claire schwartz @23cschwartz Twitter profile

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claire schwartz

2 years

✨Civil Service is out today✨ These poems have shaped my interior landscape for nearly a decade and it’s lucky to find a form in the world. Thank you to everyone who has given this trying a place to land 🖤

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

Today in Minneapolis, I saw free hot food stations, mutual aid stations giving away diapers and formula, medic trainings, people watching other people’s kids like they are their own, knowing they are their own. The alternatives to policing are already here, have been.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

It is essential to our struggle for self-determination that we speak of love. For love is the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact. It is love that allows us to survive whole. —bell hooks

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

"The passive voice is the language of the state. The status quo. The enforced state of being. It generates the mythology that violence of the state is inevitable." —Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The Associated Press

@AP

2 years

BREAKING: Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist for the Al Jazeera network, was killed by gunfire in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. The shooting happened during an Israeli army raid in Jenin.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

If you have airline miles, you can donate them to refugees, asylees, asylum-seekers, and their immediate family members, who have legal approval to travel but cannot afford airfare here:

Miles4Migrants - Let's make safety only a few miles away

Miles4Migrants uses donated frequent flyer miles, credit card points, travel vouchers, & cash to help vulnerable migrants get to safety.

miles4migrants.org

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

And what shall we do, we who did not die? —June Jordan

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Writing doesn't have to be autobiographical for it to be personal. The shape of your imagination is a deeply intimate thing.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

Audre Lorde ('34) and Toni Morrison ('31) both came into the world on this day. February 18th is holy.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Tamir Rice should be 16 on 6/25. His mother, Ms. Samaria Rice, is leading an effort to renovate the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Center in Cleveland. Among other services, the Center will offer art classes like those Tamir loved. If able, pls consider giving

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

I really appreciate when people say, "No, I don't have the capacity to take this on right now." That means I can then find somebody who can do the work well, who won't leave other people scrambling to pick up what they've dropped. That honesty is a kindness to everyone.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." —Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

"When you lose desire, you lose language. Language is desire enacted: I want to tell you something." —Solmaz Sharif

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

The primary goal of curfew is not to get people to stay inside. The primary goal of curfew, like other state borders, is to authorize the violence the state will enact when that boundary is broken.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

—Etel Adnan (1925-2021)

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

...we are each other's harvest: we are each other's business: we are each other's magnitude and bond. —Gwendolyn Brooks

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning. He added: What is political about this moment? I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running. —Solmaz Sharif

Lee Fang

@lhfang

2 years

The teenage/adolescent urge to see family relationships as a battleground for politics should be avoided at all costs. The personal is absolutely not political. Family and friends do not have to agree on partisan or ideological bullshit to be close. Happy thanksgiving.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

—Langston Hughes

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

KJ Brooks's CashApp: $keiajahgabbrell KJ Brooks's Venmo: @thachingonas

Bossip

@Bossip

3 years

Protect This Queen: Kansas City Activist Keiajah Brooks Alleges Police Harassment After Viral Video, Thinks They're Plotting Her Murder (@ KJGBRKS / Social Media)

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

Seeing a lot of reform being renamed "abolition." It seems worth reiterating: abolition is a rigorous dismantling of systems of unfreedom, not smaller police departments w/better branding, not a reading list sent out by a university whose endowment is invested in private prisons.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

—Lucille Clifton

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

why do ppl so often endorse like they are trying to predict what will happen instead of changing what might be possible?

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

"One of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky...& he said, 'Look.' He said, 'You Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.'" —Marie Howe

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

This is not about "a lack of police." This is about a robust, foundational collaboration between police and other white supremacists.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

"I write out of a derivative of anger. And that derivative is care." —Ocean Vuong

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night .. Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That’s why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day —Ed Hirsch

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Saidiya Hartman says, "Care is the antidote to violence." Here are some poems that teach me how to care, that offer care. 👇

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

"Nothing need be this way." —Saidiya Hartman

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

—Aracelis Girmay

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." —Edward Said

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

Sending extra love to you who didn't win anything, get any acceptance, get any job offer or money or external affirmation and who is figuring out, however you need to, to clear away the noise and get back to the blank page in your own time.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

throwing a poem at a violence doesn't work. art doesn't operate on crisis time. what art can do, does, is to help position and fortify the relationships that allow us to better respond, to be with, to move toward otherwise.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

—M. NourbeSe Philip

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

"In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is a form of self-denial." —June Jordan

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

Not being able to gather in grief is a particular pain. The rituals we rely on to give form to grief’s formlessness, unavailable. This is hard.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

I appreciate the reminder from people long doing abolitionist work that the cops are not the single object of divestment. That to abolish cops but to invest in carceral medical institutions is not to abolish policing. That what is built matters as much as what is destroyed.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Wary of the ways #ShareYourRejections is sounding a bit like triumphalism in the form of a chorus of "i tried, failed, tried, succeeded." I hope these "failures" remind that these institutions are not designed to host us all. We need to make other ways.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

"Let it matter what we call a thing." —Solmaz Sharif

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 months

They did not mean to kill the children. They meant to. Too many kids got in the way of precisely imprecise one-ton bombs dropped a thousand and one times over the children’s nights. —Fady Joudah

[…]

"They did not mean to kill the children. / They meant to."

jewishcurrents.org

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

just remembered that when my grandmother wanted to curse someone, she would say in yiddish: "he should have a mansion with a hundred rooms, in every room one hundred beds, and a fever should drive him from bed to bed." sitting here w/my 4-letter words thinking about what's lost

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

There's a reason that racist poems are often bad on the level of craft. It's because, as M. NourbeSe Philip says, English—a colonial language—requires decontamination. That is a rigorous thing, a thing of ongoing deep vigilance, an understanding of how language is (un)made.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

It makes me sad that most pubs consider books more than 2 years old "too old" to review. Reading well takes time. It takes time to be with, apprehend how something makes meaning in the world.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

"If you make and keep my life horrible then, when I tell the truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look good or, God willing, feel good to you, either." —June Jordan

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

I love how with some books, there is no "before" and "after" reading them. There is only the "before," and the the rest of your life that will unfold in the space (re)reading makes.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

People who don’t believe they have the capacity to do harm are so harmful.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

“I think the duty of the writer . . . is to remind us that we will die, and that we’re not dead yet.” —Solmaz Sharif * * * “And what shall we do, we who did not die?” —June Jordan

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

“[A]rt—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.” —Adrienne Rich

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

"I think we have an obligation...to study what we love, what we want to preserve and keep with us and grow. Joy strikes me as one of the ways we know we are in the midst of such things. It’s like a finger pointing to the thing, saying 'Take care of this!'" —Ross Gay

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Poems can build a space for your child-self that you never had, that you needed. I love that tending through time.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

To be clear: NOT in response to the murder of George Floyd, in response to the work of Black organizers and other protestors *insisting* on this divestment following the murder.

Ryan Faircloth

@RyanFaircloth

4 years

#BREAKING : Minneapolis Public Schools votes unanimously to terminate its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department, in response to the death of #GeorgeFloyd .

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

—Anne Boyer, when asked "What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?"

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

"perhaps these are not poetic times at all" —Nikki Giovanni

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

"I love human beings. Time squeezes us from both ends like accordions, and I love this music we make." — @ilya_poet

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

I feel such company & grief in this poem by Andrea Cohen, which I think about all the time

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

“[L]anguage is just what poets use—like wind chimes—to catch the sound of the larger, more essential thing. Wind chimes themselves are not the point. The point is the wind.” —Jenny George

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

"Poetry's major proposition is that it will turn language over—that it intends to reorganize how a thing is thought, or may be thought." —Dionne Brand

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

Palestine will be free.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

Y’all ever had a teacher who took you seriously before you dared to take yourself seriously in public and, in doing so, offered you a stable future self to move out onto?

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

Wild Geese By Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Waiting for Happiness By Nomi Stone

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

I am so, so excited to share the cover of my poetry collection, Civil Service ( @GraywolfPress , 2022), designed by Mary Austin Speaker with 💫dream💫 compass-art by Doris Salcedo

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

"Fuck 'the speaker.' It is I." —Lucie Brock-Broido * * * "I am not mine." —Mahmoud Darwish * * * I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with. —Toi Derricotte

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

my inbox is entirely gigs being canceled and corporations assuring me they love me

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

—Andrea Cohen

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

one thing I love about being in-process with a poem is how, when I leave the page, the poem comes with me. it become a container for noticing, an imperative to pay attention.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

“No one enters violence for the first time by committing it.” — @daniellesered , quoted by @prisonculture

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

"Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly." —Carl Sandburg

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

@ztsamudzi Thinking of Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Fascists fetishize the state for a whole set of purposes; and anti-fascists tend to fetishize the state as well. The state does not think and do. People in various configurations of power (including from below) enliven states to think and do.”

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

"The air is a second page." —Ocean Vuong, on reading aloud

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

Capital suggests something called work, it puts that work within a certain square meter of the day, so it occupies days, it occupies lives...It compresses language in its meaning, in its logic of what we are good for...It objects to trees except as lumber. —Dionne Brand

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

1/ In 1974, Adrienne Rich won the National Book Award and gave this speech co-written w/co-nominees Audre Lorde & Alice Walker. I come back to it often. It reminds me that we don't have to accept the forms power offers.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This By Hanif Abdurraqib

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

Jacob Lawrence / Etel Adnan

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

Instead of a "best of the year" lists, I'd love to see "books I lived with this year"—not limited to books published this year, just what you held/held you as you moved through

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

"[J]ust remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game." Happy birthday, Toni Morrison!!!!!

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

sometimes I think about what Robert Hayden did with that "too" in the opening line of "Those Winter Sundays": "Sundays too my father got up early"—all that those three little letters are charged with carrying, the exhaustion of it, the genius.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond. —Gwendolyn Brooks

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

The Quiet World By Jeffrey McDaniel

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

7 years

happy birthday, Lucille Clifton!!

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

Sometimes, when I feel sick or when small things feel impossible, it helps me to imagine myself as my body's caretaker. "I'm putting you to bed," I tell my body. Or, "I'm taking you for a walk now." Or, "Here, let's sit by the window."

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

2 years

Surreal to have lived with these poems in various forms for more than eight years and then to see them now, like this, outside my door.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

"I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written." —Linda Gregg * * * "More and more, I am becoming convinced that poetry is not a form of writing, but a form of reading. And a form of thinking and being in the world." —Solmaz Sharif

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events. —Louise Glück

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

Being edited well is such a profound gift. When someone imagines your fledgling present into fuller futures . . . To be seen in the act of becoming, & to become better for their seeing . . .

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

what brutal hours, what brutal days, do not say, oh find the good in it, do not say, there was virtue; there was no virtue, not even in me let us begin from there —Dionne Brand

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

There's something so beautiful to me about poems that dare to articulate their purpose. It always strikes me as such a vulnerable & tender thing to say: I believe, I am trying. A few ars poetica poems I return to 👇

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic? By Andrew Grace

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

"Let it matter what we call a thing." —Solmaz Sharif

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

3 years

If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

( @GraywolfPress , 2022)✨

claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

grateful, after years in my head, to have a thing to hold in my hands - even privately for now - to imagine it worldward, perhaps.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

—Garous Abdolmalekian, trans. Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

People so often say derisively "only poets read poetry," but another way to think about it: so many poetry readers write poems! I love how reading poems makes me want to work something out on the page. At its best, the writing feels like a practice of reading.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

Thank You By Ross Gay

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

"Many things are true at once." ––Elizabeth Alexander

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

I’m trying to remember what it feels like to touch a place of radical possibility. A collaboration between June Jordan & R. Buckminster Fuller points me back. I wrote about it for @NewYorker .

When June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller Tried to Redesign Harlem

The “Skyrise for Harlem” project speaks with resonant clarity in this summer of uprisings.

www.newyorker.com

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

"Many things are true at once." ––Elizabeth Alexander

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

I really want to read and/or edit an anthology about literary friendships—who read the drafts, who brought over groceries, who gave the pep talk, who loved through the not-making, who made the making possible

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

3 years

—Bob Kaufman

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

5 years

“I think it’s one of the hardest things in the world to somehow make sure that the ones you love receive your care for them as physical information, as definite as—raindrops hitting your palm. Like when you hold out your hand to check if it’s raining and it is.” —Helen Oyeyemi

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

4 years

I can't stop thinking about Harryette Mullen saying that the space for satire is disappearing because political language has full-on entered the terrain of the absurd.

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claire schwartz

@23cschwartz

6 years

"More and more, I am becoming convinced that poetry is not a form of writing, but a form of reading. And a form of thinking and being in the world." —Solmaz Sharif ( @nsabugsme )

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