—I CAN’T SEEM TO GET THROUGH THESE SONGS ABOUT YOU

 

 

 

Padraig O Tuama

 

 

Disappointment is the cost of love.

 

When we share something we’ve created, we’re usually hoping for an echo that says, I see you.

 

The qualities of listening and sharing are reciprocal.

 

It’s really the living who live with the dead.

 

The only way to get through it is to go through it.

 

A myth can last a century, or a week.

 

The assumption that everyone shares the same myth isn’t accurate. We all have our own vision.

 

When it comes to racism, or harm in general, you might think, I didn’t personally do that. But you should ask yourself, Did I benefit from it somehow?

 

There are all sorts of ways to recognize, or unrecognize, people.

 

It’s a form of art when you read your poem aloud and the tension in what you’ve written makes your voice crack, catch and rise.

 

I’m not in a room of belief, but I’m next door listening.

 

I think Jesus respected those people who didn’t give him the answers they thought he wanted to hear.

 

True eroticism is following an urge, without one person dominating the other.

 

I’m trying to develop the capacity to hold ambivalence.

 

We don’t tell “we” stories, we tell “me” stories, and that’s what we always have to remember. Each story we tell is ours, and ours alone.

 

Pay close attention to the strains of tension you feel.

 

Your privilege is entirely yours alone, and the only person who doesn’t seem to know that is you.

 

When someone claims something to be true, I always want to ask, Says who?

 

What is the place of envy in your life?

 

Performing guilt only benefits the performer.

 

Art will always defy any one singular emotion. Always.

 

Emily Dickinson had the gift of noticing things just to notice them.

 

So often, when reading poetry, the voice in your head will say, I don’t get it paired with But I should get it when really the important thing is, What do you feel about it?

 

Believing less helped me believe in something else more.

 

Persona is the Greek word for mask.

 

Really, nothing is solid. Nothing is sure.

 

There’s always the arrogance of time to consider. 

 

Poetry doesn’t belong to poets. Poetry belongs to the public.

 

There are lots of opportunities to be lonely this week. 

 

It’s important, when reading a poem, to try not to get it as correct as the poet wants it interpreted, but to notice where it draws you to, and why, and what does it reveal about something in your life. 

 

What is it that I see now, that I never wanted to see?

 

What do you want, and why, and to whom is your desire directed?

 

It’s worth paying attention to the dynamics of desire. Desire means wanting something you don’t have. Some desires go unfulfilled—some are sexual, of course. Some are about relationships. Some about the world. Essentially, desire is the space between control and absence, a missed yearning, the absence of absence.

 

Desire reveals ourselves back to us.

 

When it comes to desire, the only thing we have is how to deal with it.

 

Sometimes it’s good to ask, “What world is this language making? Breaking? Mending?"

 

Hello everyone. Hello nothing. I’m Douglass.