summer 2023!!!!
- take every opportunity to swim
- read every single day
- be crushingly vulnerable
- open up your heart
- dance forever
- go to the beach
- find yourself in everything
- say what you want
Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean. Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival. Only after time has passed do you recognise that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterwards, pulling dry brown fibres from your chest.
Anna Lyndsey, Girl in the Dark
ex best friends are like. i found texts from you in my phone from 2014 and i didn’t stop crying for half an hour. your mother passed me in the grocery store the other day and i couldn’t meet her gaze [does she still make upside down pineapple cake for your birthday?]. i write all my “y”s with a loop at the bottom; the same way you always signed the notes we passed in class [“love you!”]. i’m full up with rage and i don’t know how to uproot the fury from my chest. from under my fingernails. i adore you more than you’ll ever know. hating you has become second nature.
“I do feel that people’s expectations are misdirected when all they want is to understand a poem. It is one of the exasperating things about the way poetry is taught. It is assumed that an understanding of the poem is the same as the experience of the poem. Often the experience of a poem—a good poem—will elude understanding. Not totally, of course, but enough, enough to have us be close to what lies just out of reach.
I think that for most poets in the writing of their poems there is a point when language takes over and they follow it. Suddenly, it just sounds right. In my case—and I don’t like to bring myself up in this way—I trust the implication of what I am saying, even though I am not absolutely sure of what it is that I am saying. I’m just willing to let it be. Because if I were sure of whatever it was that I said in my poems, if I were sure, and I could verify and check it out and feel, ‘yes, I’ve said what I intended,’ I don’t think that poem would be smarter than I am.
At any rate, to get back to what I was saying a moment ago: it is ‘beyondness,’ or that depth that you reach in a poem that keeps you returning to it. I suppose you have to like being mystified. That which can’t be explained away or easily understood in a poem, that place which is unreachable or mysterious, is where the poem becomes ours, finally becomes the possession of the reader.”
Mark Strand, from “Poetry in the World,” written and published c. 2001 (x)
