Raptures Could Be Little Or Large, Could Come One After The Other In A Torrent, Or Singly And Separated

Much has been said and written about the ‘haiku moment’ - that it blurs the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘self’ and ‘other’; that in it the perception of the essential and accidental, of the beautiful and the ugly, disappears; that it reflects things are they are in themselves.

- Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems

i) robert browning / eurydice to orpheus (1864) ii) w.a. mozart / “parto, parto” (la clemenza di tito, 1791) iii) jessica waldoff / recognition in mozart’s operas (2006) iv) c.w. gluck / orfeo ed euridice (1762) v) catherine maxwell / the female sublime from milton to swinburne: bearing blindness (2001) vi) gerald griffin / the collegians (1829) film stills from portrait de la jeune fille en feu (sciamma, 2019)

let yourself be a living part of death

Garous Abdolmalekian, Forest tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Every moon will be a moon of surrender

Ada Limón, The Noisiness of Sleep

I take the soil in

my clean fingers and to say

I weep is untrue, weep is too

musical a word. I heave

into the soil. You cannot die.

I just came to this life

again, alive in my silent way.

- Ada Limón, Invasive

I fear that to write so much about crying will tempt a universal law of irony to invite tragedy into my life.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

the beauty’s really in the movement, in watching your mouth try to swallow despair.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

A bird pecks at the corroded corner of the sky

Garous Abdolmalekian, Long Poem of Loneliness tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. The world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign & re-create myself…”