"We...feel a kiss on our lips Trembling there like a small insect." —ARTHUR RIMBAUD 1. False Gods I'm terrified of the one in my kitchen. It's as long as my index finger, & two thumbs wide—so big, so alive with its bigness, that I can't imagine putting my foot on top & pressing— any more than I could imagine pressing down on a hummingbird or newborn kitten. I'm screaming & waving my hands, but it doesn't move. Then, slow & steady, it starts to walk toward me. I'm yelling, "You dumb ass, you stupid mother fucker." I'm so big, so powerful, I can't believe it won't obey me! "Ok," I say, this time with assurance, "You better not go in my bedroom,'' but it does the very thing I told it not to do, heads straight down the hall, through my door & climbs up on the heater beside my bed. (Imagine me trying to sleep & feeling that slight tremble on my lips!) I grab the heater & carry it, carefully (I don't want to hurt it when it falls!), out the front door to the porch, begging, "Please, go home to your own people." But it holds on, as if it doesn't want to leave. Later, as I'm drifting off, I hear the long soft clickings of a chorus outside my window & I wonder if it brought back a bunch of its friends to serenade me to sleep. 2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away They have a hard thing on the top of their head that sticks out like the bill of a baseball cap (but pointy), so they can't look up; they only see the ground & don't know you're screaming & waving your hands. They only see your foot & they imagine its cool shadow: what a good place to hide, they say.
In Lucasta Miller's L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron," "the story of lived experience paves the way for a story about creativity, women’s lives and the liminal literary interregnum of the 1820s and 30s." via THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLIMENT
WHAT SPARKS POETRY: BRIAN TEARE ON GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’ “AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE” "I remember the moment I learned words could record the reciprocal press of poet upon the world and the world upon poet. A truant undergraduate student, I had signed up late for a “Modern British Poetry” course, and came to the second class unprepared. The assigned reading was Gerard Manley Hopkins."
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