#sestinas if they're good

[scribefindegil]

I mean this in the ace-est possible way but Dimple-in-Reigen's-body is really hot. sorry.

[ecc-poetry]

"TERF Wars" notes and recs

Before you read the sestina, if you indeed do, I urge you to check out these creative efforts from fellow LGBTQ+ zillennials:

"I'm Done with JK Rowling" Jessie Gender (The biggest direct inspiration for this piece. It's 3.5 hours long, so if you love long Youtube videos like I do, you're welcome.)

Trans Witches Are Witches (Get this bundle of LGBTQ+ games, zines, music, and other creative goodies! It's 80% off until 02/24/23.)

"A Brief Look at Harry Potter" Lily Simpson (Yes, my favorite Harry Potter/JKR retrospectives from trans creators get even longer. This one is 10 hours, I've watched it twice, if you start now you can be done by the weekend.)

Harry Potter Rebind Laur Flom (Separating the art from the artist by rebinding the Harry Potter books without JKR.)

And then some navel-gazing from me under the cut.

As a member of the Harry Potter generation, I've been thinking about my relationship with JK Rowling and her work. I never actually finished the Harry Potter books, and while I remember participating in fannish activities (midnight screenings and book release parties, fanfic-reading and -writing, a letter to JK Rowling that I don't think I ever actually mailed), Harry Potter as a world never became one of the ones that really grabbed me and shaped me. In hindsight, I'm still not sure why. It didn't offer me what I think I wanted then, which was a deep understanding and empathy for my internal state.

Speaking of understanding and empathy.

Many trans creatives, from video essayists to writers to visual artists, have spoken movingly and with moral urgency about JKR's transphobia and the threat it poses. But they shouldn't have to do all the work. Transphobia is an attack on all women--and all people--because bigotry is intersectional. I wanted to write something that would come from my own experience as a queer cisgender woman and repudiate the idea that transphobic rhetoric serves me in any way. To whit: There is no conflict between the rights of women and the rights of trans people (they're overlapping categories). There is no trans debate--a human person, with dignity and feelings and inalienable rights, is not to be "debated."

I hope that this poem serves as one more pebble of resistance against the forces that seek to undermine our rights. Trans liberation now. <3

P.S. I owe big thanks to my bestie Anthea Carns, author of the musical "The Devil and Sarah Blackwater" as well as other stuff that is good! Without her this sestina would have been (even more) tortured and (even less) focused.

Also, a big thank-you to my family. We watched all 7 Harry Potter films over the winter holidays, and seeing my parents raise many of the critiques I've seen over the years, in real time, was fascinating. When Hedwig died, my mother turned to us and said, "This is cruel. You don't do that to children." And that really stuck with me.

[i-love-love]

I know this is a joke, but in case anyone perusing the notes is looking for actual advice I figured l'd chime in with an unreasonably long manifesto. (My credentials, if they matter to you, are a minor in creative writing and being 25% of the way through my MFA, as well as being a published poet!)

Write a lot. All the time. 60-80% of it will be bad (even more at first). The remaining 20-40% is what makes it worth it. I know everyone and their grandmother says this, but don't roll your eyes — they all say it because it is, unfortunately, true. And because it took me a while to figure this out: you're going to write a lot of poems that are almost entirely bad with one little nugget of brilliance and poems that are mostly genius but they're glued together with gross mud. A big part of getting better is figuring out A) the difference and B) how to separate the brilliance from the slop.

Also, unfortunately, if you want to write good poetry you do have to read a lot. Mix it up— old stuff, new stuff, ~important~ poetry, Instagram poetry, stuff you like, stuff you don’t like. All of it is helpful. BUT there’s a secret part of this, and it’s that you have to think about the poetry you read too. Skill doesn’t just enter your brain through osmosis (actually I guess it kind of does, but it’s a terribly slow process). The main functions of reading to better your writing are 1.) you find out what your options are in terms of stuff you could try, 2.) you find out what you hate, and 3.) you find out what you like. Figure out what’s really working and what isn’t. For my grad program we have to write 20-40 pages of specific analysis every few months— for each book on your reading list, you write an essay analyzing exactly one specific craft element. Examples of ones I’ve done recently are how consonance contributes to meaning and tone in The Raven, Whitman’s strategies for imagery in section 15 of Song of Myself, functions of metrical changes in The Tempest, efficacy of the points of view in Carol Anne Duffy’s The World’s Wife, contrast in Amy Gerstler’s The Soul Looks Down on the Body, and narrative tension in Ross Gay’s Spoon. Now, I’m not saying you need to write a five page essay for every poem you read (although if you feel like it, go nuts, it can’t hurt you), but thinking very critically about how different elements of craft and technique work (or don’t) in the stuff you’re reading will help you understand how to use those techniques in your own work.

Which leads me into my next point— technique!! I am of the belief that poetry is the most unfair genre to work hard to master, because every single person on planet earth can write a good poem purely on accident. It's surprisingly easy to stumble into brilliance. This can make you a bit bitter if, say, you pay a university the cost of a luxury car in order to learn how to write really good poetry. However, study isn't pointless, because it teaches you how to reliably write multiple good poems. This is because you gain an understanding of technique, which is how you transform a cool idea into an engaging piece of writing. Learn it. Love it. Find out what tools you can put in your toolbox and how to use them individually and together. Here's a super non-comprehensive list of techniques and elements you might consider learning how to manipulate:

Rhyme (end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, visual rhyme)

Assonance, consonance

Meter

The line (length, enjamoment, end stops, stanza breaks, consistency vs variance, caesura)

Imagery (sensory, metaphors and similes, tenor and vehicle)

Forms (there are too many to list here, but examples are sonnet, haiku, sestina, etc.)

Punctuation

Avoiding abstraction

Internal logic

Narrative (plot arc, character roles, tension, resolution, really any techniques you can find in narrative-based forms of writing)

Repetition

Title

Point of view

Endings and beginnings (of lines, sentences, stanzas, the piece as a whole)

Next up— work with others. I loved college workshops because I had a really spectacular professor, but I know that's not everyone's experience. At any rate, share your writing with other people— and try to get a variety! In undergrad, I only felt satisfied with my work when it was successful with three audiences: 1) poets who were stronger writers than me (prof, classmates), 2) writers who weren't as strong as me yet (other classmates), and 3) people who knew nothing about poetry (friends and loved ones). There were things I could learn from all three! They helped me to spot what was working well, what wasn't work as well as l'd hoped, problems I wasn't even aware of, solutions for problems I could figure out, connections to other works (mine and others'), and ways I could improve upon all of the above. In a writing group you also get the benefit of helping other people with their work. Pedagogical theory has a ton of info on why, but basically you learn best through teaching the material to others. You get way more effective with using simile (for example) in your own writing if you're able to explain why your peer's use of it is successful or unsuccessful, and help them figure out what would improve it. Another perk is that you can make friends :)

Recommendation number 5: read craft books. Many of these unfortunately are very redundant, because they'll generally try to cover a lot of the same basic ground in case you haven't heard it before, but it's still worth it to read a variety because they often have additional advice/info which you don't find in all the others. My favorite is The Poet's Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, and I know another very popular one is The New York Writer's Workshop's Portable MFA in Creative Writing. This is kind of a fast track to learning technique— you get a lot out of analyzing other poems, workshopping, and experimenting on your own, but books like this do a lot of the hard work of figuring out what's going on and explaining it to you. It's not a substitute, but it's a great supplement.

Additionally— revise a ton. Most of writing successful poetry is not actually writing but editing. Many writers receive a lightning flash and immediately scribble down an entire poem. Usually this has a lot of great components but needs significant refinement to take it from a brain blast to a finished piece. Perfect sonic technique, tension, imagery, clarity, line, etc. rarely all arrive at the same time as inspiration. (The cool part though is that as you endlessly practice all of the above, more and more of these techniques will appear accidentally in your first drafts!) The revision process is typically where you end up utilizing all that craft stuff you've been working so hard on from the earlier tips on this list.

Moving on from the general overview type advice, here are some rapid fire tips for people who enjoy writing poetry but want to take it to the next level:

I'm a grade-A bitch when it comes to this one but PLEASE, for the love of god, abandon the no capitalization/no punctuation gambit. It was cute when e e cummings did it, but it's no longer original and very rarely if ever serves to add depth, meaning, clarity, or interest, especially for newer writers who are just doing it for the vibes.

Show, don't tell. Stay away from abstractions, and replace them with concrete images. "Life can be scary" or "I feel sad" don't take your reader anywhere- extrapolating on the evidence, sensations, results, etc make your piece much more engaging. For proof, check out the poems Good Bones by Maggie Smith and Mid Term Break by Seamus Heaney, which both respectively address those abstractions I mentioned in a much more interesting way.

Get opinionated about other people's writing!Old and new! (Myself? I love the Romantics, but I can't stand the Beat poets. I think Siken is one of the most brilliant writers the world has ever seen, and I think Jos Charles writes some of the stupidest, most fart-sniffing drivel ever published.) This helps you zero in on what you do and don't like, which helps with A) finding more poetry you want to read, and B) refining what you focus on in your own writing. It also enables you to participate in dialogue with the poetic community.

Next time you can't figure out what's going wrong in a poem, go in deep and force yourself to justify everything. Every word. Every punctuation mark. Every line break. Every image. Every bit of sound play like rhyme and alliteration. Every single thing. Explain why each and every one is necessary to the poem as a whole, and cut out or change everything you can't clearly detail a function for. This exercise is a pain in the ass and you have to be willing to be brutally honest with yourself, but it really helps.

Try out writing a poem every day for as long as you can manage. They will not all be good. Many will likely go into your "crappy first drafts" folder and never see the light of day again. This exercise rocks though because it gets easier and easier to come up with something on the spot every day, and it gives you a gigantic pile of drafts you can start to refine into workable, quality pieces.

Consider enrolling in a course or certificate program through a college, rec center, or writing institute. Having a good fit with the instructor and other students is important, but you'll likely learn a lot.

So! No one asked me for any of that and it is very long, but nobody ever accused me of brevity. Anyway— go forth. Learn about stuff. Write a bunch of bad poetry until it turns into good poetry!

people who write poetry are so scary literally how the fuck did you do that

[wilheminalibrary]

11/09/2023

Bedrooms and the Best of Intentions: Week 1 of November Writing Challenge

I love November. There's something alluring about the month before the end. It commands in equal measure the pitched mandate of disaster preparedness and a decadent sort of Masque of the Red Death need to party before the end. Few things in life delight me like cognitive dissonance. The air changes, the night gets thick with darkness as early as 5:30pm, and something in me wants to get all my shit together and ride the missile into the end of the year like the end of Dr. Strangelove.

How fitting then, that all my friends are cracking their knuckles and getting busy with the reason for the season: National Novel Writing Month. Thirty days of committed work and thirty days of my group chat blowing off steam and complaining about their word counts. I'd laugh and sip my lemonade from the Porch of the Unbothered but, here's the thing: I love a challenge. I love writing to a brief. Give me an assignment, a deadline, and a small chance of success and I'm sold. I see my friends mounting up like the Regulators and I long for a horse. But how do I ride beside them?

I've attempted to write long form before with minimal success. This is what I can best manage: thirty poems, thirty days. A poem a day. This keeps me apace with my peers and gives my November that essential doomsday feeling I need to feel alive.

So that's what I've been up to all week. So far, the process has been rewarding. Funneling my work into the bottleneck of a messy procession of days, forcing first drafts that must be edited later, I can feel these habits barnacle-ing onto my craft. It feels good to look at the past week and see seven little sprouting plants poking out and leaning towards the gray sun. It feels like accomplishment. Like progress.

Of course, the most daunting part of wrangling poems at this pace is that age-old writer cliche: Where to get ideas. Some of my poetry peers can swan dive into the month wihout a plan and trust the universe to give them 30 things to write about in as many days. I love these people. I envy these people. I am not one of them. I need structure. I need buckets. I need a project. I need to iterate. That means forms. It means scaffolding. I love scaffolding.

When pulling inspiration for series poems, the two main roads I've had any success with are variations on form and variations on theme.

I write mostly free-verse, but occasionally feel the call of a sestina or villanelle or pantoum. Perhaps it's the lapsed Catholic in me, still clutching her rosary with frail hands, but I find immense power in repetition. Repeating lines, repeating words, they build momentum and magnify intention like spells or prayers or music. Each repeated line takes new weight from its predecessor, forcing the reader to see the same thing but suddenly different.

Thematic writing or motifs help to tackle larger concepts a moment at a time. I think of the way my transition has changed me, so I start with the media I grew up loving that changes with me as I look back. I'm obsessed with the idea of home and the ways we build it, so I start with people's bedrooms.

These works can feel like the parable of the blind men and the Elephant, grasping at the too-big whole of a thing and coming away with pieces. Bedrooms have such significance. They're solitary spaces that we define by our living in them, but the mere mention of them conjures intimacy, sex, and connection. In her book, The Letters of Mina Harker, Dodie Bellamy writes that "1,000 bedrooms couldn't solve my problems." The line immediately made me think of all the bedrooms I'd been in, and the legend of a thousand paper cranes.

Maybe they would solve everything. Maybe there's value in the work itself. It suddenly became meaningful to attempt it. And so a healthy portion of the month's poems are going to a series about Bedrooms.

The first week has gone by with minimal incident. A couple of skipped days here and there but I'm on track. I'm happy with the poems and excited to write more.

I'll be putting up posts like this one weekly to reflect on my process thus far. A week of poems in. I feel pretty good. I feel like I'm working towards something significant, even if it's just the sense of accomplishment I feel looking at all the sprouting plants poking up from the garden so far. I put in the work, for no other reason than the work itself. I'm eager to see where the rest of the week takes me.

The world may be ending. The year may be shuffling towards a terrible, cold end, but I will work the winter until its soil freezes into bitter stone. I will tend to my hardy crops as the sun dips low and blue as metal. I will work.

And then, as the blue goes black and the last day has nothing left to say but "I'm sorry" and silence, I will look down at my table, my bounty of growth and smile. Piled on my table will be all my efforts, steaming and lovingly transformed from hard work to art.

And then, in the dark hall of December's shadow, proud as a parent, I will pull all my poems toward me with a satisfied sigh and I will do what December was made for.

I will feast as the world screams its last breath all around me. I will bite down on all my heard work and taste its blood in my red mouth.

I will smile.

I will feast.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B