Quotation
"'Oh, beauty!' whispered Emily, passionately, lifting her hands to the stars. 'What would I have done without you all these years?'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

Quotation
"What concerns me among multitudes and multitudes of other sad questions which one had better try to lure aside with parfaits and sunshine, is that there is a certain great sorrow in me now, with as many facets as a fly's eyes, and I must give birth to this monstrosity before I am light again." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotations
"'That was what set me off hating civilization.'
'Well, cheer up,' he said; 'there isn't much of it left.'" -Elizabeth Bowen, "Mysterious Kôr"

"What is it that civilization softens in us? Civilization cultivates only a versatility of sensations in man, and…decidedly nothing else." -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

"…where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the intangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love and kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no long an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilty, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…" -Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Quotations
"And it seems that always in August I am more aware of the rain." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotation
"Words revolve in flame and keep the coliseum heart afire, reflecting orange sunken suns in the secret petals of ruined arches. yes, the glowing asbestos thorns and whistling flame flowers reflect the cells of the scarlet heart and the coliseum burns on, without a nero, on the brink of blackness. so words have power to open sesame and reveal liberal piles of golden metallic suns in the dark pit that wait to be melted and smelted in the fire of spring which springs to fuse lamps and clods into veins of radiance.
so sylvia burns yellow dahlias on her dark altar of the sun as the sun wanes so impotence and the world falls in winter. birds contract to frozen feathered buds on barren boughs and plants surrender to the omnipotent white frosts which hold all colors cruelly locked in hexagonal hearts of ice." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotation
"We all live in our own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care. And my dream-world — how much more valid, how much nearer to the truth is it than that of these people?" -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotations
"Psychologists call that state of deluded madness 'narcissistic love.'
I call it 'my twenties.'" -Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

"Whom can I talk to? Get advice from? No one. A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money. And I won't take advice, even if I want it. I'll kill myself. I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself…so many others are worse off than I. How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess, and even if now I have lost my sense of perspective, thereby my creative sense of humor, I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else's shoulder. Masks are the order of the day — and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair. I will begin to think again, and to act according to the way I think. Attitude is a pitifully relative and capricious quality to base a faith on. Like the proverbial sand, it slides, founders, sucks me down to hell.
At present, the last thing I can do is be objective, self-critical, diagnostic — but I do know that my philosophy is too subjective, relative & personal to be strong and creative in all circumstances. It is fine in fair weather, but it dissolves when they forty day rains come. I must submerge it before a larger, transcendental goal or craft. What that is I cannot not now imagine." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"…we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotation
"'But you are a fairy yourself — or you wouldn't be able to find fairyland. You can't buy a ticket there, you know. Either the fairies themselves give you your passport at your christening — or they don't. That is all there is to it.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

Quotation
"I have been needing, more than anything, to talk to somebody, to spill out all the tight, jealous, envious, apprehensive neurotic tensions in me…" -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotation
"I want to love somebody because I want to be loved. In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of the wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotations
"'If we don't chase things — sometimes the things following us can catch up.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

"'If you run after a man he'll run away. It's instinct. We have to run when anything chases us.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Magic for Marigold

"Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time — when pursued like a bandit — will heave like one; always remaining one county or room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you." -Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Quotation
"Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising in her own person so famous a thing:
'This is happiness, I suppose.'" -Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Quotations
"'Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend.'" -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Cleon: Thou art like the harpy,
Which, to betray, dost, with thine angel's face,
Seize with thine eagle's talons. -William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre

"…I don't want to be this body anymore
That holds all the betrayal of the universe
Its tissues bluing all day into a blue-black
Blood balloon
One day all that blood will be dark and grey
I want to be an unearthly body instead of this one
I want to be a body that is free of dreams
The imagination
I never wanted the imagination within my legs and arms anyway…" -Dorothea Lasky,
                                                                                              "The Body"

Quotation
"In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you;
In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed.
All of most worth I bound and burnt and slew:
Old peaceful lives; frail flowers; firm friends; and Christ.

I slew all falser loves; I slew all true,
That I might nothing love but your truth, Boy.
Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do
Their wedding garments in their haste of joy.

But when I fell upon your sandalled feet,
You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.
I heard the singing of your wings' retreat;
Far-flown, I watched you flush the Olympian snows,
Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned
To stare upon the ash of all I burned." -Wilfred Owen, "To Eros"

Random Musing
So I began the rather terrifying process of applying to MFA programs in poetry this past November.  I didn't have too much faith in my prospects of getting in anywhere - MFA programs have notoriously low acceptance rates - but I was fortunate enough to be accepted to four of the nine programs I applied to.  Let me tell you, there was a ridiculous amount of celebrating after each of those letters/emails arrived.  Lots of tiramisu.

Ahem, anyhow, in the end, after weighing the various pros and cons of these programs, I decided on where I'm going to be this fall: Oregon State University. That's right, I'll be a beaver come September.   Not nearly as cool a mascot as the wolverines, but it'll do.

OSU's program is excellent (despite sharing the whole "OSU" thing with Ohio State); I'll be working alongside very talented individuals and it actually fully funds each of its MFA candidates for the full two years.  I was lucky enough to receive a diversity fellowship from the school as well that literally doubles my original stipend for this upcoming year.  So on top of receiving my MFA at a great school - getting to work almost exclusively on my poetry for two years - I won't have any financial worries.  It's really ridiculously ideal.

I will be sad to leave Ann Arbor for Corvallis, OR though.  I've really grown to love my college town.  This is why, quite a long while ago, I mentioned already being homesick for Ann Arbor - knowing you have to leave somewhere makes you all the more fond of it.  This move to the west coast is going to be a very big change.  I've never lived anywhere but Michigan my whole life.  Here's hoping it's a good one though.

Quotation
"…I can't help what I want.

There is no such thing as a dream that comes true.

Every dream is already true the moment it is dreamed." -Suzanne Buffam, "Amor Fati"

Random Musing
This is a bit late - I'm not sure how I forgot to post about this earlier - but Word Gumbo published one of my poems in their last issue. You can read it here, just check out page seven.

Quotations
"If they substituted 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"Once cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that." -Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

"…Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness." -Robert Creeley, "The Rain"

"…'Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies…" -William Shakespeare, "Venus and Adonis"

Quotation
"For the fairies dwell only in the kingdom of Happiness; having no souls they cannot enter the kingdom of Sorrow." -L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

Quotation
"'I will not love — to love is to be a slave,' I said.
And the minute I said it I was ashamed of saying it — because I knew I had just said it to sound clever. I don't really believe that to love is to be a slave — not with Murrays, anyhow. But Dean took me quite seriously.
'Well, one must be a slave to something in this kind of a world,' said he. 'No one is free. Perhaps, after all, O daughter of the Stars, love is the easiest master — easier than hate — or fear — or necessity — or ambition — or pride.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs