Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,
Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,
Though someone always said I’d be all right—
Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad
(The…
“A sign on the door, which visitors in the past have found distasteful, made emphatically clear the owner’s unwillingness to deal with people of decidedly unliterary tastes: ‘No law books, no text books, no science books. ONLY POETRY!’ ”
Read more from Rhoda Feng on the legendary Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I must go here:
Brace yourselves: great books as emojis. (Yes, that’s The Grapes of Wrath.)
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
(Source: joanwolf, via mllehazelwood)
One Today by Richard Blanco
For today’s poem, I want to direct you to The New York Times for the full-text of “One Today” by the 2013 inaugural poet Richard Blanco. Both of us at Structure and Style are proud of our President and thrilled that he was re-elected, but regardless of your political leanings, this poem is beautiful, so read it and give “thanks for a love/ that loves you back”.
-S
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give…
Where did you go to, when you went away?
It is as if you step by step were going
Someplace elsewhere into some other range
Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,
Knowing nothing of the language of that place
To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in…
Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating—
Where will all come home?On goes the river,
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.Away down…
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—-
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is…
“Maybe only poets should be allowed to write memoirs, because they know that our perception is partial, our recollection is worse, and the world is made of shards and fragments that make patterns, but leave gaps and sharp edges. Nick Flynn’s excellent new memoir embraces the unknown and unknowable as the very core of our experience.” — Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Nick Flynn’s memoir, The Reenactments, will be in stores on January 7, 2013. It chronicles the surreal experience of being on set during the making of the film Being Flynn, from his best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and watching the central events of his life reenacted: his father’s long run of homelessness and his mother’s suicide. Enter to win an advance copy of The Reenactments on Goodreads today.
