#so i don't think the visual of them being inverted would come through as well >:/

[antisocialxconstruct]

Documenting this in case I accidentally delete these photos before this project is done (since I think it's gonna take a while...) the dogs and puppies destined to become clowns and clownlets

[jawnkeets]

probably a strange question but: how did you develop your style when it comes to poetry? I really appreciate how you write and how it's vague and specific at the same time? don't know how to express what I mean exactly, but it's like phrases that you feel more than you really understand them sometimes, and that don't look like they should make sense at a glance but when you really read them they do. maybe you'll know what quality I mean 🙈 I feel like I'm way too literal when I write and I want to be a little more abstract in a say less, convey more kind of a way?

hey anon, thank you! not a strange question at all - it’s actually a very good question, and one that i was asking until recently as well (and to be honest am still asking!). i totally know what you mean.

i guess the shortest answer i can give you is that i think ‘poetic feeling’ is best felt full-on, but expressed to the side. it’s also something that genuinely does get easier the more you try to do it, i.e., is a skill that can be sharpened; to start with, everything feels like nonsense, or not quite right, and i felt like a bit of a fake initially, but as i did it more and more i had more and more tiny breakthroughs and gained confidence (which is a genuinely such a large part of any creative endeavour), and this can happen surprisingly fast and snowball; i switched up my style in maybe 1-3 months, just trying a little bit - maybe 15 lines - every couple of days or so. and i didn’t put pressure on myself, deciding if i hated it i’d delete it and reminding myself that no one had to see. i find writing short poems also really helps with practising: they can help you focus more intensely on each choice.

it’s also not a solo thing, or at least doesn’t have to be - i use random word generators, to different degrees depending on the poem, and also it’s surprising how much even just picking words off wikipedia can help, especially with themed poetry. recently i wrote a poem about the medieval period, and threw in words that came to me with terms from wiki pages about the medieval period (history, art, medicine, etc), to make noun phrases like ‘kaleidoscopic altar vision noise’, ‘law texture’, etc etc. the thing that’s helped me most, though, is reading other poems which i think have this quality, which tends especially to be image-heavy poetry: will stone’s translation of trakl completely changed the direction of my poetry, and lorca, rilke and seferis have also been invaluable. i also find authors that do weird things with syntax interesting, like e. e. cummings and j. h. prynne, but don’t go quite as far as them. i have a list of favourite poems which might help, and which i re-read regularly ❤️

something else i enjoy doing is practising reading and misremembering, which sounds like cheating but is actually an excellent way of generating new material. i remember reading (i think it’s this article) alexandra cook’s 'creative memory and visual image in chaucer’s house of fame' and it was a breakthrough for me. from memory (ironic - wish i still had access so i could properly quote from it/check stuff) it talked about how one dimension to medieval creativity was misremembering - that new ideas and originality came from the gap between what the work actually was and how another writer remembered it. trying to deliberately misremember is a lot of fun; a poem is then borne out of an interesting intersection of skill and contingency, which gives it an energy, i think.

on a kind of separate but related note, the classical ars memoriae, or ‘art of memory’, might be quite an interesting thing to play with in relation to writing poetry. what it is, for anyone that’s not familiar with it, is basically the notion that the way to remember things is by having some kind of system in your head - like spatialising the material (so you think about the room you first encountered it in and all the details to help you better remember it), imagining it in a sequence, breaking it up into sets - there are absolutely loads of ways. if this seems weird or alien, we still use mind maps all the time, which is a great example! to deliberately twist, literalise and tbh actually invert the art of memory stuff (i know this is a bit abstract eek), i’ve been thinking recently that it might be fun to distort ideas (themes, an image you like, a line you like) by running them through various ancient memory systems, because i think medieval thought had a point that these systems subtly distort things even as and precisely because their function is get us to remember them accurately (paradoxically, we bend them to our chosen way of thinking/remembering stuff, which alters the material). using ways of memorising we wouldn’t normally use, and forcing them to interact with material much more literally, can yield quite interesting results. in any case, it introduces different ‘head spaces’ which can be quite useful to take in a very loose way when trying to ‘think to the side’: here’s a starting list. to give quite a crude and simplified example, let’s say i’m obsessed with homer’s wine dark sea and want to write something based on it, but also different and original. what if i try to think of ‘wine dark sea’ as sequential (thinking of material in a sequence being one way of remembering things listed on the above wikipedia link)? i’m honestly not sure what that means, and i can’t envision that. it doesn’t even make sense, and is a deliberate perversion of what memorising things in a sequence would actually look like - ‘wine dark sea’ would be one chain in a sequence if the sequence was, e.g., ‘favourite quotes’. ‘wine dark sea’ itself can’t be a sequence; this would turn ‘wine dark sea’ into something logical, mathematical even. but then the phrase ‘mathematical wine dark sea’ is interesting and unexpected. and you can then play with that or variations of it - ‘wine sea: dark, mathematical’ would make a great opening line, and ‘wine sea mathematics’ and ‘wine dark mathematics’ are really interesting phrases (you know actually i quite like this - might go and write a poem about it now... lol).

that last bit is very speculative and i’m kind of thinking out loud, so feel free to ignore haha. i wrote a post on writing poetry a couple of years ago, too, which might have a couple of useful tidbits. i hope some of this is helpful!!

[elizabethrobertajones]

i honestly don't see the 'dont come back' as a sam parallel? jhn literally told sam to cut ties with his family, what patience's dad said sounded more like a warning, that once you begin hunting/get lost in the supernatural, there's no going back and you can't live a normal life

Yeah, I mean, I can see how that nuance was. But it’s the same phrasing while she’s making the decision to leave one life for another so the visual/dialogue/thematic parallels are ALL there even if they’re all inverted. 

James doesn’t have to John Winchester her in the sense that he’s telling her not to come back, he can do it out of concern and fear and a warning that she’s going to be changed forever and probably die or whatever. 

The direct parallel to her and Sam is that she KNOWS she has to leave. 

But it’s literally direct opposite that she’s leaving a comfortably wealthy household where she was doing her exams in order to go to the best college, and Sam applied for college against his father’s wishes in the worst growing up conditions ever, of borderline criminal lives and career prospects of unpaid unthanked vigilante justice against monsters. He was going to be a lawyer to try and probably help people from within the system I guess. 

Sam had to do it for his personal reasons but Patience gets the “have to save people or it’s my fault” burden that motives DEAN. There’s another emotional parallel to Dean having to leave the djinn dream in 2x20 first because he thinks he needs to UNWISH HIS OWN HAPPY ENDING to save everyone who died because he wasn’t there to help them. And you know me I have to quote that speech of Dean’s from 2x20 to John so much I may as well just save it to a notepad file on my desktop but it huuuuurts us, precious :D

DEAN All of them. Everyone that you saved, everyone Sammy and I saved. They’re all dead. And there’s this woman, that’s haunting me. I don’t know why. I don’t know what the connection is, not yet anyway. It’s like my old life is, is coming after me or something. Like it like it doesn’t want me to be happy. Course I know what you’d say. Well, not the you that played softball but… “So go hunt the Djinn. He put you here, it can put you back. Your happiness for all those people’s lives, no contest. Right?” But why? Why is it my job to save these people? Why do I have to be some kind of hero? (begins to cry while talking) What about us, huh? What, Mom’s not supposed to live her life, Sammy’s not supposed to get married? Why do we have to sacrifice everything, Dad? (pause) It’s… (Dean’s lips tremble. Silence. We hear the sky rumbling. Tears begins to falls on DEAN’s cheek.) Yeah…

That the sort of burden Patience feels about her visions, that people will die and it will be her fault if she doesn’t intervene to save them. It’s the same thing Sam had with his visions for a little while but that became so personal about his mytharc we didn’t have a standard thing of him predicting regular old MotW… If Patience has no mytharc like Sam’s then she can probably do the kind of thing he did in 1x14 but for regular monsters or something?

Anyway we’ve never actually SEEN the night John and Sam fought and Sam left, but we can gather it was in anger and John was upset Sam was leaving his protection but the factors are all different - that John was keeping them off the grid for their protection while James has been keeping Patience settled and all her comforts tended to and so on so that she never HAS to go hunt. Sam was raised as a warrior for his protection. So John and James are arguing from fundamentally different places about their children going in fundamentally opposite directions.

BUT it’s really cool and important for Patience for us to see a VERSION, even if it’s mirrored and backwards, which at least feels alike to Sam leaving for college, because it’s a transition, and a choice, and she’s deciding against her parent’s wishes to keep her safe, of what she thinks SHE has to do for her future and happiness that he can’t understand. The emotional frustration with a parent, the choice to leave DESPITE it and the eerie ringing of that phrasing all make the mirror.

I think it’s important to remember mirrors and parallels on this show are NEVER exactly “this same thing happens again but with different characters”. For example Dean’s just had a “Purgatory” style cliffhanger, but he’s with Sam, Sam’s just by his side, it’s not the same at all as how he went through with Cas in 7x23 and Cas fled, because the relationship with Sam is fundamentally different, the reason is different (get them out the way/damsel in distress them for the sisters) and so on, but visually and in the main action points the exact same thing has just happened to them as happened to Dean and Cas. We can draw similarities but it’s just not the same thing. But it’s still important to know this happened to Dean before, and DRAW the comparisons to explain to ourselves what’s happening this time, why it’s different, what it means etc. 

The Patience thing is mirroring a huge moment in Sam’s life that started him on his journey in many ways, his first bid for independence, and an early point in his life where he made a choice, and he tried to define what his life would be. Of course that didn’t last for him but this is a backwards mirror and the Dean stuff leaking in on Patience’s emotional side of this changes it to the sort of choice DEAN made to return to being a hunter, which is a good parallel that for Patience it’s not about running away as Sam was, it’s about embracing her true self, her abilities and what she can be. The meaning is backwards. So it stands to reason many of the other little factors around it are backwards. 

But at the end of the day it’s STAGED as most immediately similar to the idea of what John and Sam’s argument must have looked like and we know from repeated dialogue SOUNDED like. So that’s the first association to mind to me. Even if nothing else about it is the same. James is what holds her back, and that she needs to leave as an argument so that she can make a clear decision, that he can tell her in disappointment/anger she’s not going to come back from this and she keeps her back to her father and goes anyway. THAT is an important visual and it’s probably as close to seeing Sam leave for college we’ll ever get on screen so it means a lot to me as a Sam mirror as well, since that’s such a huge unseen part of his story.