Replace with synonyms to avoid repetition Comprehensive paragraphs and meaningful diction Always searching for the right expression Checking the format of each citation Preoccupied with a wrong pronunciation

And yes I have attended that kind of training By and large very draining Only thing I recall was the struggle remaining

...As if the lack of rhyme is an unforgivable crime

Even my questions are voiced out I am still in doubt Or is it insecurity? Possibly — But more precisely — Draft and rewrite until your inner monologues start with “we” Repeating ourselves for eternity

Took a long long way to finally get somewhere — or Anywhere (And I have been intrigued, confused, humiliated, and terrified to this day) In hope that I would never expose my disguise The fake persona and dramatic tone I wish to hide That anyone familiar with the public examination would immediately recognize Ever since have I been mortified

Am I too self-aware or insensitive? Should I pretend to exist in a different continuum? Can I finally get the shame out of my system?

Go back in time and back to the future As I approach my own midlife crisis Or should I say — Wait until you reach the age of Prufrock Those are poetry, words of honesty, instead of bollocks

Must I swallow it all and praise the aftertaste boiling in my throat

I long for the singing blood, The stone is so still and cold. I dream of life, life is good. Will no one love me and be bold And me awake?

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I weep and weep alone, Weep always for my stone. What joy is my blood to me If it ripens like red wine? It cannot call back from the sea The life that was given for mine, Given for Love's sake.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke_(1918)/Song_of_the_Statue > I need to be alone to heal this bleeding stone

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”

“Read as little as possible of literary criticism — such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.”

“And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.”

— Letters To A Young Poet by Rilke Rainer Maria

We have never been as happy or as miserable. Our quarrels are portentous, tremendous, violent. We are both wrathful to the point of madness; we desire death. My face is ravaged by tears, the veins on my temple swell. Hugo’s mouth trembles. One cry from me brings him suddenly into my arms, sobbing. And then he desires me physically. We cry and kiss and come at the same moment. And the next moment we analyze and talk rationally. It is like the life of the Russians in The Idiot. It is hysteria. In cooler moments I wonder at the extravagance of our feelings. Dullness and peace are forever over.

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman. Such a separation may seem childish, but it is possible. Subtract the overintensity, the sizzling of ideas, and you get a woman who loves perfection. And faithfulness is one of the perfections. It seems stupid and unintelligent to me now because I have bigger plans in mind.

A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry’s wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a true beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman.

Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.

I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

“You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.” She answers, “It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman.”

In the café I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.

He has hurt her pride by desiring her opposite: ugly, common, passive women. He cannot endure her positivism, her strength. I hate Henry now, heartily. I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength. Probably Jean loved her strength, her destructive power. For June is destruction.

What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.

I said, “After all, if there is an explanation of the mystery it is this: The love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death, I’ll admit.”