Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

Daphne Gottlieb

Categorized in : You Change Poetry Political

I was 14 and madly in love for the first time. He was 21. He made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street.

Daphne Gottlieb

kissing girlfriend beautiful

Someone Should Write Me a Love Poem but I'm Stuck Doing It Myself

Daphne Gottlieb

love-poems should writing

I'm not a girl anymore, I'm a woman and my heart beats like prizefighter's fists, and I have not stopped yet, I will not stop.

Daphne Gottlieb

girl healing heart

The thing about superheroes is that they don't have problems, right? A feminist hooker superhero wouldn't have to worry about assault, or pregnancy, or poverty, or disease, or eating and shelter, or police. In order to make her a superhero, you have to divorce her of the very context that makes her story possible. You have to gloss over the trauma.

Daphne Gottlieb

divorce pregnancy order

That's point of writing: building what you need, right?

Daphne Gottlieb

building writing needs

I write to make sense of things that dont make sense to me.

Daphne Gottlieb

make-sense writing

I think that hope is the act of continuing in the face of the truth.

Daphne Gottlieb

continuing faces thinking

Love - at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love - does not conquer all.

Daphne Gottlieb

pairs conquer doe

There is nothing going on. I took nothing you wanted. You can't have it back.

Daphne Gottlieb

wanted

All the black leather she needs is the E-Z boy recliner where her love is parked with one of his hands wrapped around a remote, the other, a bottle of beer. She's right. It's kinky. The way he doesn't look away from the TV, as her head bobs in his lap like a fisherman's float on a nature program, hectic with the pace his breath sets. His crotch swells under her mouth's prowess. He's such a sweetheart he waits until the commercials to come.

Daphne Gottlieb

beer love-is boys

come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you did this time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it

Daphne Gottlieb

hurt sight men

you can take this mouth this wound you want but you can't kiss and make it better.

Daphne Gottlieb

kissing relationship sex

I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.

Daphne Gottlieb

think you poetry matter

I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.

Daphne Gottlieb

back reading culture people

I go through periods of not writing. Until there's something I can't find in the world that I need, so I write.

Daphne Gottlieb

find need writing world

I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.

Daphne Gottlieb

write go like fever