Just so I have something to start with on this blog thing, I want to quote a few things from Adrienne Riche's "Poetry and Commitment," which my friend Emily (ejoyes.blogspot.com) lent me.
"If there's a line to be drawn, it's not so much between secularism and belief as between those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic -- to be used for repression, manipulation, empty certitudes to ensure obedience." (p.33)
"it will be hard for hands calloused on a trigger to question a daisy."
- from "Romiosini" by Yannis Ritsos, transl by Kimon Friar
"I open the refrigerator door
and see a weeping roll,
see a piece of bleeding cheese,
a radish forced to sprout
by shocks from wires
and blows from fists.
The meat on its plate
tells of placentas
cast aside by roadblocks."
- from "The Fence" by Aharon Shabtai, transl by Peter Cole
just add water and stir
who is this guy ::
- insta-wade
- Stretched between atheism and faith, exasperation and hope, I'm like everybody else: just another person trying to get by the best way I know how.
1 comment:
Wade love,
I am so glad those passages spoke to you. They certainly enlivened me when I first read "Poetry and Commitment." I have returned to Rich time and time again when the stupid word wars have threatened to eclipse my hope. She does something so beautiful with language that it's almost impossible not to wiggle around when I'm reading her. She reads me too from her authorial place. It's that connection, that "reading" of each other, across space and time and location(s) and ages and orientations that keeps me connected to something "greater than myself."
I miss you and love you Wade. Really.
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