On Connection

by Kae Tempest

Unknown, not unperceived william blake

terrible cities, proud stone temples to an age of evil that sold itself as the Age of Light.

How can I respect myself enough to give myself the energy I usually reserve for the people I perform for?

I can be lost for days, struggling to even hold the pen because my hands are made of soil, and then finally I’ll give in, start watching a documentary about Manny Pacquiao through half-closed eyelids, and suddenly it explodes into the room and I feel it break across me. Sometimes when it comes on strong like that, after an absence of days or weeks, it makes me cry. I sit and write in tears. I don’t know why. Nothing’s wrong! It’s like I’ve crested a hill that I’ve been climbing for ever, and I finally get to see the valley beyond.

‘He is not really making the music, it is making him – if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.’

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Complete Poems

agent Rebecca Thomas

Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in New York

Any spiritual practice will call our attention to the gap between how we aspire to be and then how we actually are, and what we do with that gap. That gap can be profoundly shaped by the unjust systems in which we’re mired. But I do think it has an ancient core, which brings us back to questions of self-knowledge and aspiration and care.

from maggie nelson

MN: There is an expression that I talk about with my students a lot. I think it even has a neurological basis: that our brains are Teflon for positivity and Velcro for negativity.

I’m grateful to the institutional space for giving me – and them– the chance to have a life filled with so much conversation and communication. It is a wonderful way to make a living. I don’t treasure the parts of institutional life that can make it a hostile or exploitative environment, so one has to stay vigilant, one has to try to make it feel as good as it can feel despite the various structures and pressures that impede that goodness. But generally, I love it.

The Argonauts, by choosing this kind of marginal greyscale for citation, I was trying to use the form to dramatise my inner enmeshment with – my happy haunting by – these ‘many gendered mothers of my heart’.

‘The fox condemns the trap, not himself’