#Poetic Elegy

[wickedzeevyln]

Hollow Shallow

For my beautiful roadrunners out there. You claim the poetsknow the weight of night,as if on silver spoonemotions are measuredas nothing but a passing fever,and dare you call yourselftitles that none of your soullesswork hopes to appeal.You claim the poetsknow the weight of night,yet strip their wordsto leave an empty shell.What gold liesin a silence full of lust,where bodies speak,but minds…

[saint-chroma]

poem for class

[rashomon-vu]

"Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!

Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed

Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep

Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep."

— "Adonais" , an elegy to John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley

[x-en-jpeg]

(ken is the legal name I use in college, this is a college assignment.)

i revamped my existing poem “Twirl,” which i wrote in honor of the girl that i was in my childhood.

[autoreflexions]

The affirmation of life-and-death appears as one in the [Duino] Elegies. To admit one without the other would be, as the Elegies let us experience and celebrate, a limitation which in the end shuts out all that is infinite. Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and upon which we do not cast our light. We must try to achieve the greatest awareness of our existence that is at home in both unbounded realms and is inexhaustibly nourished by them. The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the greatest circulation courses through both: There is neither a here and now nor a beyond but the great unity where the beings which surpass us, the angels, are at home.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Withold Hulewicz, dated 13 November 1925

[nightshadesmusings]

text below the cut

Zugzwang

“Zugzwang: a situation in which the obligation to make a move in one's turn is a serious, often decisive, disadvantage.”

Everything reminds me of you. Now you’re doomed to become a collection of memoirs Alive only in pictures from the time we called ours. I can’t help but remember you. In between the notes of the music, in the lyrics of my favorite song In the places where I still expect to see you, now I am in zugzwang I can’t help but miss you. Love, though beautiful, is ever bittersweet Love, in all of its enormity, remains discrete.

[crestfallenstars]

Sometimes I feel like I'm really bad at writing.

My poems do not contain beautiful words.

When you look at them it does not look like art illustrated and woven into letters.

They don't rhyme or have a rhythm.

All they have is raw emotion, like me.

This isn't about poetry anymore.

love, crestfallenstars

[easternpine]

from Nox by Anne Carson

[randomrichards]

FIGHTING ELEGY:

A hotheaded teen

Joins militaristic gang

So he can lash out

[theflashjaygarrick]

After thinking about the comic fandom's prioritisation of white male characters I feel like it's a self fulfilling cycle.

Mainstream discourse around superhero comics is all about how white male centric the genre is. The general consensus in fandom is that women don't like female characters because they are badly written and 2-dimensional in most nerd franchises.

And if you go in with that mindset you'll fairly assume that the characters who have the best runs and most interesting stories are the white men. And if you look at fandom spaces and people are waxing poetic about characters like Jason Todd and Tim Drake and acknowledging that characters like Babs, Steph and Cass exist this only will reinforce this perception. So the person getting into batfam go and ask for the best stories about the Batboys or read summaries about their arcs, only seeing these women as background characters in male characters stories.

But the thing is that isn't strictly. I mean I 100% agree that comics are sexist and racist but that doesn't mean that there aren't phenomenal and iconic runs starring and entering female characters (including queer women, disabled women, and WOC). Cassandra Cain and Kate Kane probably have two of the best character bibles out of the entire batfamily in the form of Batgirl 2000 and Batwoman: Elegy. Selina and Babs both have more well received story lines/runs than Jason Todd does.

Great stories with nuanced female characters exist but the assumption they don't means that people don't look for them. So instead they draw upon stories with the Batboys (minus Luke Fox, JPV and often Duke) in their fan art and fan fiction and discussions and accidentally obscure the stories of female characters in the batman mythos even more.

And the cycle continues.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Poetic Genres

Whereas a poetic "form" defines the way a poem arranges sounds, rhythms, or its appearance on the page, a poetic "genre" is something like the poem's style. Many poetic genres have a long history, and new poems almost always seek to explore a new aspect of the traditional style and thus to redefine the genre in some way. The following list is a selection of the major genres of poetry.

allegory A narrative with two levels of meaning, one stated and one unstated.

aubade A song or poem greeting the sunrise, traditionally a lover's lament that the night's passion must come to an end.

ballad Broadly speaking, the ballad is a genre of folk poetry, usually an orally transmitted narrative song. The term "ballad" applies to several other kinds of poetry, including the English ballad stanza, which is a form often associated with the genre.

blason A Renaissance genre characterized by a short catalogue-style description, often of the female body.

cento A poem composed entirely of lines from other poems.

dirge A funeral song.

dramatic monologue This might be called a "closet soliloquy": a long poem spoken by a character who often unwittingly reveals his or her hidden desires and actions over the course of the poem. The "I" of the dramatic monologue is very distinct from the "I" of the poet's persona. Robert Browning was a master of this genre.

eclogue A short pastoral poem; Virgil's eclogues are one of the first examples of this genre.

ekphrasis Originally a description of any kind, "ekphrasis" is now almost exclusively applied to the poetic description of a work of art.

elegy This genre can be difficult to define, as there are specific types of elegiac poem as well as a general elegiac mood, but almost all elegies mourn, and seek consolation for, a loss of some kind: the most common form of elegy is a lyric commemorating the death of a loved one. Greek elegiac meter, which is one source of what we know as the elegy today, is not normally associated with loss and mourning.

epic A long narrative poem that catalogues and celebrates heroic or historic deeds and events, usually focusing on a single heroic individual.

epigram A brief and pithy aphoristic observation, often satirical.

epitaph A tombstone inscription. Several famous poems end with the poet writing his own. (See, for example, Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" or W.B. Yeats's "Under Ben Bulben.")

epithalamion A song or poem that celebrates a wedding.

fable A brief tale about talking animals or objects, usually having a moral or pedagogical point, which is sometimes explicitly stated at the end. Aesop and la Fontaine are perhaps the most famous fable-writers.

georgic The agricultural cousin of pastoral, a georgic is a poem that celebrates rustic labor.

hymn A song of praise.

invective A personal, often abusive, denunciation.

lament An expression of grief.

light verse Poetry that is mostly for fun: this can mean anything from nonsense verse to folk songs, but typically there is a comical element to light verse.

lyric This genre encompasses a large portion of the world's poetry; in general, lyrics are fairly brief poems that emphasize musical qualities.

masque Courtly drama characterized by elaborate costumes and dances, as well as audience participation.

occasional verse Poetry written with reference to a particular event.

ode A long, serious meditation on an elevated subject, an ode can take one of three forms.

paean A song of joy or triumph.

palinode A recantation or retraction, usually of an earlier poem.

panegyric Poem or song in praise of a particular individual or object.

parody A comic imitation.

pastoral Originally a poem that depicted an idealized singing competition between shepherds, "pastoral" has come to denote almost anything to do with a rural setting, although it also refers to several specific categories of the genre. Associated genres of varying synonymity are idyll, bucolic, eclogue, and georgic.

psalm A sacred song.

riddle A puzzling question that relies on allegory or wordplay for its answer. Riddles are often short, and often include an answer to the question posed, albeit an unsatisfying one. The riddle of the Sphinx, which Oedipus solved, is a particularly famous example: "what walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday, and three in the afternoon?"

romance An adventure tale, usually set in a mythical or remote locale. Verse forms of the romance include the  Spanish ballad and  medieval or chivalric romance.

satire Ridicule of some kind, usually passing moral judgment.

tragedy This genre originated in ancient Greek verse drama and received extended treatment in Aristotle's Poetics, which made the downfall of the main character one of the criteria for tragedy. The genre has since expanded to include almost anything pertaining to a downfall.

verse epistle A letter written in verse, usually taking as its subject either a philosophical or a romantic question.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

More: Word Lists

[thy-valhallen]

Batfam Voices as Instruments

Batfam voices as instruments bc i think of things very musically and it struck me others don't

Bruce: bass guitar. he's low and deep and when he speaks, you feel it in your eardrums, straight into your jaw. his words are like injections into your skull, feel intense and impossible to ignore-- but he has softer moments, too. quiet, gentle plucking of strings, the careful, slow strums of a man who plays only for the ears who will know what the notes will mean

Alfred: viola. slightly deeper than a violin, but mostly just warmer. a voice you hear and want to hum along to, a voice that sits in your ears before it sinks into your chest. it's gentle and sways with grace across strings and notes, it plays a harmony that supports and compliments, that is a steady through-line for everything that surrounds it

Dick: trumpet. brassy and loud and present and fuck do you KNOW when he's in the room. he's so bright and warm and MEANT to be heard. you hear him in your heart, every time he speaks, feel it deep in every vein like he's writing gospel into your DNA. and usually it's jazzy, it's excitement and riffs and improv and leaping off the page and doing cartwheels across a music staff-- but he's just as capable of whispersoft confessions of heartbreak and loss in D minor, can let loose a lament of all he's lost in an elegy of epic proportions

Barbara: harp. a challenging instrument to understand and play, and one she plays with ease. she is plucking strings with careful fingertips, strums across them all with a single hand. she's a melody that glides past your ears, a song that doesn't sink in-- if you're not paying attention to the hooks that latch into your brain. she is careful compositions and sweeping songs arranged for each audience with care. yet when she feels wrath, she shreds herself to make sure you feel it-- she takes scissors to her own strings to cut deeper than the song could alone

Jason: cello. deep and contemplative, with a sort of vibration that bites into your bones from the moment he opens his mouth. waxing poetic is his native tone, and it sounds like a bow dancing across strings and fingers traversing the frets like they were made for it, a soothing melody that could be a lullaby. when fury comes, the sound alone is so sharp where it's settled into your joints that you can't fight back; it's vicious strokes across the strings that shred the bow's hairs without care, wrath in every pull like it's a sword. he can settle into the orchestra or he can sweep them all offstage to stand alone against the conductor that dared to direct him

Cass: marimba. light and soft and so very deliberate. all those bars close together, and each hit with precision, because when Cass speaks, each sound and syllable is effort and choice and control. she is range and gentle dancing note to note and a sound that settles on your skin like a gentle rain, clinging and soft and so very present. to hear it is to hear if a storm could sing and serenaded the sky it calls home. she is echoing in an empty room until she fills it herself (i think of this specifically)

Tim: piano. it's all about the force put into it-- he can be the most careful, calculated guy in the room, playing with all the rigor and rigid professionalism of a NY Symphonic pianist. but the real Tim is the one who's fingers flutter playfully over the keys, who's voice cracks from laughter and sleep deprivation and stress, who trembles between octaves as his fingers tire but makes the leap anyway. he is clear ringing notes in a crowded room and rambling words like a glissando back and forth across the ivories, he is a song quiet enough to fall to the background but a complex and delicate tune if you care to listen

Steph: drum kit. she is all intensity and living in the moment and sharp impacts and a beat that never stops, never waits for the rest. she can get lost to the rest of the voices in a room, but you'll never shake that she's in your head, that her voice is there and present and presses against the base of your skull like it wants to worm straight in. she's rhythm and motion and changing things up just to do it; her voice hops from the snares to the bass to the snares and back to bass and never lets you think between notes, she's moving so fast, because it's all her, nothing she ever has to question, even if she makes you question with every slam on the cymbal

Damian: violin. he is careful in his every motion, ever meticulous with all he does; he lives in fear of being out of tune, of off-key notes for a long time, and so each one is practiced and known to the point of monotony. but over time, he thaws and the notes become more loose, more free-- he speaks less like his eyes are glued to the page, furiously tracking each note he'll play and more like the natural he is-- he becomes sharper in a different way than the rest of him, notes out of place that jut from the rest and it's okay that they do, a hum of songs that don't follow classic melodies and don't feel the need to. don't mistake it though-- his voice has always been as regal and pointed as the rest of him was raised to be, and his voice grabs both your ear and your eyes, dragging you to look at him, for him to be seen and noticed and given attention

Duke: saxophone. he is deep and rich and resonating. his voice is emotion and expression and honesty. his voice sits on your tongue because hearing him makes you want to speak, want to talk and chat and ramble with him, to reply to his melody with any harmony to match. he is a voice meant to be heard by many, who may not stand out in a room naturally but makes himself stand out by the passion in his voice. he is a slow, experimental hand that plays notes with hesitance until the rhythm hits him and suddenly, it's a melody of energy and power and a presence that he doesn't even know he has

[isiaiowin]

GOetry - Black Out

Welcome to GOetry! A weekly poetry club.

Every Monday, you'll receive a new poetry prompt and have until the following Monday to submit your poetic creations. Come join the fun! Post your finished work under the #GOetry and don't forget to tag me @isiaiowin so I can see your work.

You can also add your work to the AO3 collection here.

Thank you who participated in last week's prompt. Such beautiful elegies were being shared and many brought tears to my eyes.

This week’s prompt:

Black out poetry.

What is black out poetry:

Blackout poetry is when you take a written piece of text from a book, newspaper, or magazine and redact words, in order to come up with your own poem. Make it as artistic as you like

Example: By Diana Adams:

@goodomensafterdark

[leohtttbriar]

i imagine the elegy is the most common poetic form on the trill planet. it just has to be. like the sort of nostalgia that ezri engages in here is so distinct and could so easily hurt if she's not willing to be poetic about it, you know? to be so full of so many memories, with no material perspective on any of them!--i mean! the memories are bound to be coated in amber, to turn and twist into "golden days" even if the days were in fact not golden, and become emblematic of the george-eliot-mill-on-the-floss-description-of-devotion: "we could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it." and ezri has had nine childhoods.

and like. ezri is describing something she can never really go back to because it does not materially belong to her, speaking to someone who had a similar relationship to another dax host ("two of us, side by side") which ezri can never return to either because it does not materially belong to her, but even if they were her memories, rather than just the memories she carries, still she would never be able to return. it's a triplicate of nostalgia and an elegiac wilderness and i think there's something particular about how ezri expresses this longing-to-return (in a way jadzia did not): as a somewhat unwilling symbiont host but who's job it is to understand people even when they can't quite explain themselves. she feels undeserving in a way that the thomas-gray-narrator feels undeserving, sitting in a country churchyard, reading the inscriptions on tombstones of ordinary yet well-loved people, as "The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to [her]." and it's like the rough transition for her from being one person to nine hasn't yet given her the opportunity to realize that she is already a part of the elegy, not just a narrator.

[latin-literature-tourney]

Latin Literature Tournament - Round 2

Propaganda under the cut!

Tibullus Propaganda

The poorest little meow-meow of Latin elegy, while all of his lovers are bad bitches

He was so wonderfully bisexual. Wrote the longest poetic project about homosexuality in Latin lit, which is pretty lit

His style is really graceful and smooth, making for soft, easy reading

Sulpicia Propaganda:

Sulpicia does more in 40 lines than most poets do in thousands

If you don't vote for the only female poet of whom we have any significant chunks, you're sexist. I don't make the rules

She is so fucking funny, you guys. I laugh out loud every time I read her

[gawrkin]

The Death-song/Elegy of Uther Pendragon: New Translations

(Credit to @wandrenowle (awesome person) who gave me this excerpt from a recent translation of The Book of Taliesin)

A few points to make:

There's a certain ambiguity about whether or not the narrator here really is Uther Pendragon himself.

The part where Uther is named "Shining Armor" - I believe this is the translation for the original word in the poem, "Gorlassar". From what I can research online, "Gorlassar" could also mean "Bright Blue/Very Blue" or even "Higher than the sky". I've heard some theories online before that Geoffrey of Monmouth created the character "Duke Gorlois of Cornwall" from this epithet of Uther's.

If so, that means the possibility of Igraine always having been Uther's wife and Igraine only ever had one husband. Huh.

Wow, apparently Arthur is not as badass as his dad, being only a ninth of Uther's prowess. This is the very same Arthur who, in Welsh Myth, can destroy armies by the hundreds, go toe-to-toe with giants and is the standard of comparison for warrior excellence ("...although he was no Arthur"). This elegy implies Uther is leagues more powerful than that.

It reminds of Sir Branor, the Dragon Knight, from Palamedes, a 120-year old knight of the Round Table from Uther's era. When he shows up to Arthur's court, he challenges everyone in Camelot, including Lancelot, Gawain and Tristan, and soundly kicks their asses. The general impression is that however OP King Arthur and his knights are, Uther and his boys are waaaaaay more OP. Very Anime.

(It also has shades of Nestor from the Iliad, talking about how the heroes of the "Seven against Thebes" would kick anyone's ass in the Trojan War)

The part where Uther boasts of his Poetic Prowess - "as great as that, of seven score poets". This, in particular, fascinates me. See, in an older translation, that particular segment is phrased as such:

There is a tradition Uther Pendragon really does magical abilities:

In the new translation, Uther is primarily hyping his skills in the Bardic arts, but personally, I think that doesn't preclude Uther's magic powers.

In Celtic Myth, Bards, because their status as lore-keepers, often had magical powers, like Prophecy, shapeshifting (Taliesin and Myrddin/Merlin) or having the power to harm and curse using satires:

I believe there's even a term for Bardic Prophecy in Welsh: "Canu Darogan".

This sort of loops back to "Uther>Arthur" again, seeing as how Arthur is one of "the Three Frivolous Bards of the Island of Britain"

Jeez, can imagine being at your death bed, and like, decide " I'm gonna write an entire poem about how awesome I am and how my prophesized, magic son ain't shit compared to me"