“I wish to show you the darkness you are so afraid of. Trust me. This darkness is a place you can enter and be as safe in as you are anywhere; you can put one foot in front of the other and believe the sides of your eyes. Memorize it. You will know it again in your own time. When the appearances of things have left you, you will still have this darkness. Something of your own you can carry with you.”
― Selected Poems 2: 1976 - 1986
― Selected Poems 2: 1976 - 1986
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
―
―
“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
―
―
“This is “poetry,” this song
of the wind across teeth,
this message from the flayed tongue
to the flayed ear.”
― Selected Poems 2: 1976 - 1986
of the wind across teeth,
this message from the flayed tongue
to the flayed ear.”
― Selected Poems 2: 1976 - 1986
Ilse’s 2025 Year in Books
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