poets and poetry
June Jordan
her main focus was Simone Weil. She riffed on Weil’s idea of the void, of making a space inside yourself for the divine to rush into. “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”
The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson - The Rumpus
- Max Ehrmann
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata"
In the fall of 1970, the Black feminist poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan traveled to Italy as a Rome Prize recipient in the category of Environmental Design ( We’re On 153).1 She was awarded the prize for work that grew out of her collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Jordan’s connection with Fuller began in 1964, when Jord... See more
“Harlem Will Widen from River to River”: Environmental Justice and ...
skyrise for Harlem
reconfiguring the relationship between the built environment and it’s ecological context.
sekou, malcom Mccullough
Maybe this is all taking me back to Annie Dillard, my first writing teacher, whose influence on me abides, and who famously and reassuringly once wrote, “You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over.” In other words, the empty-handedness is import... See more
The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson - The Rumpus

I prefer old school Audre Lorde’s version of risk:
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to sta... See more
The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson - The Rumpus
Excerpt from Prose Architectures introduction by Renee Gladman: "Drawing extended my being in time; it made things slow. It quieted language. It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language: I saw it as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if something were being poured or pulled out of oneself, but here, ... See more