Lucy Alford

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The Time Is Now to spark your writing! This week we recommend a classic book on poetic forms by Lucy Alford, and #PWWritingPrompts on summer dualities, materialists, and relationship dynamics. Read more: at.pw.org/TTIN

Arrived on Saturday—exactly in time for its name day. Deepest gratitude to John Yau and Black Square Editions and for the immense gifts of time, care, attention, and language offered by Michael Snediker, Juliana Spahr, and Michael Rutherglen. Welcome to the world, little book ✨

Still bringing home little gifts from travels, for those who are no longer here. Maybe someday I’ll stop doing that; maybe not. If I see something small that reminds me of you, I can’t bear to leave it behind—even if you’ve already left.

It’s all very brief, any way we go

May the lived & living world continue to break our hearts—over & over & over & over again. We are conditioned to believe ourselves to be armored, special, individual beings—a sad fiction. We grow into or relearn love (aliveness) through some interaction of grief, tenderness, time, and repetition.

(Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, p. 2.)

“Our lawns are overrun with ragweed & quack grass, one of them offering a row of red and pink tulips each spring, heads snared through the chain-link they lean on. The nearby porch overflows with rideable plastic toys, a wagon, tricycles, a fire truck, their primary colors now faded to Easter hues.”

(Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time, p. 139; quoting Dickinson. P1056)

“For pare all of temporality to a single moment and awareness of the shadows that fall from one’s heels as one walks, distinguishing the self from its own image and that image from the difference of the ground, dwindles to nothing:

‘There is a Zone whose even Years
No solstice interrupts—
…’”

Realized I have not shared this here—
Such an odd threshold, this small book I’ve worked on for longer than any other, flying from my worrying hands. Out in April from Black Square Editions. Godspeed, little one. With gratitude to so very very many.

"Ignorance is a cure for nothing."

W.E.B. Du Bois

Six Voltas

it is, if not
embarrassing,
nothing.

poetry is nothing
if not embarrassing

:)

“Time flies, time is fleeting, but then there comes a moment when time, no longer nimble-footed, no longer winged, is for us to carry.”

(Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow, 68.)

“…one day gone, three days gone, a week gone, three months gone.
And the days, counted so closely, with all those hours and minutes for one to carry, feel simultaneously long and fleeting.”

(Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow,” 69.)

“Where can we live but days?”

(Philip Larkin, “Days”)

“in the chance
of poetry to attend
Imagination
‘s song”

(Ed Roberson, from “echo echo etude,” Asked What Has Changed, p. 45)

Thank you so much for reading, and for sharing these generous words—moved and glad to hear that my book resonated with you! 💜🙏🏼

O how I love this

Morris Graves / Fire, 1947

Morris Graves / Hibernating Animal, ca. 1954

I’m in!

Thank youuuuuu