Monday Required Reading. This essay made me cry. Read it. Then go call your best friend, or write her a letter, or send her an email. Something. Lindsay King-Miller's "Hold On To What You've Got":

In seventh grade, Heather was the new girl in school. She was chubby and bookish and wore weird, gaudy clothing - denim hats covered in puff-paint flowers, neon orange skeleton earrings that dangled to her shoulders. During a game of kickball, she sat in the gravel on the sidelines, drawing circles in the dust with her sneaker with her face buried in a huge, hardcover Unabridged Shakespeare. She carried that book with her everywhere. I adored her instantly. I didn't want to play kickball either. I sat down next to her and we were best friends. 

There's a surprise twist in this story, but I don't want you to feel waylaid when it comes, so I'll spoil it now: Heather dies in her sleep, at the age of twenty-five, of an undiagnosed heart condition. 

It's difficult to articulate the process by which two twelve-year-old girls with a lot of things in common - archetypally awkward, voracious readers, intellectually far ahead of their burgeoning social skills - become inseparable. It feels predestined, unfolding with the simplicity of a teen-movie montage: sleepovers, slasher movies, painting each other's fingernails, singing into hairbrushes. It's hard to imagine that there was a time I didn't know her; that there are aspects of my personality that predate Heather. It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape. We like scary movies. We say "fuck" a lot. We write poetry. I learn to think of myself as strong, confident, unaffected by adversity, because that's how I see heather. Without her I would be too self-conscious to be the first person on the dance floor. But she is always there beside me, throwing her long hair into my face, and I'm not embarrassed if the two of us are together.

[KEEP READING]

Too often we are asked for the facts, the proof of what happened before, so we can justify with certainty what will happen next. By doing so, we modify our curiosity to focus on reporting the news versus making it. We begin to train ourselves to be historians rather than history makers. We become the victims of other people's thinking instead of discovering and developing our own unique and authentic point of view. We search for certainty, and by doing so we make certain the outcome of our journey will lack any sense of adventure or discovery. Then we sit back and wonder, "What happened?" when a colleague or competitor passes us by and redefine our reality. We are encouraged to turn off the bright light of curiosity to live in the shadows of certainty, reducing our risk of losing, while making certain that winning will never be in our future.

-- Gary Friedman, Restoration Hardware Objects of Curiosity Spring 2013 catalogue

Repetition

Say it.

Say it over and over and over again.

Say it like a mantra.
Say it like a magic spell.

Say it until you believe it.

Say it until it sounds wrong.
Say it until the words twist in on themselves.

Say it until it makes sense.

Say it until your voice runs out.
Say it until your throat is raw.
Say it until you're swallowing blood.

Say it until you can't breathe.

Say it until it's true.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it until it stops being true.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it over and over and over again.

There are some poets whose body of work reads like a single poem: an ongoing, deepening dialogue with the self and the world that is divided into separate poems, as if only for convenience. Consistency of voice, consistency of form, will create this impression; so will a body of work that eschews narrative or embeds it in a looping, ranging, open-ended development. Mainly, however, it is the pervasiveness of a poet's obsessions, the regular recurrence of key images and ideas, which tends to meld many poems into one.

-- Carol Moldaw, review of Poems by Anne Michaels

"Overheard" on the internet (aka Read in a review on ratemyprofessor.com): Unless you are a PhD student in English literature or came over on the Mayflower, I don't know how it's possible to do well in his class.

I wasn't aware that PhD students and pilgrims were the same thing. Does this mean that as of the fall when people ask me what I do, I can tell them I'm a pilgrim? Because I feel like that would be really funny.

Ivy: I know you guys are super successful now, but did you ever feel like giving up?

Julia: Um, I could barely get up to answer the door.

Ivy: I just don't know what to do. Now I'm going in for parts that I would have passed on two years ago. Maybe I should just quit.

Julia: I've been where you are. It's a brutal business. But just when I'd want to throw in the towel, something would happen to remind me of why I love it in the first place. And thus the dysfunctional cycle continues.

-- Smash, "The Fallout"

Insomnia

1 a.m.
The coffee pot hisses.
You couldn't sleep anyway.


I am a lover of tinywords, so I've been giving micropoetry a try lately. It's challenging and delightful and wonderfully suited to my current mental state.