From Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

From James Schuyler’s “Trip”:

When I think
of that, that at
only fifty-one I,
Jim the Jerk, am
still alive and breathing
deeply, that I think
is a miracle.

O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.”

Auden’s elegy for Yeats.

Honestly this may be the information I needed to make the leap

Love Katherine Addison. Have you read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire? Does a related thing for me.

All new to me and sound amazing. I’m next on the library waiting list for The Book of Love so I know what I’m doing next! Thanks times a million.

China Miéville and Rachel Cusk are mine. Maybe something to read on the way home from work? Thank you for offering!

Quote from Adrienne Rich: "If we have learned anything in these years of late twentieth-century feminism, it's that that 'always' blots out what we really need to know: When, where, and under what conditions has the statement been true?"

From Adrienne Rich's "Notes toward a Politics of Location."

It’s really fun! Pairs well with Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land

"But refusal, which is only sometimes a kind of poetry, does not have to be limited to poetry, and turning the world upside down, which is often a kind of poetry, doesn’t have to be limited to words. Words are useful for upending the world in that they are cheap, ordinary, portable, and generous and they don’t mess us up too badly if we use them wrong, not like if we use matches or a machete wrong, but poetry is made up of figures and figurations and syntaxes as much as it is made up of words. We can make a poetry without language because language as the rehearsal material of poetry has made the way for another poetry, that of objects, actions, and environments. This is not saying to be a poet means you only have to rehearse turning over the world: now try putting the chair on your head."

Some days my only certain we is this certain we that didn't, that wouldn't, whose bodies or spirits wouldn't go along. That we slowed, stood around, blocked the way, kept a stone face when the others were woeful and complicit with smiles. And still we ghost, and no-show, and in the enigma of refusal, we find—despite ourselves—that we endogenously produce our own incapacity to even try, grow sick and depressed and motionless under all the merciless and circulatory conditions of all the capitalist yes and just can't, even if we thought we really wanted to. This is as if a river, who saw the scale of the levees, decided that rather to try to exceed them, it would outwit them by drying up.

If you are thinking about Anne Boyer after yesterday, here's her excellent poem on refusal. www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-book...

Wildest thing about the American economy I've learned after two years at the Federal Reserve: Almost 1% of US GDP is residential realtor commissions!

fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1b2IC

"Thus 'history from the bottom up' came into being."

from the Peter Linebaugh introduction to the second edition of Albion's Fatal Tree