theparisreview:

One could as well have chosen
that life of supermarket carts
junked in the backyard,
where you stand and wait
with your mechanic’s hands
and a bare chest
in summer, light
behind you jammed into the picture,
its code undecipherable
even by the camera,
so steep and dense its
dreaming smeared on the warped
boards of the toolshed, makeshift
cinder path, and what once must have been
grass of a lawn now given way
to automobile parts and that complication
of wreckage, brutal and casual
at once, whose talent it is to attach
itself to us in California
or to those lives in other places
we accede to.

Where evening finds us
I cannot name yet; these are lives
best seen, or dreamt, beneath that sun
of backyard chaos
and indeterminate nourishing power,
that sun of rusting crankshafts,
of beached headlights, where you wait
for what shall not be named yet in this poem,

where evening finds us,
should it find us,
on a second-hand mattress whose bent springs
jangle when the wind lies right,
those mechanic’s hands
to small avail
against the infinite
machine turning
the stars on over California,
the dark no doubt insisting moonlight
color chaos silver soon in backlots
where supermarket carts
and auto bodies
await, if we are gifted,
restoration at our hands
(and we are gifted),
we who, beneath that daylight etched
like anniversaries on the calendar
nailed to the toolshed wall,
wait for what has not disclosed its name,
neither in California
nor in this life of bleached,
unlikely places.

Herbert Morris, “These Are Lives”
Photography Credit Lluís Tudela

God I love The Paris Review.

(via enigmaticrose)

(Source: sheandherdarkness, via extraordinaryfearlessness)

theparisreview:

It is
so snug—
the skin
of the living animal
stretched out
to a rug
shaped something
like the United States.
One meditates
upon a
Florida-like flap—
a forward leg
which ran
the Russian steppes
perhaps?

—Kay Ryan, “Poetry in Translation”
Art Credit Jonathan Dalton

smmurphy:

SMmurphy Design

Visual Identity: to give a Norwich University College of the Arts student society a visual identity.

Here I chose to re-brand the Creative Writing society. I put my design into context by creating a starter pack for the members- with the inserts including an introduction to the group, a bookmark, two postcards displaying the logo (one with typography and one without), flyers and a poster.

I wanted to mirror a raw and personal touch through my starter pack, so I used handwritten fonts printed on textured paper and pages from books to convey an honest representation of the valuabilty of creative writing itself.

I used blue ink for an artistic theme that ties all the inserts together. The coffee cup ink ring adds an honest expression of a creative writer’s thought pattern. The intensity of the blue ink contrasts well with the fragile material of the paper- balancing the design out.

(via smalltalktumblr)

(via dallasclayton-deactivated201304)

(Source: stream.pleated-jeans.com, via writersrelief)