#Benka writes

[benkaben]

Regarding this interview about the portrayal of intimacy in Euthanasia...

I can't say I'm happy with any of it.

Because okay. You don't want the romance to derail from the drama? But still want it to be clear there's a romance there?

Then build it up, genuinely, show the characters grow closer and how they like each other, create moments between them that show the romance happening, not just state it for the audience verbally.

And hey, you don't need NC scenes for that! No, sexual intimacy is not the only thing that "proves" a romance exist.

I mean heck, you could even go all the way around and have all the NC scenes in the world and still present a story where the characters aren't in love with each other, because sex ≠ romance. Absolutely.

But also I'm, really tired™, of this idea that any kind of sex portrayed in media is only going to "taint" the final composition. As If sex and love stories were some dirty stain that automatically made the work lesser: Less serious, less formal, less dramatic.

I don't agree with the idea that you have to sacrifice intimacy in order to be taken seriously. I don't agree with the idea that sex is by default, just fanservice and therefore it's portrayal subtracts automatically from the story.

And don't even get me started on the way this idea is so prevalent specially when it comes to queer media.

I have never, in my life, encounter someone bashing Dark because it contains sex and nudes, I have seen more respect shown for the sex scene in Midsommar than for the explicit kiss of Catra and Adora, and I would argue we have at least a couple of good shows that discuss heavy topics without needing to censor themselves when it comes to CHARACTERS HAVING SEX.

It doesn't have to be One or The Other, and continuing pushing this idea that it has to, either your work becomes un-pure or can't be taken as seriously as you wish, is nothing but purity culture bullshit, and I'm mad, and so, so tired to still be having this discussion all over again

[littleragondin]

@benkaaoi

A new horror BL? From BOC? With Jet my beloved? And written by Sammon? Yeah, ok, I'm in.

[dfroza]

Happy poem in your pocket day!

A tweet by Jen Benka, president & executive director of the Academy of American Poets and producer of Poets.org

@jenbenka:

something like bringing the entire life

to this moment

the small waves bringing themselves to white paper

something like light stands up and is alive

—Muriel Rukeyser #PocketPoem

4.29.21 • 10:18am • Twitter

@POETSorg: Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day! Celebrate by selecting a poem and sharing it on social media using the hashtag #PocketPoem

https://poets.org/national-poetry-month/poem-your-pocket-day

4.29.21 • 7:15am • Twitter

i “believe...” in a pure dream of writing

[plusorminuscongress]

Tracy K. Smith Bids Farewell as U.S. Poet Laureate

Tracy K. Smith Bids Farewell as U.S. Poet Laureate By Neely Tucker Published April 16, 2019 at 10:00AM

Tracy Smith shares a laugh with Vogue Robinson, poet laureate of Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas), during Smith’s farewell event as U.S. Poet Laureate. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Tracy K. Smith concluded her remarkable term as U.S. Poet Laureate with a speech and on-stage conversation at the Library of Congress Monday night, capping two years of travel, podcasts and community conversations across the nation.

Smith began her tenure with a packed reading at the Coolidge Auditorium in Sept. 2017, and she ended it on the same stage in much the same fashion, sharing the platform with five poets laureate from Hawaii to New York.

Speaking to an enthusiastic audience, she said she felt “indescribably lucky.” She had taken the post with the belief that poetry had always been good for the individual. Two years later: “More than ever, I believe it’s good for the collective, the community, even to something resembling the nation.”

The poet’s office in the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center, high in the Jefferson Building, features elegant furniture and dramatic, west-facing views of the U.S. Capitol Building and the National Mall, the Washington Monument in the distance. Smith, however, did not use the space as a retreat for ivory-towered contemplation.

Instead, she used the position for active outreach, working to expand poetry’s impact on multiple fronts. She, with a team from the Library, made seven trips across the country in an “American Conversations” tour, traveling from Alaska to Louisiana, holding readings in rural areas that are not on the typical literary circuit. She typically read from a poem, then asked the crowd, “What did you notice?” and let the conversation go where it willed.

While at home in New Jersey, she recorded more than 100 episodes of “The Slowdown,” her five-minute daily poetry podcast. She also edited a volume of poetry, wrote an opera libretto, penned essays for the New York Times and others, all while maintaining her position as the director and professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

It all combined, she said, to make her rethink what poetry might mean for an often bruised country.

“I was…very determined to push back against the pervasive narrative of America as a divided nation,” she told the crowd at the Coolidge. “The narrative that says people in the rural heartland have nothing in common, not even a shared language, with those living in urban centers.”

Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of Academy of American Poets, a non-profit agency dedicated to supporting the art form, moderated the on-stage conversation. She said that Smith’s grassroots approach had expanded the horizons of dozens of national and regional poetry organizations. “Because of you and the work that you’ve done,” Benka said, “we’ve begun a conversation about how we are serving rural communities in our poetry programming and that’s not something we’ve talked about before.”

Smith and Benka were joined on stage by Vogue Robinson, poet laurate of Clark County, Nev. (Las Vegas); Tina Chang, poet laureate of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Kealoah, poet laureate of Hawaii; Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, poet laureate of Oklahoma; and Adrian Matejka, poet laureate of Indiana.

Smith arrived in Washington just a few hours before the event, stepping off a train at Union Station and rushing into a whirlwind last day. She settled into her office in the Jefferson Building for the final time, beaming.

“When I’m in this room I feel really grateful to be a part of the history that it represents,” she said. “I think about Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Bishop and Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey (all former poets laureate). I think about these people who are so important for me as a reader and as a poet.”

The office, and its civic duties, had compelled her to think about poetry not so much as an introspective art, she said, but more often in its role in the public square. That triggered a change in her own poetry, she said.

Poetry, she came to realize, “is something that could make us better at listening to, and being compassionate toward one another as citizens. I think that just being called upon to talk about the art form in those terms has made me think in ways I wouldn’t normally have done. I’m used to thinking about craft-based questions, as a professor, in terms of my own work. But I’ve been thinking more socially and, you know, conceptually. I think my sense of even how I approach different voices is larger as a result.”

Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1972, raised in California, and educated at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. Her  third book of poetry, “Life on Mars,” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and her memoir, “Ordinary Light,” was a 2015 finalist for the National Book Award.

She was the 22nd Poet Laureate of the U.S., and the first chosen by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Her most spine-tingling moment at the Library? When, as background research for a video tribute for Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday celebration, she pored over his things in the Library’s holdings.

“There were his eyeglasses, his cane, a bust of his hands, and some notebooks of early versions of “Leaves of Grass,” she laughed, “and that was pretty transcendent.”

Read more on https://loc.gov

[rethinkela]

Tweeted

"Right now, people are writing in what I think is a real renaissance of Black poetry and they’re leading the way of the renaissance in American poetry, more generally." —Kevin Young @Deardarkness https://t.co/fQAWViN09n

— Jen Benka (@jenbenka) September 1, 2020

[2plan22]

RT @jenbenka: Maya Angelou and Carl Sagan offered, as @brainpicker writes, "a message about our place in the cosmic order not as something separate from and superior to nature, but as a tiny pixel-part of it, imbued with equal parts humility and responsibility." https://t.co/IVzs5sJJ9N 2PLAN22 http://twitter.com/2PLAN22/status/995362173361647616

Maya Angelou and Carl Sagan offered, as @brainpicker writes, "a message about our place in the cosmic order not as something separate from and superior to nature, but as a tiny pixel-part of it, imbued with equal parts humility and responsibility." https://t.co/IVzs5sJJ9N

— Jen Benka (@jenbenka) May 10, 2018

[benkaben]

One thing about me is my memory sucks ass, I can remember random information and facts but I can't tell you for the love of my life what happened in what year in my life, or if anything happened at all, every moment blurred together and getting more and more difussed as time passes by, and then I just have these Big Ass Chuncks of Erased Memories all around.

Another thing is, I found what has been my diary since 2017, often left without any writing inside for months and years (last time I wrote in it was 2021. I hadn't even started watching QL by then bjkahjsi), and BOY. BOY AM I ARO AS FUCK.

I do have a vague idea of wanting to fall in love, I do have the instances here and there of liking people, romantically, but I'm reading this dramatic and overwhelming thoughts of my 15 year old and I've encountered so many times the phrases "I don't think I can fall in love the way I'm supposed to, I don't think I can love someone 100%, I think I could marry someone I like but I'm not sure I would love them how I should" AND LIKE.

Ohhhhhh man. Ohhhhhh little guy, who didn't even know they were more of a guy than a girl. Oh darling.

I've been thinking for at least a couple of years now that I might be aro because I haven't experienced any strong romantic attraction towards someone in YEARS, and then I read this, and it turns out I have never really experienced it at all.

There's this sensation of some kind of mark to met, a love like in the movies that makes people go mad, a love like those I see people experience in real life, the commitment, the sensations, the actions, the tales and stories people tell about it all. And I love the idea of love, but I hear all of that and think "it just doesn't seem to happen to me''

And when I was younger I thought I might've been broken, but it turns out, I simply are not the same as a lot of other people, and there's a lot of people that are like me.

And boy did it clicked again. The way it clicked when I understood what being bi meant, the way it clicked when I got a label for my gender that fit.

It's kind of validating, especially when you don't remember when things started to happen, to see something you've been thinking about for quite a while and look behind and say "Oh no, it's not a little while, this has been, my whole life"

I'm not closed to the idea of falling in love, I'm not against the idea of dating and even marrying someone, but now I can say it's not my priority, or something I even look for, nor something I feel incomplete without.

It's just a part of me that has always been there, and it now has a name.

[benkaben]

I mean, show me the studies!

If there's really such differences between humans because of their genitals, show me then!

Show me the evil hormone you lack, show me the one that makes you just and fair, show me the verified experiments that prove you're incapable of harm, show me how they were repeated in México and Madagascar!

Show me then, teach me how we will all forever be tainted by cruelty and evilness because we've all been conceived with at least some devil... "male" help.

Oh? Haven't we heard this story before? Something about an apple and a sin, I believe...

Oh but you're right! Yours is different because it's factual science, not those silly fairytales of all mighty reality creators, of course!

No no, go ahead, show me, prove me, teach me, point at the research, replicated and duplicated and validated and unchangeable, that finally shows us all, deviants and freaks, the gene that makes you holy, divine femenine.

| Sanctified Science | B. A.

[benkaben]

Hyeonho starts to also try and remade his life, after leaving behind his feelings for Dohoe... but he's still holding that strange, unfathomable sensation of "maybe if things had been different..."

He has hold to his repressed emotions for too long and now he's unconsciously holding to that tiny little thorn, tearing him apart slowly.

He starts dreaming about them. About Dohoe and himself. About his beautiful eyes looking at him with actual love, even if it wasn't the type of love he saw Juyeong with. He doesn't hate it anymore.

But he wakes up and tries to shake those dreams off. He knows he can't, because there was a time, albeit a short one, where he and Dohoe only really had each other.

His dreams are, in fact, memories, of a friendship he now considers lost.

Time goes by and now he only encounters his past on occasion, when he sees Juyeong in the reflection of his car's mirror, saying hi to the Taekwondo teacher of the building next door.

He doesn't like the greedy need of reaching out that spurs out of his chest.

He doesn't like to observe and actually think about Juyeong and the happiness he exhales. He doesn't like to think about Dohoe and wonder himself to sleep if he's actually doing better without him.

He can only guess that much by the laugh that reaches Juyeong's eyes, so loud and so free.

His dreams start to change.

That freedom and laughs are not longer secret to him. Where before a faceless silhouette of Juyeong stood, now there was a shining joy.

And Dohoe still looked at him with love, but this love confused him... so similar to the one he shared with Juyeong, never once the type of endearment he looked at him with...

"... But I survived because I had you. Because you were my friend."

He wakes up one day, and decides to make a risky call.

[benkaben]

Hole in my chest from your little beatings,

defeated once again at the tremors of the uncaring gods you carry around

broken down through the disgust in your face, the disbelief in your voice, the disappointment in your eyes

Maybe the deities you so very worship would've been kinder than your little bone breaking hammer

Little everything, every little thing, little, little, little.

Keep on pushing one little laugh onto one little scratch onto one unfortunate scream onto one accidental fist onto one little mockery and you'll get me bleeding hurt, big and real.

I wonder if I can ever stop carrying so very little much of yourself in my veins,

and I wonder if you'd care as much for who I am if my blood was glittering gold, extreme, intense, and odd,

and not "normal" red, like yours.

[silverquillsideas]

this is incredible. holy shit

I'm crashing fancy words on a empty white chaos, always exhuberant and arrhythmical; Trying to put my feelings down in a way that translates fairly their intensity, I lose myself in prose and grammar.

I think myself in English when my veins bleed other language, when my tongue denotes a more latin enchantment, and my convulted thoughts feel smaller when translated.

I want to express these harrowing emotions and pretty phrases that I know made more sense in my mother language.

Sounded smarter, sounded stronger, sounded a little bit more free and louder.

But the curious statistics of the world we live in it's always facing me: if my prose was meant to be shared, it should be first killed, and then reconstructed, full of asterisks and some lies.

So why not do myself the killing before they get to my lyrics?

Translation is a dirty job, not because it's purpose, but because of the dismembered bodies of rhymes and beats and emotions and feels it leaves behind, to offer a pre-chewed version of something that might have been better if only it reached a smaller audience.

[plusorminuscongress]

Tracy K. Smith: One Night Only

Tracy K. Smith: One Night Only By Neely Tucker Published April 11, 2019 at 10:00AM

Smith tours the Santa Fe Indian School as part of her project to bring poetry to underserved communities, Jan. 12, 2018. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Tracy K. Smith, the U.S. Poet Laureate, hasn’t kept to an ivory-tower, life-of-contemplation existence during her two years in the post. It seems she’s hardly sat still.

She’s published her fourth book of poetry, “Wade in the Water.” She’s edited an anthology, “Fifty Poems for Our Time.” She’s toured rural areas of the nation in seven states (from Maine to Louisiana to Alaska), and written about those travels in “American Conversations.” Her daily podcast, “The Slowdown,” will shortly hit episode No. 100. She’s also kept her day job at Princeton University, where she is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of the Humanities, as well as the director of the creative writing program.

It’s sad to say goodbye, but her final event at the Library will be Monday, April 15,  in the Coolidge Auditorium. She’ll be in conversation with poets from around the nation: Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (Oklahoma), Kealoha (Hawai`i), Adrian Matejka (Indiana), Tina Chang (Brooklyn, NY) and Vogue Robinson (Clark County, NV).  Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, will host. And yes, book sales and signing will follow. Tickets are free, but required. If you can’t make it, the conversation will be livestreamed from the Library’s Facebook page and our YouTube site (with captions).

Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1972, raised in California, and educated at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. Her third book of poetry, “Life on Mars,” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and her memoir, “Ordinary Light,” was a 2015 finalist for the National Book Award. This online guide will take you to a reference of her works.

Read more on https://loc.gov

[benkaben]

Hold on to what keeps you moving on, as silly at it is, hold on to the character, to the pet, to the TV show, to your friends, to that one really delicious plate you know how to make.

Hold on to the hope of eating your favorite fruit, to relaxing on your couch, to reading a new book, to talking to someone new, to dancing to your favorite song and singing at the home-made karaoke.

Keep on living, even if you feel you're just on stand by, you're still here, experiencing every day, even if not all experiences are kind, you still can look forward to all those that are, and remember all the fond ones that stay in your heart.

Life is all about the in-between moments, after all.

[benkaben]

All of this? Very self-destructive.

Yet you hold me holy, and tell me I'm worth it.

How can I keep on killing myself,

when you tell me you love me?

[benkaben]

You ask me not to scream,

yet you don't listen to me.

All my life you bear repeating

"the loser is always the one that yells first"

But how do you want me to stay quiet,

how dare you demand me to be silent,

how can I not raise my voice against,

When you've been tearing me apart,

teeth, fists, words and all?

| Not a fair echo | B. A.

[benkaben]

Can I try to love you again and again and again?

Can you carry my love as if it was not a cross?

Something pure and kind and not covered in blood.

Something nice and sweet like honey on a sword

I'm sorry, I was raised a wolf and I don't know how to make the hunger stop.

But I will try again, to love you the way lambs deserve.

|| Let me try again