Maya Angelou (American Poet)

Maya Angelou, born April 4, 1928, is an American poet, memoirist, actress and an important figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. Angelou is known for her series of six autobiographies, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which was nominated for a National Book Award and called her magnum opus. Her volume [...]

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Grief

Grief, that
2-headed beast,
I write from within
my own experience
shouting tears
that open up the abyss
of longing
that shut down
the song.
.
Where is the light
the beacon that
pulses hopeful messages
on a stormy night
You, no longer there
to occupy the hollow
beside me in the bed.
You gentle, soft flesh
presssed against my side,
a leg wrapped round
my thigh.
.
The pillow,
inconsolably wet
as I remember the soft,
warm mist of [...]

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Graham Miller – Australian Suburban Splendour

Through the Amy Stein | Photography | Blog I came across the Australian photographer Graham Miller, which is not surprising given that both artists seem to share a fascination for suburbia, its people and cultural accessories as well as the sense of “isolation from community, culture and the environment” (Stein) that seems to pervade much of the [...]

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David Gould on Forgiveness

After having been harassed for 10 weeks by my o’seas family members to upload my holiday photos onto Flickr, I’ve finally started with the first batch on Italy and the first installment on Germany. That kept me away from blogging, but in the meantime my bellissimo friend Jeanie *) emailed this poem, which [...]

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Helena Wong: Poetry

My friend Helena, whose qualities I have praised before, is also a great poet. I love her notion of poems as dream catchers, and I have been asking her for years to publish at least some of her work on the Net, but with little success so far … maybe that might change now?
anyway, here [...]

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Anthony John Gray

 

SECRET DREAM

Anthony John Gray never had any formal training when he changed his career path from being a British police officer to becoming an artist. I find his work quite fascinating because of its fusion of the surreal with abstract geometry. Apart from giving it a certain Gothic expression, this blend also [...]

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Zwei Gedichte von Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945)

 

SINNENRAUSCH
Dein sünd’ger Mund ist meine Totengruft,
Betäubend ist sein süsser Atemduft,
Denn meine Tugenden entschliefen.
Ich trinke sinnberauscht aus seiner Quelle
Und sinke willenlos in ihre Tiefen,
Verklärten Blickes in die Hölle.
Mein heisser Leib erglüht in seinem Hauch,
Er zittert, wie ein junger Rosenstrauch,
Geküsst vom warmen Maienregen.
- Ich folge Dir ins wilde Land der Sünde
Und pflücke Feuerlilien auf den Wegen,
- Wenn [...]

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ANGORAWEG

Ich wähle den Angoraweg 
aus sanftem Dornenbauch.  
Das Lindenziel soll meine Kindersonne sein.
So streu ich Glasblumen ihm 
auf die Spiegelstraße, 
und decke sie mit Himbeerwatte zu.
Kein Schnitt mehr kann in seinen Vaterfuß.
Und der Koffer mit Seelenverband
in ferner Höhle 
im Sommerschlaf.
Schrittfüße für Standbeine. 
Keimherzen für Blutseelen.
Und im Cardigan aus meiner Kinderwelt. 
by Inga

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Little Infinite Poem (by Federico Garcia Lorca)

Little Infinite Poem
For Luis Cardoza y Aragon
To take the wrong road
is to arrive at the snow,
and to arrive at the snow
is to get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the
grasses of the cemeteries.

To take the wrong road
is to arrive at woman,
woman who isn’t afraid of light,
woman who murders two roosters [...]

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Arthur Rimbaud

When he was not yet 17, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris’s literary society with the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of 20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. “A Season in Hell,” “The Drunken Boat,” and the prose poems of Illuminations were epochal works that changed the nature of an [...]

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The Man Watching (by Rainer Maria Rilke)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if [...]

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Tobacco (by Peg Boyers)

 
To rid yourself of envy and sin
mix honey with tobacco.
— CUBAN FOLKSONG
Tabaco, tu boca,
tus bocas—your mouths,
sweet island uncles, your lips
fragrant with Cuban puros, and you
lifting me
in a cloud of smoke
for a good-night kiss, passing me,
one to one,
with your dark burly arms
hugging me close so that
my hair, my nightie, take back the smell
to linger over in [...]

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Don’t Write History as Poetry (by Mahmoud Darwish)

 Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen
to the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
has no compassion that we can long for our
beginning, and no [...]

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Ten Dispatches About Place

 
[Originally I had planned to summarise this article; then I thought I could copy and paste snippets, like scattering selected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Finally I realised that the only way for me to preserve the very essence of this statement is to leave it untouched.]
Ten Dispatches About Place
by John Berger
Published in the July/August [...]

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Pablo Neruda

Today, Chilean time, 103 years ago was the birthday of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century: Pablo Neruda. I love poetry as an artform, but generally I am more focused on individual poems rather than poets – with very few exceptions, such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Pablo Neruda. These poets [...]

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Kahlil Gibran – On Children

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house [...]

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James Joyce

Irish novelist James Joyce was born this day in 1882; he died in Zuerich 1941. Perhaps the most influential and significant novelist of the 20th century, The modern symbolic novel apparently owes much of its complexity to James Joyce’s experimental and explorative literary methods. His intellectualism and his grasp of a wide range of philosophy, [...]

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Novel written based on SMS text

 

Right now I’m rather busy with setting up a Flickr site, but here’s something that’s worth noting. Someone in Finland published a book entirely consisting of text messages. It’s the fictitious story of an IT executive who quit his job, travels through Europe and India and keeps in touch with friends and relatives via SMS. [...]

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Ancient Ones (Patricia Reis)

From the beginning We have been with you. We are the Ancient Ones And we remember.
We remember the time when there was only love, The time when all breathing was one. We remember the seed of your being Planted in the belly of the vast black night. We remember the red cave of [...]

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