#My older poetry

[jnrduttonswritingjournal]

[fagocitando-o-caos]

[grendel-menz]

Coming out this Friday is Impossibly Precious, Terribly Small, a zine about children growing up, friends going missing, and the moon moving away from the earth by centimeters a year.

[rottenamy]

My mental health is dying rn ׄ ♪ ִ

[kiisuuumii]

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence (tr. Sinan Antoon)

[candiedspit]

I killed a deer in Wisconsin

[chains4w-gutzfuckk]

༚༅༚˳ . holidays don't feel like holidays anymore, but at the same time, I don't think they ever did, ever since i was a kid everyone around me would seem so happy as the leaves and snow fell to the ground, but all i could bring myself to think about was the emptiness of it being over.˳༚༅༚

[xiaojaan]

this was written. this was always going to happen. you're the wife who dies in the start of a movie and you're also the hero that spends his life avenging the death. your bones were meant to tear and break that's what you're born with.

you're the character in the horror movie who has to go in dark alley before others. he doesn't die in the process but he remains scarred forever with what he witnesses. this is what you're meant to do anyways. time will pass on and so will the suffering but you will not be able to move on from a violence that you can't even remember anymore. it will always be who you are.

you turn to things and clowns and romances and gods and angels and celebrations but your doom will follow you anyways. you can try to make it a romantic comedy but your life will always begin like a tragedy anyways. you will always be strong but not enough to pass this test. from your birth to death the doom follows.

there's something about the first child that makes them doomed from the start. you're born as something more than yourself. you're born with a permanent weight on your shoulders. if you learn to carry the weight then there's more. but if you put the weight down you will forever be called out for your bad posture.

[poetrysmackdown]

what makes a poem a poem? does it have to be written in a certain way? is this question a poem if i want it to be?

Fun question! This is just my personal sense as an avid reader and less-avid writer of poetry, but for me it’s useful to distinguish (roughly) between poetry as a genre and poetry as an attitude or philosophy through which language and the world can be understood. And of course these two go hand in hand. I see poetry the genre as essentially a type of literature where we as readers are signaled, somehow, to pay closer attention to language, to rhythm, to sound, to syntax, to images, and to meaning. That attentive posture is the “attitude” of broader poetic thinking, and while it’s most commonly applied to appreciate work that’s been written for that purpose, there’s nothing stopping us from applying that attentiveness elsewhere. Everywhere, even! That’s how you eventually end up writing poetry for yourself, after all. There’s a quote from Mary Ruefle floating around on here that a lot of folks have probably already seen, but it immediately comes to mind with this ask:

“And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps.”

Similarly, after adopting the attentive posture of poetics, there’s plenty of things that can feel or sound like a poem, even when they perhaps were not written with that purpose in mind. I’ve seen a couple of these “found poems” on here that are quite fun—this one, for example. The meaning and enjoyment you may derive from the language of a found poem isn’t any less real than that derived from a poem written for explicitly poetic purposes, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be called poetry.

That said, I do think that if you’re going to go out and start looking for poetry everywhere, it’s still important to have a foundation in the actual language work of it all. Now, this doesn’t mean it has to be “written in a certain way” at all! But it does mean that in order to cultivate the attentiveness that’s vital to poetry, one needs to understand what makes language tick, down at its most basic levels. It will make you better at reading poetry, better at writing it, and better at spotting it out in the wild.

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is an extraordinary resource to new writers and readers, and a great read for more experienced folks as well. Mary Oliver’s most popular poems are all to my knowledge in free verse, and yet you might be surprised to find her deep appreciation for metrical verse (patterns of stressed/unstressed syllables), as well as for the most minute devices of sound. In discussing the so-called poetry of the past, she writes,

“Acquaintance with the main body of English poetry is absolutely essential—it is the whole cake, while what has been written in the last hundred years or so, without meter, is no more than an icing. And, indeed, I do not really mean an acquaintanceship—I mean an engrossed and able affinity with metrical verse. To be without this felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound is to be forever less equipped, less deft than the poet who dreams of making a new thing can afford to be.”

In another section, after devoting lots of attention to the sounds at work in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, she writes,

“Everything transcends from the confines of its initial meaning; it is not only the transcendence in meaning but the sound of the transcendence that enables it to work. With the wrong sounds, it could not have happened.”

I hope all this helps to get across my opinion that what makes a poem a poem is not just about the author's intention, and not just about meaning (intended or attributed), but also about sound and rhythm and language and history, all coalescing into something that rises above the din of a language we would otherwise grow tired of while out in our day-to-day lives.

I'll always have more to say but I'm cutting myself off here! Thanks for the ask

[fagocitando-o-caos]

[coffeexxcigarettes]

Sprinkling powdered sugar on stone steps,

Using my fingertips to carefully shape

Clumsy reindeer paws.

I remember beaming at my mother,

How excited my little brother

Would be.

It never struck me as odd,

That I never had the chance

To believe.

x

..

..

.. @nosebleedclub Dec 2nd; Reindeer

[jojo-the-bird]

Would they understand why I’ve done it? Why I did it? Would they fully understand that I’ve killed myself? Their daughter? Suicide? Or would they just understand that I’m gone.

[august-writing]

"Not I," I said, "I love you."

Yet when blood was on your face I knew you not.

"Would you follow me, my child? Even in the dark?"

But when the light blew dim I fled.

You told me of the future, and of a joy to come 

You loved me and you taught me

"I know your heart, my child."

When you were weak and weary where was I to comfort?

When you cried out for the Father I hid my face.

I saw you. I saw your eyes and anguish.

O how it pierced me. How could I abandon you?

"Not I," I said, "I love you." But how could it be true?

I turned and left my lover.

Weak and twisted is the heart that claimed to live for you

How can it be, how can I live? I wish to love you.

Yet it is a dead heart that saw your face among the crowd.

A light flew across the distance. On the wings of your suffering.

O how it pierced me. My eyes have opened.

I don't deserve to be here, to sing and see the dawn

Lord let me live and love you

How I was meant to all along

[svnflowermoon]

jealousy, jealousy

sometimes i wish i was them,

the girls in my pinterest boards,

the girls at my school on those road trips with friends,

the girls with the love stories people like me write poems about.

and more often than not,

that wishing becomes jealousy.

it sickens me, that i'm jealous of them.

i have everything i could ever want, do i not?

...do i not?

i saw this girl from my school post on instagram last week,

she'd just had her sixteenth birthday party.

an aesthetic affair, the likes of which are scattered throughout my pinterest.

they swam and danced in the rain, drinking apple juice from cocktail glasses.

i wasn't invited—of course i wasn't, we're not friends.

her friends' posts about it dragged out for days on end, and of course, so did my jealousy.

it's stupid, really.

her win is not my loss, i know that more than anything.

it is engraved into my brain so that each time i feel jealous of her,

i feel guilty for bringing her into my own personal inadequacy.

why do we look to others to reflect on our own lives?

and i know that i am that girl for some people at school,

and that knowledge just makes me sad.

because why are we never satisfied?

why do we always want what we can't have?

the things we long for,

they're the greatest things on earth,

until we have them...

and then we long for something else.

[poemsonmars]

the universe talks to me

when no one else is around,

but you didn't hear that from me.

she shares her secrets

and shoots her stars

and tells me stories

about the most beautiful things

that she has ever encountered.

you are at the top of her list.

you are at the top of mine, too.

-mars

[giantkillerjack]

There is a horror in that moment

The kind that makes most folks look away

That moment

When you realize

The Pain

Will not be stopping.

I'm writing a book in which

The main character goes through the same thing

And I'm stuck because

How do you write a scene like that?

Where do you put it in the story?

When does it finally dawn on him?

Not only the knowledge that

dancing

running

skipping

jumping

walking

fucking

working

adventuring

Living

will never be the same.

But when will it dawn on him that his last day of painlessness was months ago, and he didn't even know it at the time? (didn't even get to say goodbye)

Maybe that's why they say dawn breaks.

Maybe I'm stuck because I've never seen it anywhere else.

(maybe that's why I felt all alone in my mourning)

(maybe that's why I'm writing a book)

I've never seen a story where there were days of pain and days of ease, and then the days without pain got fewer and fewer until one day, it was just

Pain.

And of course my character, he waits

And waits

And waits

And works

And searches

And pleads

And yet the rest of his life

Suddenly stretches before him

Horrifically long, unthinkably long, with the knowledge that, from now on,

Every Day Will Be A Pain Day.

Every second

Of every minute

Of every hour day week month year

For forever

For forever

For forever

For forever

For forever

For forever

For forever

How many scenes do I write

of him mourning?

And - before he finds the acceptance that even allows for mourning -

How many scenes of that horrific slow-sudden frantic-panicked suspicion of the truth?

How does one draw (it's a graphic novel) the face of a man (his name is David)

struck with that kind of strangling grief?that choking half-denial?

That silent scream of horror given sound?

How many people tell him they are sure it will be fine even as he feels himself falling further?

How many of them fail to understand until they are gone from his life?

How many times does he blame himself?

How many times is he right?

Don't get me wrong

It's a hopeful story

Really.

It has a happy ending

And that happy ending happens

On a pain day.

I just hope I can tell my story good enough to show

What that means and

Why it matters.

I just hope we can be seen.