“Why Do I Find Everything But Peace?”

Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

I’m too fine to not be between someone’s daughters legs

Mary Ruefle

One day you’ll sit in the sun and things won’t feel so bad

You’re in her dms, I’m in those cryptic, prophetic dreams she keeps having. We’re not the same

why are u gay

i wanted to make my life more difficult 

the idea of being vague & mysterious is appealing to me, but i overshare every day

Write everyday. It’s easier than it sounds. Make time everyday to write something. Even if it’s one line scribbled into a napkin on the subway or the bus, or a whole precious early hour in the morning. This practice lets the mind know that everyday we must be observant, that we are paying attention, always.

Learn poems you love. Read whatever poems you can get your hands on. Not just the classics, but those poets who are writing today. Pick up journals, magazines, and anthologies; search for the poems that break you open. Read those poems over and over again until you have them memorized in your mouth. Don’t worry about mimicking them, just accept them as your teachers and hold them close. Become an expert on the poems you adore.

Cultivate silence. Silence is essential in order to hear your own voice. Especially nowadays when we often have the television on, the radio on, or music playing all day long, it is essential to find some silence to listen to your own voice. Your own voice is the only thing your poetry needs.

Embrace revision. Revision might be the hardest thing that writers have to do, aside from battling our own internal demons, because it means admitting that we are wrong. Sometimes we are so wrong that we need to start all over again, and it’s embarrassing. Sometimes we only need to change a comma, but listen, every poem needs revision and every poet needs to learn humility.

Practice gratitude. Cherish those friends and colleagues who care enough to read and comment on your work. If you truly pursue writing, you will come to realize how enormously important these people are to your writing life and therefore to your making of a “real” life. Make sure you read their work with the same care and closeness they offer you. And buy them coffee and cakes when they return a manuscript with pencil marks on every page. It is a true act of kindness that should be greeted with great gratitude. And be thankful that you want to write at all, what a powerful art to devote a life to, how lucky we are to love such a wild untamable thing.

— Ada Limón, “Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry”

when i’m six feet underground the bugs in my body will dream of u

academia is 50% crying, 20% research, and 30% coming up with funny titles for every paper that you write