Czesław Miłosz, from “The Song.”
pasta ❤️
when Florence Welch said “but did I dream too big? do I have to let it go? and what if one day there is no such thing as snow?”
and when Mitski said “venus, planet of love, was destroyed by global warming; did its people want too much too? did its people want too much?”
“I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.”
Anita Brookner, Look At Me
I’ve written poem after poem,
as if hoping one day—like the tortoise
—to reach, by way of faulty words
and images, the place where you have been so long (…)
Adam Zagajewski, ‘For You’
Every book is for someone. The act of writing may be solitary, but it is always a reach toward another person – a single person… every sentence inscribed on a page represents a bid for contact and a hope for understanding.
Siri Hustvedt, Living Thinking Looking
What is a poem but a gesture
of reaching?
Claire Schwartz, ‘Cross-Examination’
I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
June Jordan, ‘These Poems’
“When I think about you in huge doses, I drown in despair, in longing, in guilt. I learned to think of you in tiny rations like meals delivered to my plate, three times a day. Each time enough to nourish me, to make me hope, to keep my heart alive.”
— Dawn Lanuza
