The History of Bop Bop began with jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940 Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking down past a men’s clothing store on 42nd street or south main in L.A. when from a loudspeaker they heard a wild and possible mistake in jazz… Continue reading Jack Kerouac
The question is how you rearrange the stars above your head, to open up unexpected paths on the ground beneath your feet. — Brian Holmes, “Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies” or “The Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics,” Continental Drift.
Who will winter my immortality with me? Who will thaw with me? Come what may, I shall never trade the earthly love for the subterranean. I still have time to turn into flowers, clay, white-eyed memory … But while we are mortal, my love, to you nothing will be denied. — Vera Pavlova, “89″ If… Continue reading Vera Pavlova
In order to write I must place myself into the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snares of words: the words I say hide others—which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast… Continue reading Clarice Lispector
[M]an, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock And water and sky are constant—to feel Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural Beauty, is the sole business of poetry. The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason. — Robinson Jeffers,… Continue reading Robinson Jeffers
Each star sinks the tip of a needle into night. — William Olsen, from “The Human Heart,” Trouble Lights (Triquarterly, 2002)
This year we are making nothing but elegies. Do what you are good at, our parents always told us, make what you know. This is what we are making, these songs for the dying. You have to celebrate something. —Margaret Atwood, from “Four Small Elegies,” Two-Headed Poems. (Simon & Schuster March 9, 1981)
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape. ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. (Chapman & Hall; Serialized 1860-1; book form 1861)
The world is a magic book, and we its sentences. We read it and read ourselves. We close it and turn the page down And never come back, Returned to what we once were before we became what we are. This is the tale the world tells, this is the way it ends. —… Continue reading Charles Wright
After love, no one is what they were before. —Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless. (Tor Books; First Edition edition March 29, 2011)
The Vale of Soul-Making 