Segregated Words: Alexie and Trethewey

Concept poetry always risks disinterest. A book of poems – or an entire collection, in some cases – that focuses on a single topic can only hold so much attention, and the audience that does attend must either share in the monomania or be coaxed into its obsession quickly. The right seductress can take you to her room and entertain forever with the curtains closed, like Anne Wies in Floating City. Despite the urban fixation, she lets us in on joyous secrets, the beatitude of the city, and we transform alongside her subject with a smile.

But not all concepts can be so successful, and many overstep the boundary between focus and fixation. Questions of race and identity, as popularized in poetry by Sherman Alexie and Natasha Trethewey, walk the fine line and often stumble into tedium.

The problem with conceptualizing emotion is that its expression becomes exhaustive; one can only talk for so long about being a fish out of water or a disgruntled half-breed or an indignant native American. These things, although potential topics for one or a few poems, are the means to a more creative end, not the ends themselves. Unique human conditions produce uniquely emotive beings, people capable of fathoming the world in endlessly different ways. These people, then, should do more than just poeticize their complaints ad nauseam at the expense of other creative ventures. They should exorcise past demons and charge onward rather than stand on a petrified soapbox.

What a strange soapbox it is, too - demanding restitutions, decrying intolerance, and elucidating personal plights with supposed social resonance. We hear their hollering loud and clear. She is black. He is Native American. But their attempt to promote diversity is a rather uniform one, a singular self-sabotage. It proves that they can curate their own Museums of Me but are too scared or proud or boring to walk outside. She is still that little mulatto girl trying to fit in (or stand out), but she can’t because her struggle has won out. It has replaced her and speaks volumes while she remains mute: "A true account of how things were back then. / On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth, / bucked eyes, our textbook's grinning proof - a lie / my teacher guarded. Silent, so did I". And he can only stew indignantly, waiting to strike back: "You understand and know / why I was so quick to rage, remember / why my hand closes easily to a fist."

Move on, move on, move on...

New Phenomenon: The Ostrich

Somewhere in between the exhilaration of flying with falcons and the ho-hum of sitting bored in a birdhouse is the Ostrich, a flightless thing but a bird nonetheless. The Ostrich is too weighty and ponderous to fly, a decent stab at soaring but aeronautically doomed by its own makeup.

Unlike the Birdhouse, the Ostrich is mobile. Unlike the Bird, the Ostrich is grounded. Alfred Corn touches on what can turn one into the other in his review of Robert Hass's Time and Materials, saying:

Although Hass briefly expands the scope of the subject by alluding to the Aeneid (the moment when Aeneas flees the burning city with his father on his back), I think the allusion is too weighty for this poem, given how unliterary and unadorned it is. A defense would no doubt argue that resolute austerity of presentation matches the dire events recounted; even mildly aesthetic touches might seem like window-dressing. As for the Trojan allusion, though grand, it conveys the notion of a son bearing the burden of his father. Fine, but then Hass is repudiating the paternal legacy here, whereas Aeneas intended the opposite. If I’d written the poem, I’d have dropped the Trojan allusion and reconceived the text as a brief prose memoir.

In a sort of anti-statistical vein, we can view the birdhouse-ostrich-bird schema as a continuum on which most poetry can be plotted. An abundance of popular references, familiar themes, traditional forms, and even jokes can relegate a poem to Birdhouse status; they entice readers with the promise of communal enjoyment and wink-wink accessibility, sheltering us from pounding hearts and discouraging the flutter of wings. Unique forms, personal allusions, bizarre analogies, and exotic topics will earn the title of Bird-of-Flight; they fly freely and of their own accord, gracefully shattering gravity and permitting us to enjoy the ride. Then there's the Ostrich, trapped dead center. It is a poem with vision and potential, with wings that flap loudly but in vain due to the gravity of their own philosophy. The Ostrich is loaded full of hefty allusions, lengthy clauses, and theoretical intent, and is easily categorized according to its respective school (i.e. Tjanting and Language Poetry).

Here are some examples of where certain works lie on the ornithological spectrum:

Birdhouse: Denise Duhamel-Two and Two /Natasha Trethewey-Native Guard / Sherman Alexie-First Indian on the Moon
Ostrich: Ron Silliman-Tjanting
Bird of Flight: Maggie Dietz-Perennial Fall / Anne Wies-Floating City / Dean Young- Embryoyo

Please feel free to edit this list as you see fit; it's certainly not exhaustive and most labels are arguable.

Sylvia Plath Reads "Daddy"

"Floating City" Soars

Floating City, Anne Pierson Wiese's premier release and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more than deserving of such acclaim. Despite the childish praises on the back cover ("Floating City is a super debut!"), the book's interior shines brilliantly and explores the shadows it creates.

The book is a concept collection; every poem is a poem of place, and the place is New York City. Wiese carves into the city's core, exposing natural mysteries that hide beside the megalopolis' sidewalks and streetlights.

St. John the divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.

And we do transcend the hubbub of the streets, but first Wiese plays to our notions of metropolitan life, starting her poems like guided tours that both orient and confuse, as we shoot quickly through a 5th Avenue blur of pastry shops, subway stations, and street signs. She trivializes the taxi-window view of the city, not giving us cause to brace for her clever shift from the surface to the deep.

Under the streets
We flock together, fleet and half tame
as rare birds loose in a cavernous
pet emporium, returning for the night
To their rows of pagodas.

By the time we've read "pagodas," it really doesn't matter where we are anymore. The city and all of its neon sterility is transformed into hallowed emotion and history, and we happily trail just behind Weise as she leads us through parks, gardens, and cathedrals that all have a secret to tell. She helps us to penetrate the facade of New York, and we find an inviolable force no skyscraper can overshadow.

Gentlemen, here is a substance
we cannot move...The old maples and oaks,
plumbing the hill as humans could not,
whisper of what's below: more rock- more rock- more rock.

The (In)Voluntary Exile: Blogs Break the Boundary

The dominant perception of artists and thinkers throughout history has marginalized their role (or lack thereof) in society. Part of this is a flaw in collective ontology, but most of it is a valid response to the likes of Voltaire, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and Alan Ginsberg, who have defined the opposite of conventional behavior and assumed official "weirdo" status in the annals of cultural history.

Now the stereotype is a self-fulfilling prophecy; an aspiring or accomplished poet invariably relegates himself to reclusive cloisters or tight circles of fellow outcasts. This is why death, solitude, and unrequited affection have been the top subjects of poetry throughout the years. Profundity is a personal endeavor, and its quest is sometimes a righteous one. The best poets have a paucity of devotees who venerate them as "sacred heretics," although in common minds their heresy is commonplace and contemptible. They are too different, too dangerous; they always border the criminal and sometimes cross the line.

The world of online poetics, however, has proven an effective method of snapping such notions, not only thrusting the concept of literature and literary theory into the mainstream but catapulting its creators into the limelight as well. Modern poets can publish and publicize themselves in blogs, and although they may retreat into unorthodox seclusion while they write, their bloggerly persona remains just as accessible and public as Perez Hilton.

See also Gabriel Gudding's February 2nd Post entitled "Varieties of Masculine Experience."

"Tjanting" has More to Say

The hard copy of Ron Silliman's "Tjanting" has a secret to tell. Unlike the pdf sample of the book's introduction, the printed pages feature seemingly random words and punctuation in bold type, which when strung together form another poem. The lines are stylistically removed from the jumbled chaos of "Tjanting"'s linear read-through, revealing both the softer side of Silliman's poesy and a sense of linguistic irony. Despite the assumed logistical barrier of constructing a poem from prearranged words, the encrypted poem is in fact much less cryptic than the body from which it was culled:

Cry into the night, the Dark, an endless search, a past entombed and doomed to human confusion. The whole damn thing is just so subjective, like everyone is breathing and copulating and praying in their own grimm fairy tale and writing their own words and forcing others into it sometimes without realizing. A flash. A winter vignette. Around the edges we are all snowblind. Snow is not an outlandish sex fantasy. The crack of the real whip on real flesh is mortifying, painful, demeaning. The thrill is in escaping, and laughing at yourself for once craving that raw and rosy flesh. But snow is always beautiful, moreso than its image in the mind, moreso than Monet and his oil magpies, moreso than Christmas lights or pillow fights, moreso than cocaine. I have seen lights in dark places and a fresh crest of snow is one, like turning the page of a moleskine and crying for the cleanliness; the virgin blanket waiting to be ravaged and stained, erected, defended, carved, trampled, balled up by toddler warmongers and catapulted with a laugh into the blustery fray. I have seen people smile at their own tracks in the snow, while others just hurry to the hearth and collapse with grateful skin. I have seen the sun burn away the page, and underneath is a new one, a bit soiled, silently beseeching another turn.

The decoding process took a long time. Was it worth it?

Workshopping in Progress:

Go easy on me!

Lunch Poems at Berkeley: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Word Alert: "Tjanting"

Just so you know.....

Somewhere in the wispy cross-fade of Tjanting's cover is a design reminiscent of Batik, an ancient form of textile art that produces unique dye patterns on cloth. Since its (probable) inception in Egypt, Batik artists have employed a tool called a Tjanting, used to apply hot wax onto fabric. It generally has a wooden handle and a metal resevoir at the end with a small spout to allow the wax to run onto the fabric. The wax is used as a resist against dye.

Thanks to Celia on Jacquard Forums for this definition.

"Tjanting" Something Else

Click Here for the introduction and opening pages of Tjanting

Not this.
What, then?
I started over & over. Not this.

So begins Ron Silliman's 2002 release Tjanting, a ponderous intermediate piece of his lifework, Ketjak, which is comprised of several other works published in succession since 1979. Each release functions as a long Language Poem, and Tjanting begins in this fashion with unabashed insistence upon the movement's tendency to disjoin: "Not this."

What follows is a flurry of prose poetry, a bizarre stream-of-consciousness account of the speaker's ruminations. Sentences are fragmented, spelling is perverted, and thoughts spontaneously jump in helter-skelter confusion. But there is order to this chaos, as images and actions recycle, multiply, and progress towards ambiguous ends in slow and agonizing detail.
"Call this long hand," he says amidst a discordant staccato of moles, airports, weathermen, and numerical puns.

The action weaves about in cyclonic fashion, turning over fragments of language, culture, and commentary in an endless (and often tiring) pageant of the unconventional. Then we hear it all again in loose pidgin; the semblance of linguistic integrity that once existed disintegrates into ejaculations of "No thingdis deep. Build an onion. This long hand call," and recollections of the vague become even less coherent.

Even with Silliman's deliberate unpredictability, the long poem fails to surprise after its first page or so. Looking at endless block paragraphs, despite their montaged intrigue, forces his linguistic experiment to blur in the mind. But this may be the point, as the mere reading of the pseudo-language itself stamps abstract impressions of an imagined world into our own. Paradoxically, the abstraction is wrought of concrete signifiers; simple nouns and visceral imagery give us a sense of firm footing inside each sentence, but refuse to provide anything more than fleeting vignettes. We feel we know the lexicon, but its meaning eludes us through its syntax as we struggle to read a new English with an interpretive accent.

It's really quite unfair. Just as we begin to feel solid about something quaggy like "analogies to quicksand," Silliman giggles and chides, whispering "Nor that either."

Silliman Sells Out, For a While

I was dismayed to find a few posts on Silliman's blog dedicated to Project Runway and Barack Obama. I'm not sure how they crept into a site concerning "contemporary poetry and poetics," but a huge screenshot from Project Runway's final competition, as juxtaposed against a picture of his most recently reviewed book, is downright disturbing.

While the image of anorexic waist lines draped in gaudy couture haunted me for days, his eighteen-paragraph political commentary merely disillusioned my faith in Silliman's good intentions (and blogging decency). The posts aren't just OT, they're obscenely OT. If he feels strongly enough and has enough material about Obama and pointless television, he should start another blog and deposit that filth there.

Nevertheless, I am happy to report that he has returned to his more admirable and pertinent endeavors, and currently features a lengthy list of poetry-related links (go figure!).

The Very Worst of Denise Duhamel

This travesty of originality speaks for itself:

Do not swallow.
If you accidentally swallow this poem, contact a Poison Control Center
...immediately.
Do not read this poem while sleeping.
If you consume 3 or more alcoholic drinks everyday, consult your doctor before
...reading this poem as a pain reliever.
This poem is not for use with the browning unit of your conventional oven.
Never place this poem in a microwave.


This poem may cause stomach bleeding.
In case of bleeding, consult a doctor promptly.
Do not take this poem by mouth or place in nostrils.
Do not put this poem into the rectum by using fingers or any mechanical device
...or applicator.
Avoid contact with open wounds.
Do not read this poem for persistent or chronic cough.
If symptoms persist for more than seven days, discontinue reading this poem
...and consult your doctor.
Do not place this poem in any container in which you are heating water.
Do not apply this poem to broken or irritated skin.
In case of serious burns or animal bites, do not read this poem. Consult a
...hospital.
If you are pregnant or nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health care worker
...before reading this poem.
This poem has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This
...poem is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.


This poem is not intended for weight reduction.
A very small percentage of readers may develop a sensitivity to this poem. This
...sensitivity may result in an allergic reaction.
This poem may contain nuts or nut fragments.
This poem contains caffeine.
This poem contains phenylketonurics which contains phenylalanine.
This poem contains 21-28.7% mercury. Reading it may cause serious mercury
...poisoning.
This poem contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer
...in laboratory animals.
This poem contains ical known to cause birth defects.


Read this poem only in well ventilated areas.
Avoid fire, flame, or smoking while reading this poem.
As with most poems, electrical parts of this poem are electrically live even when
The poem is not being read. To reduce risk of death, always "unplug it"
...after use.
Do not read while bathing.
Do not place or store where poem can fall or be pulled into tub, toilet, or sink.
If this poem falls into water, do not reach into water to retrieve it.
This poem may explode or leak and cause burn injury if disposed of in fire,
...mixed with poems of different types, or disassembled.
This poem contains liquid and vapors which may ignite.
Never spray and pull poems apart at the same time as this action creates static
...which in itself is an electrical charge which could possibly ignite.
Do not puncture this poem.
Do not attempt to iron this poem or any poem while it is being worn on a body.


Rinse this poem thoroughly before reading it. Defrost.
Always shake well before reading.
Read with food.
Read on an empty stomach.
After opening this poem, read it within seven days.
Do not turn this poem upside down before reading.
Refrigerate after reading.
Read at room temperature.
Read in a cool dry place.


Do not read in temperatures above 120 degrees F as poem may burst.
Do not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery while reading this poem.
Deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents of this poem can be harmful
...or fatal.
Read only as directed. Entering this poem into the ear canal could cause injury.
The red tip is to remind you not to put this poem in your eye. If accidental
...contact with eyes occurs, immediately put down this poem and flush eyes
...with water.


Read liberally to the affected area.
Do not read more than three times a day.
For external use only. If rash develops, discontinue reading.
Avoid reading this poem if you have skin prone to spider veins and/or skin
...which is sensitive to peel-off face masks.
If the reading of this poem is accompanied by fever, headache, swelling, nausea,
...or vomiting, stop reading immediately.

Do not read to children under twelve years of age.
Supervise any children over six who read poems.
For children under two, use only a pea size amount of this poem.
Consult your pediatrician before reading to children under six months.
Keep poems away from baby's nose and mouth.
Keep this and all poems out of the reach of children.
The reading of this poem does not enable you to fly.

No kidding.

Spider Woman Wields an Uzi? Give Us a Break, Duhamel!

Every birdhouse requires a craftsman, and I've found the perfect carpenter in Denise Duhamel, who shamelessly hurls her woodwork about and doesn't bother to brush off the sawdust. Her 2005 release Two and Two epitomizes pop poetry, dropping hefty cultural bombs and Hollywood wit into the hands of dilettantes eager to feel "in" on the joke. And joke she does, relentlessly. Like the pairs of jackasses and geese on the book's cover, her poems bray and squawk with twisted whimsy. At times (once), she pulls this off without seeming too grating, like in "The Accident":

He used to sing to us, Down
In the bottom of an itty-bitty pool...Now he can't fall
Asleep without falling, down
in the bottom of his own big pool of blood...
My father steps up the hill
To fetch another pail of blood

She does, of course, know how to play with language, but squanders her gift by turning the game into juvenile gibberish and pulp poetic puns:

Our Americano was an example to
yackety -yak yes-men everywhere. He inspired a
zillion Zen hipsters, zoot-suiters, and zazoos with his zing, zazzle, and zowie.

Duhamel draws from memes and common ground to make us all grin and laugh, and to be honest it is hard to resist. But it's like she's screaming for attention and recognition, hoping to strike the fool's fancy with pop references and radical form, as in "Pituitary Theft," a short script acted out between a bad guy and an uzi-wielding Spider Woman. Or how about a "poem" comprised entirely of warning labels from familiar household products? Sure, they're comical. They may even be clever, but they are much too comfortable for someone who knows the potential of language and poetry to move, transform and bewilder.

Ungaretti and Cruz: Hermetic Evolution

The works of both Cynthia Cruz and Giuseppi Ungaretti flooded my mind through some bizarre providence in the same day, and I could not help but notice their similarities. Sparse, mystical, and intensely personal, these poems proudly wave the flag of Hermetic poetry and assert the role of writing as a chiefly personal exercise. Rather than sparking a tete-a-tete with a popular audience eager to recognize themselves in the words of another, Cruz, like Ungaretti, leans on nothing familiar and refuses to provide the cushion of cultural references for those who shy from the unknown.

Ungaretti, considered the father of Hermetic poetry, presents beautifully terse lyrics that sing loud, despite their brevity. Here's a beautiful excerpt:


Time is silent among motionless rushes...

Far from moorings drifted a canoe...

Exhausted and sluggish the oarsman...The heavens
Already Fallen into abysses of smoke...


Stretched out in vain at the edge of memory,
It may be falling was mercy...

He did not know


It is the same illusion world and mind,
That in the mystery of its own waves
Every earthly voice is shipwrecked

He doesn't write for a reader, nor does he care if a reader responds to his work. Note the lack of popular allusions. Note the lack of interplay between writer and reader. This is a personal meditation, devoid of extension or concern for the critic. Welcome to Hermetics. Like Cruz, he seems to write for himself, exploring a private purpose and passion that exists in separation from another's expectation. Whether this is pure confession or pure creation confounds the "art for art's sake" paradigm of objective poetry. Confessional or not, the offerings of troubled souls give us much to think about. Let's think about them, rather than discount their lines as perverse spoutings from foreign minds.



See It's the Accent That Freaks Me Out for more Ungaretti.

"Ruin" Press Kit With Two Sample Poems

Here's the link to the pdf file: www.alicejamesbooks.org/images/ruin_press_kit.pdf

The book is also on tap at the Fort Myers Public Library in down town FM.

Cruz Grants Redemption in "Ruin"

"Ruin," Cynthia Cruz's debut collection of poems, delivers a rare emotional force that has been scorned by some critics for its sentimentality and unabashed grievance. Small Spiral Notebook, despite offering some hearty praise for Cruz's efforts, condemns her style for its quasi-maudlin tendencies - "too histrionic...too sonically agonized...wreaking too much self-inflicted pain."

Indeed, the speaker's cold and haunted reminiscences are sometimes a sufferance, reading like the disturbed reflections of a girlhood traumatized by untimely death. But such hauntings are nothing to shy away from, especially when they are as creatively rendered as this. The entire collection is unified by a wintry despondence and a shadowed ambiance, where confession blurs with creation and the reader struggles along with Cruz to find redemption in the ruins of a shattered past. And such moments of salvation are found in the most unlikely of places, nestled in the deathbed of her frail and doomed brother "too fragile for the world," her atrophying mare "wasting away in the barn, her weak limbs at rest," and the murderous games played in a shadowy orchard: "Let's find something still alive / to kill."

With her brother and her innocence hovering upon the brink of death, the heart feels heavy and one wishes not to read further. Then a stab of light comes in the form of a brief rhapsody like "Goleta," where we are extended a good memory and allowed to savor it. And we do so with more relish than ever imagined, as the imprisoning ruins are outshined but for a moment by simple and exalted beauty:

Little Fox was mine, upon whose back I broke
Loose those locked rooms, that
House. The Ranch, Goleta,
The impossible fire. A field, a world, a winter
Of singing that would not stop. At night,
Even now, I can hear the sound
Of great flocks passing overhead.

Cruz's "Ruin" tells a tale of transcendent pain and healing. She plays with the abstract, the surreal, and an endlessly strange array of metaphors that drag us into haunted milieus and then grant us the wings to escape.

"360°" Has my Head Spinning

In a good way, I assure you. The poem by Deborah Warren, which originally appeared in The New Criterion in February 2008, achieves the subtle lyricism and pathos attempted (miserably) by Franz Wright in God's Silence. Although independent of any rhyme scheme, certain lines recall previous images and assonance, creating a kind of fluid cohesion that spins through your mind with more grace than Warren's weather-vane :

All afternoon the wind complained, and the willows
would have come to blows—but yielded
(being willows), swimming along the air.

Thick with purposes, the same wind—squealing,
rocketing down my narrow veins,
taking the corners fast—

spun out into a hurricane in my heart
and made of my will a weather-vane—
reading every gust—

that shifts at the wind’s direction and, too willing,
hoarse on its hinges, bats in vain
and croaks and spins, not getting anywhere.

The poem, however, reads with the light ephemerality too common in modern writing - witty, immediately moving, and immediately forgettable. Still, it knows its place. Like Warren's willows that yield "(being willows)," so too do her quiet tercets stay quietly affective. The words themselves "squeal" and "rocket," but are nearly silenced by Warren's controlled contemplation in the last two stanzas. This impuissance, however, functions very congruously with the last lines, which, despite their croaking and spinning, are "not getting anywhere."

Archive Off-Limits

Reading is a free pleasure. Reading online is even freer, or at least it should be. CPRW.com (Contemporary Poetry Review), however, turns reading into a race for access, allowing the general public to view only their current articles and reviews. The losers must pay a subscription fee to access Cprw's valuable archives. Granted, the site is worth much more than your average blog or poetry fan site, but the restricted access is in itself nearly annoying enough to divert my attention to a less accredited site like HgPoetics. No barricades there. No esteem, either. But a middle ground between accreditation and accessibility can be found in online newspapers like the NYTimes Book Reviews, that offer a massive collection of archived and browsable articles for free.

YouTube Writers Videos and Interviews

A few vids and interviews with writers of prose and poetry

Jeanette Winterson Speaks with Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason
Jeanette Winterson Speaks with Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason (part 2)
Whitley Strieber Discusses parallel universes and his new book 2012
Dean Young Speaks on Poetry and Meat

Poetic prose induces epic reverie

As a hopefully refreshing deviation from the endless trifles of robotic and au natural neo-poetics, I've decided to pressure you into enjoying the invigorating confusion of Jeanette Winterson. Although poetry is not her genre, it is certainly her intent. Her short works of fiction read like extended poems, where paragraphs are line breaks and a new chapter grants enough pause to start the next verse with fresh breath. "The Passion" even features a character named Villanelle, and certain phrases repeat throughout the text within different contexts and between two "rhyming" narrators, mimicking and extending the form's structure.

Winterson plays with our expectations of narration, confession, and myth, weaving surreal tales that read like a history but feel like legend. She doesn't suppose her readers crave the mundane, thus her narrators inhabit the mindset of Bohemia. Androgynous fantasts, outcasts, and gentiles see more than the average Joe, and mystify the surrounding world with delightful incision. Inverted chronologies, unreliable and imagined protagonists, geometric narration, and philosophical meanderings reveal Winterson to be the writer's writer; one who doesn't just tell a good story but but who does so cleverly. The real irony is that she unravels the stories she spins, pushing her readers to question the very nature of storytelling - its purpose and its promise. And a new page of Winterson is always more than promising. Her words are completion, the final act of finding passion where it springs, and never again going thirsty.

If you haven't read her already, buy The Passion and taste the words. Here's an appetizer:

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."

"On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path."

"I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as [my mother's] I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should."

"His wife had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. like God, she was neglected."

"What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we're still alive, and say you've got the truth? Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now."

"The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to. In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water."

"In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is."