

On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.

Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it— to look around and love,”

— Mary Oliver, ‘The Deer,’ from House of Light

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

Frank O’Hara, in Personism: A Manifesto, featured in Selected Poems

Eve and Her Planets by Ghadah Alkandari, 2018

a note and a kiss discovered in my thrifted mary oliver poetry collection

What a relief / To be wide awake, knowing my wakefulness / Doesn’t need me, sure that my bench exists. / Never doubting its existence beneath me, knowing / For sure that it is truly beneath me / To sit on a bench that I doubt exists. / How sweet to be fully alive, for just this morning / To have nothing to live for, to think well of my thought, [...]

Jim Gauer, in an excerpt from Will This Thought Do?, featured in The Paris Review, Issue 100, Summer-Fall 1986

i love when poetry does that (makes every moment of my life stack on top of one another and sit on my heart until i am sure every cell in my body remembers it is alive again)

maybe home is in your / mouth, in the words, those / mornings when you catch sight of yourself in the / mirror, and don't recognise what you see, it's only when you / move your / mouth to speak that you hear the / music [...]

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, featured in Auguries of a Minor God

haven't we all been there where / one person becomes the world & / thinks the world of you

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, in an excerpt from Ode to Day, featured in Auguries of a Minor God

Forgive this interlude for a while: I became infinitely / glamorous and careless, like the best memory, of past / loves.

Joanne Kyger, in an excerpt from June 7. To get a head start..., featured in The Paris Review, Issue no. 56 (Spring 1973)

I don't speak. I smoke.

Marina Tsvetaeva, in Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922

i love when poetry does that (makes every moment of my life stack on top of one another and sit on my heart until i am sure every cell in my body remembers it is alive again)

before i do something i must second-guess myself 60 times