Second Poem for Theodore
by Matthew Rohrer
Just pretend my writing is like somebody else’s
What things are important to you?
I am deeply concerned about your opinion of me.
To you I want to appear pleasant
& then invisible.
I want to be an interesting story
none of you really remembers.
Just a kind of nervous thing you have, really.
& then nothing.
Nothing.
Almost an eternity of nothing.
& then a terrible cataclysm.
(Source: writingthatilike)
Kevin Durant on how he spends his free time in Oklahoma City. (via Jimmy Kimmel Live)
this is like my opinion on everywhere outside of California and NYC.
(Source: vicforprez, via tionam)
(via richardsikendaily)
Kim Kardashian and Magic Johnson
"I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it. If poems are records of true risks (attempts at change) taken by the soul of the speaker, then, as much as possible, my steps are toward silence. Silence which is the absence of speech, or the ability to speak, the reason or desire. Silence which drowns, but also which ignores us, overrides us, silence which is doubt, madness, fear, all that which makes the language bend as slip. I need to feel the places where the language fails, as much as one can. Silence which is awe or astonishment, the speech ripped out of you. All forms of death and mystery, therefore, working in each poem against the hurry of speech, the bravery of speech. And I think it is very important to feel the presence of that ocean in the poem, in the act of writing the poem. Its emissaries are the white space, of course, the full stops. But, also, all acts of grammar, which are its inroads. And the way the lines break, or slow. I’d like to think you can feel, by its accurate failures, the forces pressing against the sentence, the time order. And certain kinds of words, too, are messengers of silence. Not just vagueness and inaccuracy, but prepositions and conjunctions, for instance; and diction deliberately flattened to deaden pain. And certain sounds that deepen and slow the poem into sounds you can’t hear—all the long vowels in the sharp teeth of consonants. And echoes, and what is said by implication, by default… Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but they become each other, that only our hearing fails."
Some Notes on Silence by Jorie Graham (via bitterstrings)
