A collection of words from artists, writers, lovers, and dreamers.
The album, as [Joanna] Newsom explained to Uncut, was inspired by how her (at the time) recent marriage had invited death in her life: "Because there is someone you can't bear to lose. When it registers as true, it's like a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it."
Will Howard in Far Out Magazine
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw
Eventually, we would fold ourselves into my car and drive to an all-night donut shop on San Pablo. I hated when my friends talked over my music, and I hated it even more when Ken led them to sing-alongs, replacing the perfect harmonies of "God Only Knows" with their wounded cadences. It was my car, but it was no longer my kingdom. Sean, Ben, and King delighted in singing loudly and out of tune.
At first, perhaps it was just to annoy me, three young men singing, one begging them to stop. But then it became a noise that felt safe, possibly better than the original. In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you're experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of you, as your voice merges with everyone else's. The violent dissonance when someone, and then another, slips off-key, and everyone ventures off toward their own ba-ba-baa solo. I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together. We would sit in the parking lot until the song ended. The donuts weren't very good, but at least they provided a destination for our moving choir. We were sharing something, a combination of delirium and fraternity.
Hua Hsu
I want to touch on this idea of imposter syndrome that so many of us experience. It's an interesting word, because it's a pathology, an illness. It troubled me for a long time. I think when you said that there was a breakthrough for you when you started to see that, "Oh, I can make something for myself." I had a similar thought when I said, "Wait a minute. My imposter syndrome is actually my strength. I don't ever want to be comfortable in positions of power." The day that I'm comfortable in these large institutions, in these reified ivory towers, is my death. So I am an impostor, it was never meant for me. They didn't imagine me when they built these sites of power. May I always be an imposter. My imposter syndrome is my strength because it gives me vigilance, discernment, awareness, and fruitful doubt. My mother used to say, "You can tell everything by how they look at you." So I started to see this as my tool, my asset, and I don't want to lose that. I think the great work that we do is to turn an imposter syndrome that it started out as into a kind of immune system that protects us. I don't know if I feel at home anywhere. But I realized that the idea of the imposter is such a beautiful idea, the idea that someone can disguise and sneak in the back door with their head down and just do the threading work and then one day, put their head up and there's a fashion house or a book under their name.
Ocean Vuong in Cero Magazine
In my twenties in Korea, enveloped by the boundless plentitudes of language, I would take fresh words that had just grown into themselves and sing the joys, anger, and sorrows of tumultuous youth until they became a thick, rich soup upon tiring of the pleasures of speech. I would abbreviate self-expression and communication into silence and poetry.
One day, my language, abruptly severed in a foreign land, became sealed off inside of me, where it suffocated, and in the deafness of insensibility, I was absolutely lonely.
To save my dying mouth, ears, head, heart, smile, tears, frisson, and skin, I frantically became a child again to relearn the burbling of English.
My short and impoverished new language changed me.
In consversation, I spared my words, spoke forthrightly, was unable to make puns, always pressed to communicate intent, and I presented myself simple as I was. That attitude became entrenched in my speech and my way of thinking. Now my English has gained some color, sprouted new flesh, and can provoke sentiment, and although I have the leeway to wordlessly understand and respond with facial expressions, my impoverished habits of language remain.
On the other hand, at a certain point, I've somehow become unable to bear people who are alone, now inclined to approach them. Without exception, they become good friends of mine. This is the precious blessing that the solitude of my immigrant life has quietly delivered to me.
Mother of Jay Caspian Kang
Nations will rise and fall as they have done in our species. The Romes and the empires will come and go. But the only nation that I truly believe in, the only nation that will be here long before any country that we understand, is the imagination. It is the one that I have absolute allegiance to. And it's the only one, it's the only nation on this planet that will remain unstoppable.
To the young Asian American makers and dreamers, I want to say this to you: You don't have anything to prove. We are already proud of you. That even if you do nothing, make nothing, surviving itself is a creative act. That if you can survive, and you can survive together, then you have innovated. That by surviving itself, you have won and deserved the breath that you take.
Ocean Vuong
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
James Baldwin
Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desrt, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.
James Baldwin
I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with.
Sharon Olds
It was our first and last show together. My work with my band and crew in the seventies would take me far from Robert and our universe. And as I toured the world I had time to reflect that Robert and I never traveled together. We never saw beyond New York save in books and never sat in an airplane holding each other's hand to ascend into a new sky and descend onto a new earth.
Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other. When I walked on the stages of the world without him I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances.
Patti Smith (on Robert Mapplethorpe)
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
Patti Smith
I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen.
Alice Walker
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex — surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it, I cannot see beyond it.
Sharon Olds
Would you even believe
when it finally happens
how easy it is to feel
without any proof
that love may be, could be, actually is
longer than time.
Alex Dimitrov
When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into
her warmth, I think we are like the pages
of a love letter written thirty years ago
that some aging god still reads each day
and then tucks back into its envelope.
Ellen Bass
Dreamt last night I fed you, unknowingly,
something you were allergic to.
And you were gone, like that.
You don't have even a single allergy,
but still. The dream cracked. Cars nose-dived
off snow banks into side streets. Sometimes
dreams slip poison, making the living
dead then alive again, twirling
in an unfamiliar room.
It's hard to say I need you enough.
Today I did. Walked into your morning
shower fully clothed. All the moments
we stop ourselves just because we might
feel embarrassed or impractical, or get wet.
Tara Skurtu
The cross the fork the zigzag—a few straight lines
For pain, quandary and evasion, the last of signs.
Robert Pinsky
I love my parents. I know I love them. But what I feel for them daily is a mixture of terror, panic, obligation, sorrow, anger, pity, and a shame so hot that I need to lie face down, in my underwear, on very cold sheets. Many Americans have vulnerable parents, and strive to succeed in order to save them. I hold those people in the highest regard. But the undocumented face a unique burden, due to scorn and a lack of support from the government. Because our parents made a choice—the choice to migrate—few people pity them, or wonder whether restitution should be made for decades of exploitation. That choice, the original sin, is why our parents were thrown out of paradise. They were tempted by curiosity and hunger, by fleshly desires...
My version of the American Dream is seeing them age with dignity, being able to help them retire, and keeping them from being pushed onto train tracks in a random hate crime. For us, gratitude and guilt feel almost identical. Love is difficult to separate from self-erasure. All we can give one another is ourselves.
Scholars often write about the harm that's done when children become caretakers, but they're reluctant to do so when it comes to immigrants. For us, they say, this situation is cultural. Because we grow up in tight-knit families. Because we respect our elders. In fact, it's just the means of living that's available to us. It's a survival mechanism, a mutual-aid society at the family level. There is culture, an then there is adaptation to precarity and surveillance. If we are lost in the promised land, perhaps it's because the ground has never quite seemed solid beneath our feet.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Excerpt from "Bad Dream," published in The New Yorker
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
Ross Gay
Gathered at the side of my father's bed, his body still
warm to the touch, his eyes darkening like those of a fish
laid high on the river bank, the sun slipping through
the half-closed blinds into the cream-colored room—
we have come to dress him one last time.
To bend his arms, not for prayer, but to slide the sleeves
of the clean white shirt over, to pull each limb through—
pants, socks, shoes—till the body is clothed, readied at last
to meet whatever fiery light will embrace it first. The kiln,
the grave, love's small white cloud that arrives just before rain.
No, this is just a body. Clay and water. Hallow. What we shed
in the white room over words of prayer. What we weave of memory,
grace for grace, this already faded circle of thought and longing.
Oh, this body—grown more wind than flesh, even as the air leaves
his lungs not to return, there is a knocking at the door, something dark
and hopeful rising to my lips, the strains of a very old song.
Neil Aitken