Books I Read: Songs of Innocence and Experience

I first read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in college. I highly recommend this small version.

Books I Read

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What Do Women Want?

I first encountered this poem years ago, but thought of it when I saw a Twitter call for "your favorite poems written in the last ~50 years by anyone who isn't a white man." 

The poem is called "What Do Women Want?" and it's by Kim Addonizio.

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me. 

You can read the rest here.

The Bird

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things." -- Mary Oliver

56 Likes, 3 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: ""You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the..."

At the Beach

"THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea" -- W.B. Yeats

See this Instagram photo by @susannahbreslin * 24 likes