Charles Simic: “The kind of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.”

“Faas’s photographs, like the ones that got him the Pulitzer, in 1965, make it clear that he has a sense of what war looks like, and that it’s not just explosions and generals. It’s men with guns next to people who don’t have any; a soldier who stands with a scarf covering his mouth and nose, his expression contorted, surrounded by litters holding decaying dead bodies. It’s also the light that falls on soldiers between the shootings.”

Books and clouds and river.

From:

teachingliteracy:

paris seine river bank (by jan bijker)

nationalgeographicscans:

Palau, July 1978

bookmania:

from Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

mineral, rain, and light, and / between the corn-rows, / the broadcast field-peas / fall into soft, laying-by soil: / dry beads of concentration / covered by the moist / general ground
—A.R. Ammons

Before Stanley Kubrick was a film director, he was a photographer in New York City.

“Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.” — Dag Hammarskjold

Why does our fascination with the Titanic persist?

All sorts of deliciousness from Lines + Stars’ new Winter 2012 issue.