s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] > Books

‘Sophistry in a phrase so neat you can’t see the loose end that would unravel it. It’s flawless but wrong. A perfect dud. You can do that with words, bless ‘em.’

‘People in my class wanted to save the environment, find housing for the homeless, and provide fair, adequate representation for people with disabilities or those seeking US citizenship. But, for the most part, they all moved on to associate positions in Big Law, defending major corporations accused of poisoning children and things like that. I do not fault them for this. You cannot pay off a $200K debt if your clients are homeless.’

‘Lars plays the video again from the beginning. Exhausted, he thinks of his mother, gone. And his father uptown. And his dad’s cash (largely gone) which had backed Gallery X. The ocean is gone. The garments are gone. The giant sewing needle and pubic hair and bird wings and wallpaper, gone gone gone. Just the white cube of an empty art room and Lars in the middle, dressed in all back: shirt, jacket, and combat boots.’

‘I’d chosen to publish alongside people whose views he took to be “anti-liberatory.” Guilt by association. There is, of course, a long history of men punishing women for stepping out of line or being hard to read, but ordinary misogyny aside, Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han were right: we surveil and punish each other under the guise of liberation and safety, thus doing the state’s work for it. It’s freaky, tricky. And it does make me scared for many things, including poetry.’

‘One thing I really love about poetry is the room for the mystery, the room for the braid or the weave or the unknowing. Certitude seems very trendy to me nowadays…And what I love about poetry is that it’s a realm for not knowing. The experience of writing a poem can leave us with a question. It’s the Rilke thing: learn to love the questions. It was really freeing when it dawned on me that poetry doesn’t need to be understood, it needs to be experienced. There are different ways we understand things. We don’t just understand intellectually. We also understand with our heart or we can understand through desire; there are probably infinite ways of understanding things. What I love about poetry is that you’re not forced to come to an intellectual resolution.’

​’The same psy­chos­pir­i­tu­al and mythopo­et­ic themes that inspire my prose writ­ing. We write our obses­sions, and mine seem to be — in these poems and now in prose — sex, death, con­sump­tion, god, spir­i­tu­al long­ing, earth­ly long­ing, and holes.’

‘Making a poem is making an object. I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language. It was another way to think of a book, an object that is as visually real as it is textually real.’

‘They wanted her to name, embody, and describe them in ways they could understand, with recognizable religious imagery and emotions, in a conventional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof." She won't. She can't. Instead she says: "Light your fires!"’

‘Wealthy men hold the political and economic power, whereas their wives jealously control access to high society…
…We, on the other hand, those of us on the bottom, can slip into their lives undetected. We are invisible to them.’

‘The United States aspires to control the natural resources in Latin America and cannot allow this small southern nation, motivated by patriotic fury, to manifest imperialist pretension.’
Or later:
‘The official story is the defense of democracy, but the real truth lies in the Chilean mineral deposits, controlled by the Brits..’

‘Some path in some desert in some life. And this is the part of the life where I am lost in the desert. But the world is round and covered in oceans. So why am I here?
I’m here because I put myself here…because my father. Because illness. Because my husband. Because avoidance.’

‘Since my husband got sick, my words don't mean what they are supposed to mean. I can't say exactly what I'm thinking, so I use words that signify kindness as substitutes for more complex feelings. A multiplicity of meanings underlies the phrase I love you, which I say at least nine times a day. The phrase can mean anything from I'm sorry you're suffering to Please stop talking.’

‘Any form of positive thinking is sure to bring the kinehora on. Life getting better? ‘No kinehora.’ Believe you have redeeming value as a human being? ‘Don’t kinehora yourself.’’

‘I cross out the word LOVE and write the word IS. They are the same word, love and is, yes, love and is are the same. To be with. To be there. Of all the love languages, I think the greatest is to be there, the greatest of the languages, to be here for, to have been there with. Love.’