#also do i need to make one of those braket things ??

[girl-bateman]

Waiiiit I wanna do a poll for the ultimate ginger, pls suggest some gingers for me to add !!!!!

[kerryweaverlesbian]

A friend of mine asked for advice on writing a poem so, I figured I'd share it more widely. This is how I personally tend to go through the process (although sometimes poems just come in a stream of consciousness and I'm like damn where'd you come from???)

This gets long so, under the cut

To me, a poem is circling around an idea through building a structure, so:

1. Figure out a key idea that connects two things together("smoke is a metaphor for hidden places" + "Mary Supernatural's relationship to motherhood" = "Mary Supernatural's hidden feelings about motherhood explored through the metaphor of a house fire")

OR a scene where something very sensory is happening ("eating a live octopus", "running on a cold day")

2. Write a short paragraph of whatever comes into my head as I think about that. Connections to other works, random lines, images, concepts. The ideas can be cliché and shit and not be used in the final piece!!

I'll do one rn for the octopus concept:

"What could the octopus be a metaphor for? Struggling to create a piece of work? Like how I rotate pieces of media around in my head for a while sometimes without getting a clear thought on them, as I am with Mouthwashing right now. The struggling kick of life. A life without hands, only senses. A constant reaching forever. Maybe a squid would be better, it releases cloudy ink...? But it's not as big as an octopus. Poem speaker confused between squid and octopus. The sensation of being strangled from the inside by the octopus tentacles. Fighting against yourself and your own instincts to give up. Tears forming as ideas form. Salt and copper. The tongue is kind of like a tentacle in itself. 'I swallow it, until it becomes mine'."

^ this helps solidify the ideas of the poem without having to battle through 3 or 4 drafts while looking at a blank page willing ideas to come out. Sometimes I just do that part in my head but it can be helpful to refer back.

What I love about poetry is that you can just skip to the exciting bit! You don't need a bunch of characters or scene descriptions or dialogue. It can all be the bit that makes you go hell yeah cool cool cool!! (<- guy who finds literary analysis cool)

3. Whichever of those ideas speak to you, use some to write a first stanza. The rhythm can be whatever sounds good in your head:

"I'm eating an octopus

(Live)

With gusto,

It's fighting me back but I bite."

So now we have an established rhythm! For this one it's

7 syllables [no comma]

(a short aside)

3 syllables,

8 syllables.

Now for the rest of the poem I can use that same rhythm, which keeps me focused. If you don't want to come up with your own rhythm, there's plenty of established poetry rhythms and rhyme schemes, if you google "types of poem" they will appear as if by magic. And of course you don't have to use a pattern at all. Again, this is just what I do.

To be clear, I don't tend to literally count out the syllables, you can feel what the rhythm is by saying the poem out loud (which you should do FREQUENTLY as you write to make sure the emPHAsis doesn't go ON the WRONG word). There's poetry terms for emphasis but I don't know them because I only did up to AS level poetry 😉

If you ever find the rhythm isn't working, change it. It's your poem. Do whatever you want. Changing the rhythm can also be used to show "this is a change/escalation in idea". It's a song with a bridge.

4. Keep talking about different parts of the metaphor in that structure:

"The tentacles writhing

(I chew, I chew)

A battle,

A hunt for the truth.

The hinge of my jaw

(It hurts, it hurts)

Unkindly,

I stick in my tooth."

^ I often slip into rhyming, this also helps not get stuck thinking of literally any word from the english language that could be used. As Monica from FRIENDS says, "rules help control the fun!"

"The [something] of muscle,

(My tongue? Its leg?)

My burden,

My begging for proof."

^ my close personal friend square brakets when I can't think of a description this instant! Wooo!

"[Some sort of 5th stanza that has an end rhyme for proof, maybe with the "salt and copper" concept?]

I'm eating an octopus

(Live)

But I'm winning

It's hard, but it's worth it, the fight."

^As you can see I added an extra syllable for the second to last line, you gotta just listen to your heart sometimes. When ending things I like to harken back to the beginning! It can be a little cheesey sometimes but that's okay, poems are allowed to be cheesey!

That's my general approach. Something that really, really helps with writing poetry is also... reading poetry. You get to experience a lot of rhythms and rhyme schemes and ways of talking about ideas and how different poets use the foundation of a poem to express their meanings. Reading this poem back, I was writing spontaneously but I can very clearly see influences of A A Milne (my mum's favourite poet!), The Jellyfish by Marianne Moore and my dear friend @lesbianjoannaharvelle 's poem I wish I could draw for the theme of wrestling with creativity. Our works are in conversation! Isn't that cool!!

Anyway. Kiss kiss.

[bingsucks]

Hi, this must be random but i saw your reply/ reblog on a community post and i wanted to ask something. (Bear with me while I ramble)

So you wrote a quotation and in the quote, you included square brackets. My question isn't to do with what you were saying just the actual grammar/punctuation. (Very nerdy of me to ask but Google is a lil confusing)

May i ask why you put certain things in square brackets when saying a quote? For example " [he] would be happy if it were [his ] biscuits on the table."

Im not sure if I used it the same way you did but you were quoting the Pierce guy from community talking to Donald Glover. The pronouns were in brackets but I don't get how the sentence would have worked without it? Like I thought the brakets were for missing words but then the sentence woudnt make sense.

Hope my question makes sense. No need to answer if this is too confusing. Just thought I'd give it a shot because I've never seen it used outside of really formal contexts where i can't exactly ask the author. Thanks for reading if you got this far :)

Of course! The brackets are a trick for embedding quotes into an essay just so a quote reads better in a sentence when a quote being used is in the first/second person, but you, the writer, are not the one that said it. For example, you wouldn't say:

When he put his biscuits on the table, "I would be happy if it were my biscuits on the table"

Because they aren't my biscuits, they're his biscuits. You would say:

When he put his biscuits on the table, "[he] would be happy if it were [his] biscuits on the table" (and a cite/source here)

(for one that makes more sense, here's an actual example from an essay I wrote on Metamorphosis (NOT FROM AN AP EXAM, COLLEGE BOARD): Gregor works to pay off the debts of his family, and when he is transformed - and temporarily unable to work - those around him feel "serious and unnecessary concern" for his failing "to carry out [his] business duties" (Kafka 10). )

And you use [] instead of () because if you're quoting something like a novel or a poem, parenthesis are more commonly used synonymously with an em dash (--), and it can get difficult to tell apart the original text from the edited essay version. Example: [I carry your heart with me (I carry it in] by E. E. Cummings uses a lot of parentheticals, but if I were to quote it and change pronouns around so it fit better I would have to do so like [this].

It's something that's been drilled into me by my ap English classes, if you don't correctly embed your quotes you'll get like a 2 instead of a 4 on your evidence. but I also use quotation marks for emphasis sometimes so generally if i use brackets it means im using an actual quote from something someone said. I write a lot of essays, lol.

[life-of-lizbet]

NATTIES RECAP!

It’s been a week (and a day) since Nationals (or Natties) happened, so I’d better write up a recap now or else I’m just going to forget to and then forget what the hell even happened. So here it is!!!!

I was going to skip right to the results, then do a recap of what happened, but after thinking about it, it actually makes zero sense to do it that way. So I guess I’ll have to start at the beginning: Saturday morning, Lexington, Kentucky. (Apologies in advance if I repeat something that I had already said, I honestly can’t remember and I really don’t want to have to go through my previous posts to fish for information that I posted relation to Natties.)

We had at least 3 games scheduled for the day in pool-play fashion. There were 16 women’s teams and 16 men’s teams competing at D-III Natties in Lexington, Kentucky. From here on out, I’ll talk about the women’s division, but the same concepts can be applied to the men’s division. 

There were 4 pools of 4 teams each. Each team had to play all 3 teams within its own pool. So we started out the day playing Carleton at 9am, meaning we had to get to the fields by 8am so we could warm up and whatnot. Carleton won the whole tournament last year, and they beat us during pre-quarters during Natties last year, so we wanted our revenge on them. Not that they were a bad team or anything, but we just really felt like we could win it all, and that involved beating them. Plot twist/spoiler alert: we didn’t win Nationals.

***just as I was finishing the sentence above, I could hear my phone buzzing on my desk. I thought “who the hell is calling me?” Turns out it was a friend staying on campus who needed a hug, so we ended up talking outside of 18 for approximately 1.5 hours. Thank god I decided to bring a sweatshirt. Let’s just say my legs were a wee bit chilly after standing out there from about 8:00-9:30pm***

So the game starts, and naturally we are off to a slow start, and before ya know it, Carleton is ahead 4-0. Evan is becoming pissed off, we’re all pissed off- we know that we are capable of beating them, and it was time to compete. I was subbed into the game a couple of times for a couple of points at a time. I can’t even remember exactly when I played during the game. All I know is Carleton was ahead 8-5 at halftime. (Just a side note about frisbee, you take halftime whenever either team reaches 1 more than half the points needed to win. Because games were until 15 points, halftime was to be taken at 8 points.) We were slowly crawling ourselves back into the game, and we were finally competing like the competitive team we are. Next thing you know, it’s tied at 10 points a piece and soft cap goes off. 

Soft cap happens at a set time into the game. Soft cap for these games went off 70 minutes into the game. At that time, if neither team had reached 15 points yet, you take the higher of the two scores and add two points to it. The first team to this newly-adjusted score wins. You only have about 15-20 minutes (I can’t recall but that sounds about right) to reach the new score. Soft cap went off while we were tied 10-10, so the first team to 12 points wins. I honestly don’t recall which team scored the next point, but next thing ya know, it’s tied at 11 and hard cap has gone off. Hard cap basically means that the game is over, the last point you are playing is the last point. In frisbee, we call this last point to win it all, specifically when both teams are tied, universe point. We fought and struggled and managed to come back from both a 4-0 and 8-5 hole to tie it at 10 and then at 11, but alas, Carleton scored the last point and won the game 12-11.

Honestly, I was super proud of the fact that we fought hard against the 3rd seeded team at Nationals. (Meaning that they were ranked as the 3rd best team going in, whereas we were ranked as the 10th best team going into Nationals. At the same time rankings don’t matter because most of the teams at Nationals don’t end up playing eachother during the year so are the rankings even accurate? Probably not.) We fought until the end against a team that won Nationals last year. That’s pretty damn impressive if I do say so myself. We then had a bye, meaning that our next game wasn’t until 1pm, and it was only about 10:45am. So most of us went to the merchandise tent to buy some overpriced Natties gear. (I was going to buy a snapback to add to my collection but they only said D3 with a rose symbol on it. So I ended up buying a cool black tank top that had D-III College Championships written on it and it also said Louisville, Kentucky. I digress.)

Then came time to compete and win our next two games. At this point in time, because we had lost the first game, we were therefore unable to win our pool (meaning all three games), so we were going to have to play a 4th game (pre-quarters) immediately following our 3rd and final pool play game. The sun was out and it was hotter and more humid than hell, let me tell you. We were all absolutely roasting and we were all letting the sun get to us. We had taken many hand towels from the 2-star motel and drenched them in ice water to place on our neck/head between points, it was so hot. We let the 2nd team beat us, which was disappointing because we could have and should have won. But alas, we didn’t.

So we played our third game (I think it was against Lehigh?) and we won. So we ended up going 1-2 on the day in pool play, and while we awaited to see who we would play next in pre-quarters and on which field, Ysabel’s dad informed us that we were done for the day. We were all dazed and confused and puzzled. (I’m sure the heat also had something to do with our confusion.) He said that he went over to the board where all the scores were posted, and he talked with one of the people facilitating Natties. They said that because there was such a high chance of thunderstorms the following morning (Sunday), they had removed pre-quarters to enable us to get all of the games in. So instead of pre-quarters on Saturday afternoon and then quarters, semis, and finals on Sunday, they moved quarters up to Saturday afternoon. Because of this, although we had qualified for pre-quarters, but not quarters, we didn’t get into the Championship bracket. I’m assuming that if we had gone 2-1, and won two games instead of just one, we would have been placed into the Championship bracket. It’s because of this that we ended up in the Consolation bracket and were therefore unable to compete for actually winning Nationals. We were bummed to say the least.

Because of this, Evan said something to the extent of we could drink if we wanted to, but just make good choices. (My previous blog posts on “universe point and margaritas” and “I suck at blogging, but first let me explain...” go into detail about Saturday night and our adventure to a park. I advise reading those if you haven’t yet before going on.)

Flash-forward to Sunday morning. It’s 7am, and we are at the fields. They’re a bit wet because it’s kinda misting and it had rained the night before, but at least the fields were grass and not mud like last year. (THANK GOD.) We were playing Bowdoin first (they didn’t make it to the Championship braket?!). We love Bowdoin. We actually hated them two years ago, during my first year. But we’ve reconciled. Anywho, we fought hard against Bowdoin. Any other time that we’ve played them this year, we haven’t needed to win, so we didn’t try our hardest to win. But we put it all on the field, and they ended up on top. So for the final game of the day, and of Nationals, we played Georgia State College. Long story short (it’s not even that long of a story, tbh), they beat us when we should have won, and they somehow won Spirit Award when they had actually the worst spirit out of all the other teams we had played. Go figure. 

So it was only about noon when we finished up, so we all headed our separate ways to get lunch, then my car went back to the 2-star motel to shower and change before one last team dinner. (The hardest part was finding a restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky that would be able to seat 21 players and parents. Yikes.) We finally found a craft beer/traditional pub style restaurant that had burgers, mac and cheese, wings, that kinda food. After we’d showered, I was actually exhausted. It honestly hit me like a brick wall. I ended up taking an hour long nap, give or take, until we had to leave to make it to the restaurant in time for our reservation.

(Apologies for how long this post is. I didn’t realize that I would ramble on this much, yikes.)

We sat at this wicked long table in the middle-ish of the restaurant. I ended up on one end near Ada, Sophey, Hyeji, and several first-years. I’m pretty sure all of us who were 21 or older ordered craft beers because why not? Before anyone knew it, Sophey was tipsy and it was my favorite thing.

After dinner, we all piled into the cars and went back to the AirBnB where we were all going to spend the night. (We had DD’s for all of the cars, so no need to worry about that.) Some people went out to a bar, but I passed because I remembered that I still had a small bottle of white wine that I had yet to start. Yikes. So Sophey and I got drinks at the grocery store for people going out because it was a Sunday and in the south, you can’t buy alcohol after a certain hour. 

Once back at the AirBnB, I opened my bottle of white wine (yay for screw tops and not corkscrews!), grabbed a glass, and decided to watch Evan and 3 of my teammates play Spades. I had no idea how the hell to play, so I just watched. The more I drank, the more the rules began to click until suddenly I realized how exactly you can win. Go figure. Also, I tend to get quite giggly and overly-talkative the more I drink. Apparently I’m Rebecca’s favorite drunk person? To be fair, she wasn’t at High Tide/spring break, so she missed my drunken shenanigans there. 

We decided to switch up the games and play BS instead because you can only play Spades with 4 players, but with BS you can play with as many as you have. So to make things interesting, we added a deck of cards, so now there were like 6 (I honestly couldn’t tell you how many of us were playing BS) of us playing. The extra deck added extra insanity and unnecessary chaos, because now instead of saying that you have 4 kings, for instance, you could actually claim that you had 6 kings, because you might have actually had 6 kings. (This happened to Moon at one point during the game.) 

After a fun and loud game of BS, the people who had gone out to the bars came back. We decided to play a game of “Cheers to the Mayor!” I’m kinda sure that’s what this is called, but I couldn’t tell ya. Basically, the game starts with 2 rules. You go around in a circle and state the next number, counting to 21. Once you reach 21, everyone says “Cheers to Marty Walsh!” the mayor of Boston. (I couldn’t tell ya why we were cheering to him, but alas.) The two rules are as follows: instead of saying 7 you say 14, and instead of saying 14, you say 7. So it goes something like this: 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... 6.. 14... 8... Whenever someone screws up, they take a drink and you start over again at 1. When you reach 21, the person who said 21 has to create a new rule. I’d like to say that I hate whoever came up with one of the first rules, which was you must do the hokey pokey instead of saying number 2. I lost track of how many times I had to do the hokey pokey while sitting down while mildly drunk. What a struggle. Other rules that have been created in the past: reverse direction on a number, oink instead of say the number, say your phone number instead of that number, clap instead of saying the number, repeat the previous number, etc. 

Before I knew it, I was almost done with my small bottle of wine. Oops. At some point after giving up on Cheers to the Mayor! (we kept having to start over because there were so many rules and everyone was not paying attention, partially due to the fact that they were all intoxicated), we had a brief dance-party. Katherine used the laptop that was hooked up to the tv to play “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston, and next thing you know, there are a dozen of us dancing in the living room while singing along to the song. What a time.

We played some more card games, I finished my bottle of wine (mistake), didn’t drink enough water, but realized at midnight I should probably get some sleep because we were going the trip from Lexington, Kentucky to New England in one day (another mistake).

I fell asleep on the floor with a couple of pillows, woke up the next morning at like 7:30, went downstairs and into the kitchen where I ran into Rebecca. She made a comment above my being alive or not, and I said I was alive. But man, was I hungover. (I didn’t realize just how hungover I was until about 2 in the afternoon when we stopped for lunch at Panera Bread and I was suddenly no longer hungover. My GOD.) We left just before 9am, went to the nearest Starbucks, got breakfast and some got coffee, then we were on the road. Abby had me take over driving around 11:30 am, and let me tell you, driving while hungover is one of the worst things. I managed though, thanks to sing-a-longs in the car and a killer Spotify playlist from both Abby and Katherine. 

I guess I’ll wrap it up with a couple of words about our trip back from Lexington, Kentucky. Pennsylvania is a MASSIVE state. It’s just huge. We were in Pennsylvania from about 3pm until just after 10pm. Granted, we did stop a couple of times for gas and for dinner. But still. While we were at dinner, around 7:30pm, still in Pennsylvania, I realized we should not finish the trip back to Maine/NH that night. It was already getting late and we had been on the road for many hours. So we decided to stop at Katherine’s in Cambridge and crash there for the night, finishing the trip back to NH and Maine Tuesday morning sometime. We dropped off Hyeji at MoHo at approximately 1am. At this time we were all going crazy. We arrived at Katherine’s in Cambridge at 2:30 in the morning. Oh. My GOD! I was going crazy tbh. Anyways, Abby had a problem with her leg that was only getting worse because we’d been driving literally all day and night. So at 7am we woke up, and by 7:30am we were on the road to Maine so she could see a doctor to check it out. She’s fine now. I crashed on Abby’s bed for several hours while I waited for my dad to pick me up when he got out of work, and finally, around 5 or 6pm on Tuesday, I was home. For literally 4 full days before coming to MoHo to begin my internship. Such is life.

Tomorrow I have my first meeting with Kate and Todd the postdoc and the other student I will be working with this summer about general summer plans/what to expect/whatnot. Then Wednesday we’re going to the cranberry bog! Just for a day though, so I will have to wait to experience the guest house which has a squash court? I’ll keep y’all posted on a more regular basis so my blog posts aren’t the length of novellas or something.