#mostly poetry but that’s not the point

[loonetteslooneybin]

And if i wrote a fic about Ellie and reader spending a perfect summer together as teens, and then reconnecting 6 years later, what then?

[offslime]

ON CHILDLORE, FOLK MUSIC, & THE ARCHIVAL EFFORTS OF ONE MID-CENTURY FRENCH CANADIAN MAN, Charles MYK

[fictionadventurer]

Me, trying to write real poetry instead of light verse: I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

[tiefling-queer]

it's really disheartening hearing white trans people talk about 'who i will be safe with if i need to be hidden' when they talk about the possibility of a trump presidency, completely unwilling to engage with the fact that this is already a reality for latine people in the country. like, so divorced from the world immediately outside of small white communities that many talk about persecution and imprisonment as though it's a theoretical thing that can happen in the future and will target us, rather than something that's happening currently and targeting people at greater risk than we are.

[trickstersaint]

I’m your first patron Saint of creation! I think about Frankenstein all the time so I think your quiz worked.

!!!! whoo!!! gonna be so honest i was stressed out watching the quiz stats for the first few hours there cause the stats for creation sat at zero percent for so long... but. y'know. i think that creation has lower stats cause it requires you to make some of the brighter and more positive choices and it's not always clear where any positives are in that quiz even If you are a naturally bright and optimistic person... anyway. delightful to see all the people getting the creation result cause they are the Only people who are actively happy with the result that they got lmao

[tealfruit]

it's really a shame I have to sell 40+ of my life hours every week for poverty wages instead of spending all my time and energy on dozens of creative and technical pursuits with unlimited resources

[skrunksthatwunk]

not me spending like three hours on a late assignment (it's only like 5 days late) only for the submission box to be closed 💀💀💀

[thatone-churro]

not to out myself as a tiktok user (as if i haven’t posted mine here before) but why does tiktok require 1,000 followers to go live. on a “social media” app. i don’t want to be an influencer i just want to put the camera on while editing my poetry and yap with all of the five friends that make up my 90 followers like what’s the point. i know tiktok doesn’t understand what social media is supposed to be but. come on.

[termagax]

having a comic idea in my brain but i dont wanna get up and sketch it but i cant write it in the way i want to because i am cursed to think in pictures but i cant. draw it rn.

[louderfade]

[aphel1on]

should i start reblogging poetry and blorbotagging it or would i get canceled for pretentiousness

[fictionadventurer]

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

"A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing,

"A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses, would produce something like the following:

"A creature

Of feature

More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,

Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:

Darkly wise as a formless fate.

And if he be great,

If he be great, then rudely great,

Rudely great as a plough that plies,

And darkly wise, and darkly wise."

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to spread our thoughts thinner?

-G.K. Chesterton, Varied Types

[blackbird-poetry]

Spelling by heart...

Sometimes i wish i could

Look in your eyes and smile

Let my heart spell out

What it feels when you laugh

Tell you the truth

Under the starry sky

Walking synchronized

Voices fading out 

Hoping not to cry

As you say goodbye

And all me feelings still

Just stuck inside

Staying home

Texting you

When will you come

i wanna hold you

Laugh all day as I think

About when to say

What i felt

That starry night

[even-fools-are-right-sometimes]

And suddenly she can see the whole trajectory of her life laid out behind her in a massive spiral. It's not fate or destiny drawing her to this path, winding her towards the middle like cord wrapped around a pole, nothing magic or artificial. Just herself, slowly but steadily closing in. Switchbacks not retreats.

She gets it now, something like faith filling her up

She hasn't been wandering aimless at all, shes been exploring. Testing things out, learning what she likes and angling towards it like a plant in the sun. Like everything leading up to this point has been a Markov-chain random walk, exploring parameter space to find the optima - except it hasn't been random, not really. She has been following something. Her gut. Or her heart. Tracking some indefinable feeling of rightness and drawing closer to the center.

She doesn't know what she'll find there. But she can see the shape of it, the way all the little pieces might fit together to outline a single future.

She knows it will be hers and it will be beautiful

[celestial-kestrel]

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

[jojotier]

quick how long do you think i can maintain my playful fake outrage over how much i ""hate"' poetry after i reblog the two headed calf poem 20 times in a row