Now as if smoke or sweetness were blown my way I inhale a sense of her livingness in that instant, feeling, dreaming, hoping, knowing boredom and zest like anyone else—

a young girl in the garden, the same alchemical square I grew in, we thought sometimes too small for our grand destinies—                                                        But dread

was in her, a bloodbeat, it was against the rolling dark oncoming river she raised bulwarks, setting herself to sift cinders after daily early Mass all of one winter,

labelling the sections of her desk's normal disorder, basing her verses on Keble's Christian Year, picking those endless arguments, pressing on

to manipulate lives to disaster... To change, to change the course of the river! What rage for order disordered her pilgrimage—so that for years at a time

she would hide among strangers, waiting to rearrange all mysteries in a new light.

Denise Levertov, excerpt of “Olga Poems,” from The Sorrow Dance

MAY I BURN. MAY YOU SEE IT; DEVOTION THAT SWALLOWS YOU WHOLE

George Bataille // @inbredlamb // Richard Siken Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out // Olga Koroleva with grandfather // unknown // Richard Siken "Planet of Love," Crush // Otto Künzli Ring for two people / Brooch for two people // Ada Limón "The Good Fight," Bright Dead Things // Phoebe Bridgers Scott Street

Yesterday's journal page 📖🤍

And once more I dream of a dream of a dream.

— Lydia Grigorieva, Shards from the Polar Ice: Selected Poems, transl by John Farndon and Olga Nakston, (2016)

Heretics in Love, 23 XI 2022

Rave

under the

blast of air and Coke's light

morn-ing-party like a lens

focuses on the point of poem

From our vertical files: "Reader's Guide" by Olga Hampel Briggs.

"I couldn't help thinking that someone who overuses the phrase 'in truth' is sure to be a liar."

[Pádraig Ó Tuama]

(Olga Gonzalez Latapi)

Olga Orozco, "Cantos to Berenice (V)", translated by Peter Boyle

"You reigned in Bubastis

your feet in earth, like the Nile,

a constellation for a headdress above your heavenly double.

You were the Sun's daughter and fought against night's malevolent ones -

mire, treason or mole, rodents gnawing at the house wall, at the bed of lovemaking -

from the bejewelled dynasties of stone

to ash-laden kitchen spices, multiplying yourself,

from the temple's halo to the steam off cooking pots.

Solitary sphinx or domestic sybil,

you were the goddess Lar and in every fold, every brushy patch

of your inextricable anatomy, you housed a god, like some insomniac flea.

Through the ears of Isis or Osiris you discovered

that your names were Bastet and Bast and that other name only you know

(or maybe a cat doesn't need three names?)

but when the Furies nibbled away at your heart like a honeycomb of plagues

you puffed yourself up till you claimed kinship with the lion,

then you were called Sekhet, the revenger.

But the gods, the gods too die to be immortal

and, once again, any day they like, burn dust and garbage.

Your little bell rolled round, its music silenced by the wind.

Your little pouch lies scattered among countless mouths of sand."

Your eyes were the gold brown of pebbles under water. I never crossed the bridge over the Roding, dividing the open field of the present from the mysteries, the wraiths and shifts of time-sense Wanstead park held suspended, without remembering your eyes. Even when we were estranged and my own eyes smarted in pain and anger at the thought of you. And by other streams in other countries; anywhere where the light reached down through shallows to gold gravel. Olga’s brown eyes. One rainy summer, down in the New Forest, when we could hardly breathe for ennui and the low sky, you turned savagely to the piano and sightread straight through all the Beethoven sonatas, day after day— weeks, it seemed to me. I would turn the pages some of the time, go out to ride my bike, return—you were enduring in the falls and rapids of the music, the arpeggios rang out, the rectory trembled, our parents seemed effaced. I think of your eyes in that photo, six years before I was born, the fear in them. What did you do with your fear, later? Through the years of humiliation, of paranoia and blackmail and near-starvation, losing the love of those you loved, one after another, parents, lovers, children, idolized friends, what kept compassion’s candle alight in you, that lit you clear into another chapter (but the same book) ‘a clearing in the selva oscura, a house whose door swings open, a hand beckons in welcome’?                       I cross so many brooks in the world, there is so much light dancing on so many stones, so many questions my eyes smart to ask of your eyes, gold brown eyes, the lashes short but the lids arched as if carved out of olivewod, eyes with some vision of festive goodness in back of their hard, or veiled, or shining, unknowable gaze...

Denise Levertov, excerpt of “Olga Poems,” from The Sorrow Dance

my heart wants you, i want your heart more

Olga Broumas Beginning with O; "Love Lines" / Louise Glück excerpt from Poems 1962-2012 / Cesare Saccaggi Incipit Vita Nova - Dante (1903) / Dean Cornwell The Other Side (1918) / Yves Olade excerpt from Bloodsport / Kelly Quindlen She Drives Me Crazy / Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau Daphnis and Chloe (1882) / unknown / Sarah J. Maas excerpt from Queen of Shadows / Cigarettes After Sex Nothing's Gonna Hurt You, Baby

i. Olga Broumas, Love Lines

[ "the water is tender, green, curls / softly innocent, a lazy noose in the sunlight / i loved you, i know // now, water swells / wood, lungs, i loved you, i go" ]

ii. Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012

[ "I pretended indifference / even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. / And the more deeply I felt / the less able I was to respond." ]

iii. Cesare Saccaggi, Incipit Vita Nova - Dante

[ Cropped image of a painting by Cesare Saccaggi. A woman holds two flowers to her chest with her left hand and reaches over to hold a man's hand with her right. ]

iv. Dean Cornwell, The Other Side

[ A woman with large wings wearing a white dress and a veil leans upwards to kiss a man wearing red robes. ]

v. Yves Olade, Bloodsport

[ "You can have my heart if you have the stomach to take it. Kiss me hard enough to invert me." ]

vi. Kelly Quindlen, She Drives Me Crazy

[ " 'I hate you,' I say. Then I kiss her and kiss her and kiss her." ]

vii. Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, Daphnis and Chloe

[ Painting of two women. One wears a white dress, holding a flower crown to her head as she looks down at a woman in a brown dress. The woman wearing brown has her arm wrapped around the other woman's waist and is placing flowers on the other woman's lap. ]

viii. unknown

[ Cropped image of a painting. Two hands reach towards each other and are intertwined. ]

ix. Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

[ "They joined hands. / So the world ended. / And the next one began." ]

x. Cigarettes After Sex, Nothing's Gonna Hurt You, Baby

[ "[Chorus] / Nothing's gonna hurt you baby / As long as you're with me you'll be just fine / Nothing's gonna hurt you baby / Nothing's gonna take you from my side" ]

My lame attempt in translation of Olga Bergholz poem. She was a Russian poet who survived Leningrad blockade.

***

You know, this anxious quiet still frightens me more

Than everything else that was left after war.

So quiet that every thought of this war

Is louder than a cry, a howl, or a roar.

People growled, and crawled, and writhed here with pain.

Their blood rose above the ground, hardly drained…

Now it’s just quiet. So quiet that it seems -

Forever and ever It will stay like this.

No ploughman, no farmer, no working man

Will ever return to this quiet land.

It’s quiet and silent, it’s not death and not life.

It’s cutting me deeper than any sharp knife.

It’s not death and not life—it’s hardest despair

That mute us, deprive us even from prayers.

This anxious silence is innocent victim’s revenge—

Their knowledge and memories hidden behind the death edge.

"En el fervor de la marea sentí que mi cuerpo perdía el control.

Asumí que, así como la vida es voraz, yo también podía serlo con ella."

Olga Ovejero

Between worlds, between books, [...] Sweet anger, soft sobbing, and fervid sighs Gone, but not forgotten.

— Lydia Grigorieva, Shards from the Polar Ice: Selected Poems, on Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, transl by John Farndon and Olga Nakston, (2016)

Le  donne  del  mio  Vate  –  ☾XXXVIII☽🖋️

Cap. 6 – L’ALTRA OLGA e LA CONTESSA LARA (8) Di Olga Ossani ho saputo anche un’altra cosa, che cioè anni dopo aver conosciuto il Vate divenne collega e grande amica della giornalista e scrittrice Evelina Cattermole, una delle figure più discusse e chiacchierate del periodo.Eva era una cronista, redattrice, titolare di rubriche femminili (di moda, di costume, di bon ton, di arredamento, di cuore)…

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