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Tift
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flecti non frangi
« #105 : May 20, 2021, 07:26:54 AM »


Love Letter
By Nathalie Handal


I’d like to be a shrine, so I can learn from peoples’ prayers the story of hearts. I’d like to be a scarf so I can place it over my hair and understand other worlds. I’d like to be the voice of a soprano singer so I can move through all borders and see them vanish with every spell-­binding note. I’d like to be light so I illuminate the dark. I’d like to be water to fill bodies so we can gently float together indefinitely. I’d like to be a lemon, to be zest all the time, or an olive tree to shimmer silver on the earth. Most of all, I’d like to be a poem, to reach your heart and stay.


Tift
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flecti non frangi
« #106 : May 21, 2021, 04:08:00 AM »

How To Write a Poem
by Laura Hershey


Don't be brilliant.
Don't use words for their own sake, or to show
how clever you are,
how thoroughly you have subjugated them
to your will, the words.

Don't try to write a poem
as good as your favorite poet.
Don't even try to write
a good poem.

Just peel back the folds over your heart
and shine into it
the strongest light that streams
from your eyes, or somewhere else.

Whatever begins bubbling forth from there,
whatever sound or smell or color
swells up, makes your throat
fill with unsaid tears,

whatever threatens to ignite your hair, your eyelashes,
if you get too close—

write that.
Suck it in and quickly
shape it with your tongue
before you grow too afraid of it
and it gets away.

Don't think about
writing a good poem, or a great poem,
or the poem to end all poems.

Write the poem,
you need to hear;
write the poem you need.


« : May 21, 2021, 04:11:25 AM Tift »
Tift
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flecti non frangi
« #107 : May 22, 2021, 03:51:17 AM »


Beast and Beauty
by Vievee Francis


He took me like a mother, drew my head toward himself,
pulled me onto his lap, wrapped his arms around me and cooed
into my hair, softly as if I was dreaming and
                                                         he didn't want to wake me.
He sang a song that sounded like birds singing in the sycamore
then tree frogs. I wanted to leave. I stayed where I was.
He wore a lovely shirt. His hair was surprisingly kempt.
There was half a candle piece and a rug of quarters. Tomato soup
on the stove. I thought, "What a shirt." I prayed my breasts
would magically spill from the zipper. I wanted to feel my calloused heels
on his thighs. I wanted to linger 'til dawn. His pared nails scratched
an itch that had eluded me for years. I cried as if I were slicing onions
in his kitchen. He was a good mother. He held me, like a daughter,
as if I was just as beautiful, as he believed me to be.

Tift
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flecti non frangi
« #108 : May 23, 2021, 03:20:20 PM »

Pat Parker was a black lesbian feminist poet writing in the ’70s





(it is easier to post a screen print than try
and write the lines in the manner intended)
Tift
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flecti non frangi
« #109 : May 24, 2021, 03:09:11 AM »


"Poetry” by Marianne Moore got whittled down over the years
from twenty-nine lines to four:

"I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a
  contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine."

"Moore described the rest of the poem as 'padding,'
and it’s true that the lines are self-contradictory
and hard to explicate, but that, surely, was the point:
they show simultaneously the pointlessness, strangeness,
and necessity of poetry. "


Poetry
by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.


(But the last 5 lines are key)



(Note extract from NYRB)

Tift
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flecti non frangi
« #110 : May 25, 2021, 06:57:57 AM »


Sexism
by David Lehman


The happiest moment in a woman's life
Is when she hears the turn of her lover's key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep
When he enters the room, trying to be
Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things,
And she can smell the liquor on his breath
But forgives him because she has him back
And doesn't have to sleep alone.

The happiest moment is a man's life
Is when he climbs out of bed
With a woman, after an hour's sleep,
After making love, and pulls on
His trousers, and walks outside,
And pees in the bushes, and sees
The high August sky full of stars
And gets in his car and drives home.



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