round-up: 11/4
recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Friday, folks!
I have a quickie for you today:
Housekeeping
Love letters
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I have three poems out in print this week.
You can read them online here (x) and here (x). You can read the third one here (x).
A very important question:
& another:
In addition!
I have some new collages out (x), and they’re for sale for $7-$12 on my website.
Love letters:
What I read last week:
GLARING, Benjamin Krusling
Quotations:
Before I started Luster, I’d just finished writing a different book, and to be frank, the book was bad. I mention that because I think when a project doesn’t pan out, it can be really instructional for the next work. There is great freedom in starting something new, and in knowing that no work is wasted. It all moves you forward.
I wanted […] to have a black woman on the page articulating her experience in a specific and unvarnished way. To have her be hungry, perverse. To have her be human.
I’m interested in that contradiction of intimacy, its necessity and its ugliness.
It evolved organically. I set out to write a candid depiction of a black woman’s consciousness. The preoccupations that emerged were a function of the body attached to that consciousness and that body’s place in the world—where it is subject to racism, to an inhospitable city, and to an exploitative economy that impedes the privilege to make art and has great bearing to the kind of relationships you seek out.
I felt enormous responsibility to depict a black story where there is joy, where the characters aren’t defined entirely by how much they can endure.
I love […] a certain kind of care on the sentence level. I look to the poets, who I think do it best. The form demands discipline, and through that discipline, urgency. I love writing that is abundant and intentional. To take up room is an act of faith. It’s a vulnerable thing to be that overt in your expression, and I want to always be vulnerable on the page.
To make anything you need the means and time, and you need to be intact, and that is frustrated by the racist, sexist, and capitalist forces that all contribute to your erasure. So to be able to make art is a privilege and a refusal of this erasure.
I’m a stable / cultural accident
-Benjamin Krusling
my mom tells me not to mix liquor and pills / as I watch her very high-risk behavior
-Benjamin Krusling
I was really a low life !
now I’m back and twice as necessary !
-Benjamin Krusling
I was still in this world of enclosure , with / the coast in me , the climax .
-Benjamin Krusling
het love is a freaky war machine
-Benjamin Krusling
I don’t know why I don’t just send all my desire forward
-Benjamin Krusling
He’s not a writer, so his version of a Twitter joke is to just kind of… live-comment to Twitter followers with kind of random, unformed thoughts. And fame does that to you—where you think every kind of random, unformed thought is a gem, because you get 10,000 likes from it. He has, like, 27 million Twitter followers. And that makes me scared about fame in general. The yes-men. Even if what you’re saying is, I don’t know, kind of weird or unoriginal, you’re still getting a lot of approval and dopamine surges for saying it. And I really, really hope that I can surround myself with people who will call me out on my shit, so that—even if I ever were to have 27 million Twitter followers—I would be just kind of… a person first, and a famous person second.
Tweets:
That’s all for today. Hope you have a great weekend!
Please buy things so that I can pay my rent. Love you.