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morom-sneh · 2 years ago

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The Third Thing

BY DONALD HALL

Jane Kenyon and I were married for twenty-three years. For two decades we inhabited the double solitude of my family farmhouse in New Hampshire, writing poems, loving the countryside. She was forty-seven when she died. If anyone had asked us, “Which year was the best, of your lives together?” we could have agreed on an answer: “the one we remember least.” There were sorrowful years—the death of her father, my cancers, her depressions—and there were also years of adventure: a trip to China and Japan, two trips to India; years when my children married; years when the grandchildren were born; years of triumph as Jane began her public life in poetry: her first book, her first poem in the New Yorker. The best moment of our lives was one quiet repeated day of work in our house. Not everyone understood. Visitors, especially from New York, would spend a weekend with us and say as they left: “It’s really pretty here” (“in Vermont,” many added) “with your house, the pond, the hills, but . . . but . . . but . . . what do you do?”

What we did: we got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn’t ring all day. In January Jane dreamed of flowers, planning expansion and refinement of the garden. From late March into October she spent hours digging, applying fifty-year-old Holstein manure from under the barn, planting, transplanting, and weeding. Sometimes I went off for two nights to read my poems, essential to the economy, and Jane wrote a poem called “Alone for a Week.” Later Jane flew away for readings and I loathed being the one left behind. (I filled out coupons from magazines and ordered useless objects.) We traveled south sometimes in cold weather: to Key West in December, a February week in Barbados, to Florida during baseball’s spring training, to Bermuda. Rarely we flew to England or Italy for two weeks. Three hundred and thirty days a year we inhabited this old house and the same day’s adventurous routine.

What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing. Jane and I had no children of our own; we had our cats and dog to fuss and exclaim over—and later my five grandchildren from an earlier marriage. We had our summer afternoons at the pond, which for ten years made a third thing. After naps we loaded up books and blankets and walked across Route 4 and the old railroad to the steep slippery bank that led down to our private beach on Eagle Pond. Soft moss underfoot sent little red flowers up. Ghost birches leaned over water with wild strawberry plants growing under them. Over our heads white pines reared high, and oaks that warned us of summer’s end late in August by dropping green metallic acorns. Sometimes a mink scooted among ferns. After we acquired Gus he joined the pond ecstasy, chewing on stones. Jane dozed in the sun as I sat in the shade reading and occasionally taking a note in a blank book. From time to time we swam and dried in the heat. Then, one summer, leakage from the Danbury landfill turned the pond orange. It stank. The water was not hazardous but it was ruined. A few years later the pond came back but we seldom returned to our afternoons there. Sometimes you lose a third thing.

The South Danbury Christian Church became large in our lives. We were both deacons and Jane was treasurer for a dozen years, utter miscasting and a source of annual anxiety when the treasurer’s report was due. I collected the offering; Jane counted and banked it. Once a month she prepared communion and I distributed it. For the Church Fair we both cooked and I helped with the auction. Besides the Church itself, building and community, there was Christianity, the Gospels, and the work of theologians and mystics. Typically we divided our attentions: I read Meister Eckhart while Jane studied Julian of Norwich. I read the Old Testament aloud to her, and the New. If it wasn’t the Bible, I was reading aloud late Henry James or Mark Twain or Edith Wharton or Wordworth’s Prelude. Reading aloud was a daily connection. When I first pronounced The Ambassadors, Jane had never read it, and I peeked at her flabbergasted face as the boat bearing Chad and Mme. de Vionnet rounded the bend toward Lambert Strether. Three years later, when I had acquired a New York Edition of Henry James, she asked me to read her The Ambassadors again. Late James is the best prose for reading aloud. Saying one of his interminable sentences, the voice must drop pitch every time he interrupts his syntax with periphrasis, and drop again when periphrasis interrupts periphrasis, and again, and then step the pitch up, like climbing stairs in the dark, until the original tone concludes the sentence. One’s larynx could write a doctoral dissertation on James’s syntax.

Literature in general was a constant. Often at the end of the day Jane would speak about what she had been reading, her latest intense and obsessive absorption in an author: Keats for two years, Chekhov, Elizabeth Bishop. In reading and in everything else, we made clear boundaries, dividing our literary territories. I did not go back to Keats until she had done with him. By and large Jane read intensively while I read extensively. Like a male, I lusted to acquire all the great books of the world and add them to my life list. One day I would realize: I’ve never read Darwin! Adam Smith! Gibbon! Gibbon became an obsession with me, then his sources, then all ancient history, then all narrative history. For a few years I concentrated on Henry Adams, even reading six massive volumes of letters.

But there was also ping-pong. When we added a new bedroom, we extended the rootcellar enough to set a ping-pong table into it, and for years we played every afternoon. Jane was assiduous, determined, vicious, and her reach was not so wide as mine. When she couldn’t reach a shot I called her “Stubbsy,” and her next slam would smash me in the groin, rage combined with harmlessness. We rallied half an hour without keeping score. Another trait we shared was hating to lose. Through bouts of ping-pong and Henry James and the church, we kept to one innovation: with rare exceptions, we remained aware of each other’s feelings. It took me half my life, more than half, to discover with Jane’s guidance that two people could live together and remain kind. When one of us felt grumpy we both shut up until it went away. We did not give in to sarcasm. Once every three years we had a fight—the way some couples fight three times a day—and because fights were few the aftermath of a fight was a dreadful gloom. “We have done harm,” said Jane in a poem after a quarrel. What was that fight about? I wonder if she remembered, a month after writing the poem.

Of course: the third thing that brought us together, and shone at the center of our lives and our house, was poetry—both our love for the art and the passion and frustration of trying to write it. When we moved to the farm, away from teaching and Jane’s family, we threw ourselves into the life of writing poetry as if we jumped from a bridge and swam to survive. I kept the earliest hours of the day for poetry. Jane worked on poems virtually every day; there were dry spells. In the first years of our marriage, I sometimes feared that she would find the project of poetry intimidating, and withdraw or give up or diminish the intensity of her commitment. I remember talking with her one morning early in New Hampshire, maybe in 1976, when the burden felt too heavy. She talked of her singing with the Michigan Chorale, as if music were something she might turn to. She spoke of drawing as another art she could perform, and showed me an old pencil rendering she had made, acorns I think, meticulous and well-made and nothing more. She was saying, “I don’t have to give myself to poetry”—and I knew enough not to argue.

However, from year to year she gave more of herself to her art. When she studied Keats, she read all his poems, all his letters, the best three or four biographies; then she read and reread the poems and the letters again. No one will find in her poems clear fingerprints of John Keats, but Jane’s ear became more luscious with her love for Keats; her lines became more dense, rifts loaded with ore. Coming from a family for whom ambition was dangerous, in which work was best taken lightly, it was not easy for Jane to wager her life on one number. She lived with someone who had made that choice, but also with someone nineteen years older who wrote all day and published frequently. Her first book of poems came out as I published my fifth. I could have been an inhibitor as easily as I was an encourager—if she had not been brave and stubborn. I watched in gratified pleasure as her poems became better and better. From being promising she became accomplished and professional; then—with the later poems of The Boat of Quiet Hours, with “Twilight: After Haying,” with “Briefly It Enters,” with “Things,” she turned into the extraordinary and permanent poet of Otherwise.

People asked us—people still ask me—about competition between us. We never spoke of it, but it had to be there—and it remained benign. When Jane wrote a poem that dazzled me, I wanted to write a poem that would dazzle her. Boundaries helped. We belonged to different generations. Through Jane I got to be friends with poets of her generation, as she did with my friends born in the 1920s. We avoided situations which would subject us to comparison. During the first years of our marriage, when Jane was just beginning to publish, we were asked several times to read our poems together. The people who asked us knew and respected Jane’s poems, but the occasions turned ghastly. Once we were introduced by someone we had just met who was happy to welcome Joan Kenyon. Always someone, generally a male English professor, managed to let us know that it was sweet, that Jane wrote poems too. One head of a department asked her if she felt dwarfed. When Jane was condescended to she was furious, and it was only on these occasions that we felt anything unpleasant between us. Jane decided that we would no longer read together.

When places later asked us both to read, we agreed to come but stipulated that we read separately, maybe a day apart. As she published more widely we were more frequently approached. Late in the 1980s, after reading on different days at one university, we did a joint question-and-answer session with writing students. Three quarters of the questions addressed Jane, not me, and afterwards she said, “Perkins, I think we can read together now.” So, in our last years together, we did many joint readings. When two poets read on the same program, the first reader is the warm-up band, the second the featured act. We read in fifteen-minute segments, ABAB, and switched A and B positions with each reading. In 1993 we read on a Friday in Trivandrum, at the southern tip of India, and three days later in Hanover, New Hampshire. Exhausted as we were, we remembered who had gone first thousands of miles away.

There were days when each of us received word from the same magazine; the same editor had taken a poem by one of us just as he/she rejected the other of us. One of us felt constrained in pleasure. The need for boundaries even extended to style. As Jane’s work got better and better—and readers noticed—my language and structure departed from its old habits and veered away from the kind of lyric that Jane was writing, toward irony and an apothegmatic style. My diction became more Latinate and polysyllabic, as well as syntactically complex. I was reading Gibbon, learning to use a vocabulary and sentence structure as engines of discrimination. Unconsciously, I was choosing to be as unlike Jane as I could. Still, her poetry influenced and enhanced my own. Her stubborn and unflagging commitment turned its power upon me and exhorted me. My poems got better in this house. When my Old and New Poems came out in 1990, the positive reviews included something like this sentence: “Hall began publishing early . . . but it was not until he left his teaching job and returned to the family farm in New Hampshire with his second wife the poet Jane Kenyon that . . .” I published Kicking the Leaves in 1978 when Jane published From Room to Room. It was eight years before we published our next books: her The Boat of Quiet Hours, my The Happy Man. (When I told Jane my title her reaction was true Jane: “Sounds too depressed.”) I had also been working on drafts of The One Day, maybe my best book. Then Jane wrote Let Evening Come, Constance, and the twenty late poems that begin Otherwise. Two years after her death, a review of Jane began with a sentence I had been expecting. It was uttered in respect, without a sneer, and said that for years we had known of Jane Kenyon as Donald Hall’s wife but from now on we will know of Donald Hall as Jane Kenyon’s husband.

We did not show each other early drafts. (It’s a bad habit. The comments of another become attached to the words of a poem, steering it or preventing it from following its own way.) But when we had worked over a poem in solitude for a long time, our first reader was the other. I felt anxious about showing Jane new poems, and often invented reasons for delay. Usually, each of us saved up three or four poems before showing them to the other. One day I would say, “I left some stuff on your footstool,” or Jane would tell me, “Perkins, there are some things on your desk.” Waiting for a response, each of us already knew some of what the other would say. If ever I repeated a word—a habit acquired from Yeats—I knew that Jane would cross it out. Whenever she used verbal auxiliaries she knew I would simplify, and “it was raining” would become “it rained.” By and large we ignored the predicted advice, which we had already heard in our heads and dismissed. Jane kept her work clear of dead metaphor, knowing my crankiness on the subject, and she would exult when she found one in my drafts: “Perkins! Here’s a dead metaphor!” These encounters were important but not easy. Sometimes we turned polite with each other: “Oh, really! I thought that was the best part . . .” (False laugh.) Jane told others—people questioned us about how we worked together—that I approached her holding a sheaf of her new poems saying, “These are going to be good!” to which she would say, “Going to be, eh?” She told people that she would climb back to her study, carrying the poems covered with my illegible comments, thinking, “Perkins just doesn’t get it. And then,” she would continue, “I’d do everything he said.”

Neither of us did everything the other said. Reading Otherwise I find words I wanted her to change, and sometimes I still think I was right. But we helped each other greatly. She saved me a thousand gaffes, cut my wordiness and straightened out my syntax. She seldom told me that anything was good. “This is almost done,” she’d say, “but you’ve got to do this in two lines not three.” Or, “You’ve brought this a long way, Perkins”—without telling me if I had brought it to a good place. Sometimes her praise expressed its own limits. “You’ve taken this as far as the intellect can take it.” When she said, “It’s finished. Don’t change a word,” I would ask, “But is it any good ? Do you like it?” I pined for her praise, and seldom got it. I remember one evening in 1992 when we sat in the living room and she read through the manuscript of The Museum of Clear Ideas. Earlier she had seen only a few poems at a time, and she had not been enthusiastic. I watched her dark face as she turned the pages. Finally she looked over at me and tears started from her eyes. “Perkins, I don’t like it!” Tears came to my eyes too, and I said, rapidly, “That’s okay. That’s okay.” (That book was anti-Jane in its manner, or most of it was, dependant on syntax and irony, a little like Augustan poetry, more than on images.) When we looked over each other’s work, it was essential that we never lie to each other. Even when Jane was depressed, I never praised a poem unless I meant it; I never withheld blame. If either of us had felt that the other was pulling punches, it would have ruined what was so essential to our house.

We were each other’s readers but we could not be each other’s only readers. I mostly consulted friends and editors by mail, so many helpers that I will not try to list them, poets from my generation and poets Jane’s age and even younger. Jane worked regularly, the last dozen years of her life, with the poet Joyce Peseroff and the novelist Alice Mattison. The three of them worked wonderfully together, each supplying things that the other lacked. They fought, they laughed, they rewrote and cut and rearranged. Jane would return from a workshop exhausted yet unable to keep away from her desk, working with wild excitement to follow suggestions. The three women were not only being literary critics for each other. Each had grown up knowing that it was not permitted for females to be as aggressive as males, and all were ambitious in their art, and encouraged each other in their ambition. I felt close to Alice and Joyce, my friends as well as Jane’s, but I did not stick my nose into their deliberations. If I had tried to, I would have lost a nose. Even when they met at our house, I was careful to stay apart. They met often at Joyce’s in Massachusetts, because it was half way between Jane and Alice. They met in New Haven at Alice’s. When I was recovering from an operation, and Jane and I didn’t want to be separated, there were workshops at the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst. We four ate together and made pilgrimages to Emily Dickinson’s house and grave, but while they worked together I wrote alone in an adjacent room. This three-part friendship was essential to Jane’s poetry.

Meantime we lived in the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane’s depression and my cancers and Jane’s leukemia. When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King’s “The Exequy,” written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife. Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears. As I sat beside Jane in her pain and weakness I wrote about pain and weakness. Once in a hospital I noticed that the leaves were turning. I realized that I had not noticed that they had come to the trees. It was a year without seasons, a year without punctuation. I began to write “Without” to embody the sensations of lives under dreary, monotonous assault. After I had drafted it many times I read it aloud to Jane. “That’s it, Perkins,” she said. “You’ve got it. That’s it.” Even in this poem written at her mortal bedside there was companionship.

#words #love in general #donald hall #jane kenyon

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saltirebookreviews · 2 months ago

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Book: House of Fire & Magic

Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Series: Myths and Outlaws, #1

Publisher: Oliver Heber Books

Print Length: 380 Pages

Overall Rating: 5/5 Stars

Blog Rating: 5/5 Saltire Flag

Unicorns and Dragons are natural enemies and they never mate and have been enemies forever. Tanis Dragonmir wants revenge against the mortal who slaughtered and beheaded her elder brother who was heir to the throne. This mortal dragon hunter has her brother's head hanging showing it off to everyone, Tanis wants her revenge but also to bring her brothers remains back to give him a proper burial. Now Tanis needs Decil Coeur de Noir (Dash) the Unicorn King’s help to change her into a human form. Except for him to do this favor she must grant him a payment. As magic always comes with a heavy price. For Tanis she will lose her freedom and be in service for the Unicorns forever.

What they do not realize about each other is that they both come from royal lines. Tanis is a princess of dragons as Dash is the King of Unicorn’s. He also has a lot of guilt of owning Tanis forever due to his tragic past. Tanis had a prejudice of her own as she had been previously abducted and abused by an evil unicorn as a teenager. What Tanis is not aware of is Dash’s innocent sister had been slaughtered and her horn was cut off which gives their enemies instant power if they know how to use it. They ate both looking for their sibling’s murderers!

Soon Tanis and Dash, who should be enemies, turn into love. As they are both shape shifters and are both breathtakingly beautiful in their human form. Tanis is the first female that can make Dash smile and laugh. He also loved that she wanted to protect him even before he knew he was the King of Unicorns. As their hearts open, will this be accepted to mate outside their species? Furthermore will they each find the true killer of their siblings? Read and find out about this magnificent book in this romantasy by Sherrilyn Kenyon.

It is funny I only recently started reading dragon books recently, with The Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros which I loved. Plus I am addicted to the romantasy genre so I was thrilled to read this exhilarating novel that I absolutely loved! When I read the book description I knew I had to read it. Plus the fact I have been collecting unicorn’s since I was ten years old. I have a wall unit filled with Unicorn figurines plus my Scottish heritage as the Unicorn is their national animal. I even saw all the amazing Unicorn tapestries and paintings at Stirling Castle in Scotland. This is ironic as the first book series I ever read by Sherrilyn Kenyon over twenty years ago was her Scottish historical series Brotherhood/ MacAllister series. I even told this author when I met her at a book author/reader conference in NJ in 2013.

I am absolutely obsessed with this novel. It is an absolute masterpiece. A gripping tale that grabs the reader right from the start! A book readers don’t want to miss!

Disclaimer: I received a free advance review copy from Booksprout through Oliver Heber Books for a fair and honest review. I voluntarily agreed to read, review and blog. All words, ideas and thoughts are my own.

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poem-today · 7 months ago

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A poem by Jane Kenyon

Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer

We turned into the drive, and gravel flew up from the tires like sparks from a fire. So much to be done—the unpacking, the mail and papers … the grass needed mowing …. We climbed stiffly out of the car. The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree, the limbs so heavy with fruit they nearly touched the ground. We went out to the meadow; our steps made black holes in the grass; and we each took a pear, and ate, and were grateful.

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995)

#jane kenyon #american poetry #pears

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fractallion · 11 months ago

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it’s a repeat.i know. It’s 9.30 ish. Fully caffeined and pretty much failed to find anything positive in my morning wanders … except this. A timely reminder.

Otherwise .. Jane Kenyon.

I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.

All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

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imsorry-imlate · 2 years ago

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Found this random thing

what’s your name? Kenyon or Keny

your sun sign: aquarius ♒️

the last song you listened to: The Exit By Conan Grey

what are you wearing right now? St.Patricks Day Shirt W/ the joker

& Scream pj pants from hot topic

how tall are you? just about 5’ 3 tiny boy

piercings? 22. Nipples, 22mm gauges & 6mm on both 2nd holes and 5 other piercings on each lobe , right eyebrow, tongue, both nostrils, and septum. Oh and my belly button soon.

tattoos? 50 tattoos, woop woop!

glasses? contacts? Glasses, circle ones they thick cause im blind.

last drink: Gold Peak Zero Sugar Sweet Tea, closest thing to water

last thing you ate: Chinese food & seasalt smart food popcorn.

favorite color: Dark Green or Dark Orange

any pets? Technically,I have one cat. My parents have 2 cats & 2 dogs.

do you have a crush on anyone? Nope, You wanna be the first?

favorite fictional character:red head, BATSHIT CRAZY,packin 9 inches.

a movie you think everyone should watch: The Princess Bride

a book you think everyone should read: You Will Get Through This Night By Daniel Howell

the last place you traveled: Chicago next up: Prob Moving to Chicago

something you’re looking forward to: being happy.

tagging random peoples

@whatthebodygraspsnot @wehangout @thevioletjones @you-are-so-much-better-than-that @you-show-me-love @usergallaghers @iansfreckles @iansw0rld @abundanceofnots @aka-will-graham @sickness-health-all-that-shit @depressedstressedlemonzest @gallavictorious @heymrspatel @lonelygallavich @celestialmickey @bawlbrayker @breedxblemickey @nyhmeriah @mickey-bottom-milkovich-blog

#personal #tag game

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facinggreatness · 2 years ago

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Otherwise

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

—Jane Kenyon

#jane kenyon #otherwise #poetry

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honeyblockm · 1 year ago

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Part 4 might have some of my favorite poems I'm quite fond of the stuff here :) here is some commentary about these poems

Cw discussion of suicide (in fundy's part), maggots in the eggpire part, and self harm (for entertainment purposes) in quackity's part. Also death but like. *Gestures at the title of the megapoem.*

• Ranboo's poem is definitely one of my favorite poems I've written for this project :D although as always with ranboo I don't know what to do with his whole .. thing until I'm backed into a corner. So this was one of the last or probably the last poem to be written. Ended up drafting a lot of it in my head during fencing practice? the pov switches from cranboo to cghostboo in this line:

the water for. Some things pull this sheet tight over my head, over the open viscera.

And then it's just ghostboo hanging out in an empty snowchester! I'm especially proud of the imagery of ghostboo watching snow pile up and being unable to brush it off, giving the appearance of nobody occupying the space even though, as he says, he's "still here." I also like this line. It just sounds nice:

Have I not always / been every piece of me emerging from the bisected half, impossible / to look in the eye?

My little vwoop vwoop is multifaceted. Crack him open like a glowstick and watch a ghostboo come out. The last three sentences are directed mostly at Tubbo I think. At least in my head they are.

• the "you" in Sam's poem is Dream. Their dynamic is saur fucked up. Shout out to the time Sam got trapped in the egg and ate his arm!:

not for this growing lack inside my gut staved off by the disappearing muscle of my forearms and how no one is coming for me but him.

I think I was a little delirious in writing this poem bc it spawned the Pandoras box murder baby matriphagy joke. Uh. This thing. The places metaphors will lead you.

Anyways isn't it crazy how cdream broke out of the prison and went hmmm I'll go back and make that my base

in the black belly of our collective wanting both of us have come back home for no one else has ever thought to live here and no one else has learned to count the ticking towards nothing. but for you.

"I know only absolutes". He sure does!

• at some point in writing this project I had no idea what the fuck to do and it was driving me up the walls so I read some poems in the Kenyon review and then went on a walk and wrote two poems on said walk and the Tubbo and Aimsey one was one of them, the other was the skephalo piece from I think part 3. This poem is also my attempt at synthesizing that particular piece of lore. Isn't it crazy how the people Aimsey and Tubbo love are dead lol. I tried playing with the idea of creating a hospitable and safe space 4 the people that you love, and how Tubbo has been on the server long enough to have each one wrecked to the point where this line exists:

it's never safe enough

• fundy's poem is addressed to Wilbur! Something something killing yourself temporarily and thinking about the time your dad did that for real, right in front of you. Something about how you ask your parents everything about the world as a kid and they do not always have the best answers, esp when the question is "why did you blow up our home and kill yourself"

One of life's many questions that / I never stop asking

Hmm. Jumping in the lmancrater is, in fact, the fastest way to get out of a conversation with your dad!

In terms of going, this we know it to / be faster than walking;

This is where the narration slips into the memory of nov 16, where the situation is flipped, where Fundy is the one looking up and watching:

or letting your feet carry / you down the treacherous steps from a stiff ledge to / who is waiting at the bottom / craning their neck against / the day’s unflinching

• Connors death was so unexpected, so quick, and it was played off relatively lightly without much fanfare. There and gone and I tried to give his poem the same effect

• this was one of the earliest poems I wrote for this project! I bet I could even find the date bc I showed quackblr discord.

And yes I did end up counting it doubly for purpled. I'm sorry purpled I'll write you a better poem sometime

I like using semicolons. Semicolons in poetry my beloved. This might have been shortly after I wrote good art which is an original poem of mine that heavily uses semicolons, thus putting me in the mood. I am quite fond of this one also. I think flight is only metaphor for falling is the first line i thought of.

Quackity is kill your past selfing it up, trying to become sturdier iterations of himself. Meaner iterations.

if you could remake yourself a better man; what / would you do?

How much heart is a reference to a pro wrestling article about blading, aka the practice of purposefully cutting yourself on the forehead to appear bloodier and make your matches seem more violent to the audience:

how much heart / makes me a target; how much more makes me / good again

It's also like. How much can he afford care about something, and how it culminates in quackity putting everything into las Nevadas. Ough. Sorry my cquackity demons. every attempt to kill his past self has still ended up in disaster for quackity, though. Such are the cycles of violence or smth. The most use he got out of that skyscraper was when he and purpled died falling from it.

• FORM POEM FORM POEM FORM POEM. Is that the term for it. Idk. It's in a circle bc the uhhh. Twisted fucking cycles n stuff. For the egg there's no end and no beginning and no getting out. It's a labyrinth with no exit:

and if you thought you could / stick your hand to the / wall and follow it out

I had a lot of fun with the eggpire poems bc I got to go yippee! Time to describe the visceral! Other things with no end: maggots, which is life appearing after an animal dies. Maggots and other worms in general, which look about the same on either end:

maggots pouring from / the carcass like pearl strings / no distinction made on either flank

Poem ends on another cycle. This time the egg comes before the chicken bc it was the egg in its embryonic state that caused all these. Eggpire shenanigans

the end of all things is the embryo

• okay these last two poems from the server finale are short and vague bc they're from the server finale streams, which I did not watch and did not look up the details of, because I think they were stupid and did not believe they were a good use of my time. So instead I worked with the vague outlines of the stream that I had learned from hearing my dash and my friends talk about it. These were written relatively early on bc I had some ideas and wanted to get them out of the way lol

In spite of everything I quite like the Tubbo kills Dream poem. The narrator is Tubbo, who is addressing and referring to Tommy.

I will not lose you too.

#Clingyduo sweep

The first line of Jack sets off a nuke is a reference to the mountain goats song "the coroner's gambit"! Last line is a bible reference. Why not. I am a lot more excited about the TMG reference than the Genesis one.

The Death Poem, Part Four: Legacy

Masterpost | Part One: L'Manberg | Part Two: New L'Manberg | Part Three: Empowerment

Text:

11/28/2021: Ranboo is cut down escaping

Some things I love. Some things I love more

than that. Some things keep me sitting in this cell. Some things

I stay on my solitary perch rising out of

the water for. Some things pull this sheet tight over my head, over the open viscera.

Some things shred the muslin.

Some things leave ghosts. Some things leave me

waiting out here. Some things watch the snow

knit its heavy blankets over all of the roofs and windowsills and

the rims of the flowerpots of frozen soil and still my hands

slip through like vapor when I try to brush it off. I am still here. Have I not always

been every piece of me emerging from the bisected half, impossible

to look in the eye? There are still things left inside, bundled in cloth,

for you to take home. There are still things worth

mourning. I am still half a husband yet.

2/4/2022: Awesamdude dies in Pandora’s Vault

I am exceptional at waiting. down under this ticking absence of clocks and water gone still I sit and stare and count the cracks of obsidian shedding its dim tears not for me and not for this growing lack inside my gut staved off by the disappearing muscle of my forearms and how no one is coming for me but him. ambivalent to which one of us looks at the other afraid and angry because in the black belly of our collective wanting both of us have come back home for no one else has ever thought to live here and no one else has learned to count the ticking towards nothing. but for you. nothing is ever too good to be true except for everything as I know only absolutes and the ultimate one is if either of us thought we’d let the other would walk out of here or die then I may as well have built you a cobblestone box instead.

3/20/2022: Tubbo punches Aimsey off the Prime Path

ALL THE DEAD PEOPLE THAT YOU LOVED ARE SHOWING THEIR AWFUL FACES TODAY

their mouths are forming consonant and vowels forgetting they are vacuums

and they are asking if it's safe enough yet

it's never safe enough

for both our sakes

I hope it never will be

5/22/2022: Fundy jumps into the L’Mancrater

It was effortless.

Did I expect that? The fluid grace of my exit,

the speed, simple execution

of it all? I used to wonder and still

do but now that I’ve tasted air I think

I know the ease by which you

left. One of life's many questions that

I never stop asking and now you

are finally answering.

In terms of going, this we know it to

be faster than walking; faster than rowboats

or waiting or letting your feet carry

you down the treacherous steps from a stiff ledge to

who is waiting at the bottom

craning their neck against

the day’s unflinching

8/10/2022: Connor seeks out the wrath of God

Death is the late morning;

a languid prank. I blinked, and

I was there. Not much to it.

Nothing killed me, only God

waving a hand; a break

in the lazy breeze.

Through the window,

light bent. Voices, lamb cries,

but it no longer mattered

to me.

9/10/2022: Quackity and Purpled take a dive off the top floor

like everything here flight is only metaphor

for falling; these futile wings, this blooming sky;

if you could remake yourself a better man; what

would you do?; Most people make themselves kind but

that I was; before; my plans lay thus; First I grew pointed teeth, then;

harder eyes; Failing those I built a city; measuring; how much heart

makes me a target; how much more makes me

good again; which here we can also call untouchable or

maybe; safe; once again I am wrong; I sport canines only

to be torn out; citizens only to die; skyscrapers only for pushing

off.

10/29/2022: The Egg hosts a party

[Originally the lines are spaced to form half an ellipse, a shape you cannot do on Tumblr given the constraints of the post.]

Here again because life

is a circle,

after all and

there is no perfection

without reconciliation

and if you thought you could

stick your hand to the

wall and follow it out

well

it doesn't get much better than this

I am retribution, hunger,

lovely misery on a dinner plate

maggots pouring from

the carcass like pearl strings

no distinction made on either flank

the end of all things is the embryo

the beginning the bird

between them is the egg hatching

11/11/2022: Tubbo kills Dream

Everything between our first meeting

to now:

I have lost even the snow on my fence posts

I will not lose you too.

11/13/2022: Jack sets off a nuke

death came calling

today

it carried with it baskets, wicker

its soft feet spilled sand down the dunes

its eyes sparkled like two suns

and there was light

#my writing #this was fun. flips hair

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webster-akgae · 3 years ago

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Webster gets a job to play a mermaid at a kid’s birthday at a country club and the lifeguards fight to see who can carry him out :)

#I just ate an entire jar of baby pickles #I want more teenager/college student Webster #band of brothers #hbo war #david webster #david kenyon webster

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michigandrifter · 6 years ago

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Colorado Serenade 1946

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apoemaday · 3 years ago

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Otherwise

by Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

#poetry #jane kenyon #otherwise

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ruknowhere · 1 year ago

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OTHERWISE

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

-JANE KENYON

I don’t want to lose a single thread

from the intricate brocade of this happiness.

I want to remember everything.

Which is why I’m lying awake, sleepy

but not sleepy enough to give it up.

Just now, a moment from a year ago:

the early morning light, the deft, sweet

gesture of your hand

reaching for me.

-Mary Oliver

#mary oliver #jane kenyon #magic #the love thing #roomE

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handeaux · 3 years ago

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17 Fun Facts To Know And Tell About Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati’s Favorite Multinational Corporation

Remember The Ladies

Had it not been for Olivia Norris and Elizabeth Ann Norris, daughters of Alexander Norris and Phoebe Lawder Norris, there would be no Procter & Gamble. In 1833, Olivia married candle maker William Procter and sister Elizabeth married soap maker James A. Gamble. Father-in-law Alexander suggested his two budding industrialist sons-in-law form a partnership. It took four years, but the boys followed Dad’s advice and founded Procter & Gamble in 1837.

Born In Porkopolis

It is no coincidence that English-born William Procter, the candle maker, and Irishman James Gamble, the soap maker, ended up in Cincinnati. The manufacture of candles and soap both require fat, whether tallow or lard. Cincinnati, with its immense meat-packing industry had lots of excess fat and lots of companies ready to turn it into candles, soap or lard oil. In 1849, there were 13 candle and soap manufacturers operating here, with Procter & Gamble not even the largest.

Tech Support Gained Fame

James N. Gamble told the Cincinnati Post [9 August 1926] that, around 1865, communication between the P&G offices on Second Street and the factory on York Street in the West End relied on an army of young messenger boys who made the 1.5-mile trek dozens of times a day. Eventually, the firm installed a telegraph line and hired a young man to show up weekly “to keep the machine in order.” That would be Thomas Edison.

Going Vegan

Although built on a foundation of lard, two of Procter & Gamble’s iconic brands derive from plant-based ingredients, specifically cottonseed oil. Ivory soap grew out of James N. Gamble’s experiments in using cheap and abundant cottonseed oil as a substitute for the olive oil used in expensive castile soaps. P&G also used cottonseed oil in its candles and found itself with a surplus as electric lights ate into the candle market. A German chemist, E.C. Kayser showed P&G how to make cooking fat by crystalizing cottonseed oil. They named the product Crisco, short for “crystalized cottonseed oil.”

Accidental Myth

For years, the legend of Ivory soap’s creation circulated unchallenged. A lazy workman, the story went, left a mixing machine running while he went to lunch. On returning, he discovered that batch of soap beaten frothy as a meringue. According to that myth, P&G shipped the inflated soap anyway and began getting requests for the soap that floats. Not so says P&G archivist Ed Rider who, in 2004, found an entry in James N. Gamble’s 1863 notebook: “I made floating soap today. I think we'll make all of our stock that way.” Gamble was no dilettante. He had studied chemistry at Kenyon college and at several East Coast universities.

Cincinnati’s Cleanest Neighborhood

Two of Procter & Gamble’s innovative cleaning products are associated with homes across the street from each other on Werk Road in Westwood. James N. Gamble, son of P&G’s founder, built his estate, Ratonaugh, at 2918 Werk after he invented Ivory Soap. Charles McCarty actually conducted the research to perfect Biz enzyme bleach at his home, 2921 Werk. (For the record, Michael Werk’s Tag soap was also developed in Westwood.)

Higher Mathematics And Biblical Inspiration

Over the years, various scions of the Procter and Gamble clans have made unique contributions to the family business. P&G’s stature as a marketing powerhouse can be traced to Harley Procter (1847-1920) youngest child of the founder. It was Harley who, in church one Sunday, heard a sermon based on Psalm 45 mention ivory palaces and found the name for P&G’s new soap. And it was Harley, suspecting that a claim of 100 percent purity sounded boastfully meretricious, who hired chemist declare Ivory soap 99 and 44/100 percent pure.

Blind Pig

For some years after its 1879 introduction, Ivory soap was just one of many bar soaps sold by Procter & Gamble. P&G’s big seller in the early decades of the 1900s was “P and G White Naphtha Soap,” nicknamed “Blind Pig Soap” because the packaging displayed a big “P” and a big “G” joined by a minuscule “and.” From a distance, the label resembled the word “pig” with no I (eye) and, of course, a pig with no eye must be blind.

Enough With The Schmaltz

Food historian Dann Woellert makes the case that Procter & Gamble single-handedly ruined Jewish cooking by introducing Crisco shortening. Until Crisco came along, Jewish mothers used schmaltz – rendered chicken or goose fat – to prepare kosher meals for which lard, bacon drippings or butter were prohibited. The marketing department at P&G realized Crisco could be certified kosher, and negotiated with the appropriate authorities to ensure that it got that seal of approval. The result, Woellert says, caused “a whole generation of Jewish housewives and Jewish deli cooks to convert to vegetable fat, and lose the secret ingredient that made their dishes so delicious.”

Like A Candle In The Wind

For most of Procter & Gamble’s first century, soap was an also-ran product. Lard oil and candles brought in much more income. Boxes of candles, marked with a star to designate P&G’s boxes on south-bound riverboats, were the inspiration for the company’s moon and stars logo. Eventually, electric lighting demolished the candle market and P&G finally surrendered in the 1920s, shipping its last box of Star Brand Candles.

From Soap To The Soaps

Procter & Gamble invented the soap opera and soap operas are called soap operas because the big soap maker invented them. The first soap opera, sponsored by P&G on radio, was “Ma Perkins” and the soap in question was P&G’s Oxydol. Eventually, P&G created its own production division to produce soap operas for radio and television. The Guinness Book of World Records lists P&G’s “Guiding Light” (1952 to 2009) as the longest-running TV drama, running 57 years. Including radio, it ran 72 years. In 2009, CBS canceled “As the World Turns,” the 54-year-old soap that was the last daytime serial owned by Procter & Gamble.

Look, Mom! No Cavities!

Rolled out nationally at the height of anti-fluoride agitation of the 1950s, Crest toothpaste was the first to lobby the American Dental Association for approval. Despite objecting in Congressional hearings to Procter & Gamble’s initial advertising claims for the new toothpaste (illustrated by Norman Rockwell paintings of smiling children), P&G secured an official ADA endorsement– the first ever granted to a consumer product – in 1960. The marketing department immediately slapped that testimonial on Crest’s packaging and the fluoridated toothpaste zoomed into market leadership.

The House That Crest Built

Two scientists from Indiana University, Joseph Muhler and William Nebergall, conducted the research that resulted in Procter & Gamble’s Crest toothpaste. P&G sold its toothpaste under license from IU’s research foundation and the licensing fees funded the Oral Health Research Institute at Indiana University’s School of Dentistry, known as “The House That Crest Built.” Muhler and Nebergall have been honored by the American Chemical Society and the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their work.

Stackable & Packable

Astronomer Paul Herget, Ph.D., of the Cincinnati Observatory gained fame for his ability to calculate the orbits of comets, asteroids and space vehicles using some of the earliest digital computers. It is less known that Herget, at the request of Procter & Gamble, helped design the stackable Pringles potato chip. Herget’s calculations earned him a lifetime supply of the snack. Naturally the stacked chips had to be stacked inside something and it was Fredric J. Baur, Ph.D., who designed the iconic Pringles can. Dr. Baur was so proud of his creation that a portion of his cremated ashes are buried in a Pringles can at Arlington Memorial Gardens.

99 And 44/100 Percent Not So Pure

When Procter & Gamble sought a wholesome young woman to represent the sort of mother who would use Ivory Snow laundry detergent, model Marilyn Chambers floated to the top of the candidates. Chambers’ all-American good looks captured the image of purity P&G wanted customers to associate with their product and she was featured on Ivory Snow boxes as a young mother holding a baby. Imagine the corporation’s dismay when, within a year, a pornographic film, “Behind The Green Door,” was released, starring the not-so-pure cover girl. P&G quickly switched to a new box design.

Sympathy For The Devil

Procter & Gamble spent millions of dollars in the 1980s and 1990s fighting totally false rumors that the company was aligned with the Church of Satan. In 2007, P&G was awarded $19.25 million in one of these suits. The rumors, spread by religious groups and competitors, claimed the iconic P&G “man in the moon” logo included coded symbolism associated with Satanic rituals and that company officials had appeared on televised talk shows to declare their allegiance to Satan, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Advertising Behemoth

The A.C. Nielsen Company regularly lists Procter & Gamble as the world’s top advertiser, spending more money on advertising than any other company. The ads must have some effect, because it has been calculated that 99 percent of all U.S. households now use at least one P&G product.

Bonus: A P&G Joke

The director of Procter & Gamble’s hiring office was a very meticulous man named John Smith. It disturbed him greatly that so many applicants misspelled the name of the company to which they were applying. Every day, he received applications addressed to “John Smith, c/o Proctor & Gamble Co.” One day, he cracked. Mr. Smith sent every misspelled application back to sender with a hand-scrawled note: “It’s ER, Dammit!” He soon began receiving applications addressed to “E.R. Dammit, c/o Proctor & Gamble Co.”

#procter & gamble

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