#to a poet a thousand years hence

[apoemaday]

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

by James Elroy Flecker

I who am dead a thousand years, And wrote this sweet archaic song, Send you my words for messengers The way I shall not pass along. I care not if you bridge the seas, Or ride secure the cruel sky, Or build consummate palaces Of metal or of masonry. But have you wine and music still, And statues and a bright-eyed love, And foolish thoughts of good and ill, And prayers to them who sit above? How shall we conquer? Like a wind That falls at eve our fancies blow, And old Maeonides the blind Said it three thousand years ago. O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young. Since I can never see your face, And never shake you by the hand, I send my soul through time and space To greet you. You will understand.

[petaltexturedskies]

I send my soul through time and space to greet you. You will understand.

James Elroy Flecker, To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence

[firstunmannedflyingdeskset]

Sooooo, I've been writing a DPS fanfiction for like 7 years..

I have written over 100 thousand words.

I haven't published any of it anywhere, or to be honest edited it to be in order 🙃 because I write whatever comes to me. But have it all planned.

It's happy and so sad and so found family and it is the love of my life and my solace and it helped me process so much trauma.

Hence why I'm so scared about sharing it that and worrying about people getting invested and then not finishing it for years as it's been 7 and I haven't finished it 🙃

But would people be interested in a pre to post canon story about the implications of Neil's death on all of the poets?

Its very gay, very heartfelt, with Cheeks (Charlie/Meeks) as the main pairing, it is very sad (lots of trigger warnings) and pretty period accurate like treatment of mental illness (which basically every poet have) but I've been a little (and I mean a little) more nice about gay people than the 1950s would 😅

But it also soars like I love it

Sorry, I'm rambling and not showing that I'm a good writer, I swear I am!! I'm just so passionate about it. So would people read it is basically my question.

AAAAAAHHHHHHH

[camisoledadparis]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … November 5

1698 – England: William Minton, a 19 year old servant, is used as bait to entrap Capt. Edward Rigby, the first homosexual victim of entrapment by the Society for the Reformation of Manners. He was tried for sodomy. These Societies were formed in tower hamlets, London, in 1690, with their primary object being the suppression of bawdy houses and profanity. A network of moral guardians was set up, with four stewards in each ward of the City of London, two for each parish, and a committee, whose business it was to gather the names and addresses of offenders against morality, and to keep minutes of their misdeeds. By 1699 there were nine such societies, and by 1701 there were nearly 20 in London, plus others in the provinces, all corresponding with one another and gathering information and arranging for prosecutions.

1884 – Born: James Elroy Flecker (d.1915); English poet, novelist and playwright. Born in London, and educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster, and Uppingham School, he studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there, under John Addington Symonds.

He died of tuberculosis in Davos, Switzerland. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".

His Collected Poems (1916) were published the year after he died at age 30. His poetry shares one trait in common with that of his contemporary, Rupert Brooke: the sexuality is ambiguous. There is no question, however, that Flecker was Gay. His lover was the classicist J.D. Beazley, one of the world's great authorities on Greek vases.

His most widely known poem is "To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence". The most enduring testimony to his work is perhaps an excerpt from "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" inscribed on the clock tower of the barracks of the British Army's 22nd Special Air Service regiment in Hereford.

Bryan Lourd (R) and husband Bruce Bozzi

1960 – Bryan Lourd is an American talent agent. He has been partner, managing director and co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) since October 1995.

Lourd was born in New Iberia, Louisiana. His brother, Blaine Lourd, is an investment advisor. He attended New Iberia Senior High School, where he played the lead in several high school musicals. He earned a degree from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 1982.

Lourd and actress Carrie Fisher were together from 1991 to 1994. They have one daughter, actress Billie, born in 1992. Lourd married Bruce Bozzi, the co-owner of The Palm, on October 12, 2016, and Lourd legally adopted Bozzi's daughter, Ava. They divide their time between a penthouse apartment in the West Village, in Lower Manhattan, New York City and a house in Beverly Hills, California.

Lourd was elected to the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. He was appointed to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009 by President Barack Obama and to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2015.

Lourd 's clients include George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Robert Downey, Jr., Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, Matthew McConaughey, Sean Penn, Madonna, Naomi Watts, Natalie Portman, Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Duchovny, Helen Hunt, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Taraji P. Henson, and Peter Jöback.

1969 – The Homosexual Information Center protested at the offices of the Los Angeles Times to protest the newspaper's refusal to print the word "homosexual" in ads after it refused to print an ad announcing a group discussion on homosexuality.

1979 – Leonardo Nam is an Australian actor. He made his breakthrough as Roy in The Perfect Score (2004), and gained further recognition for his roles as Morimoto in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) and Brian McBrian in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008). In 2016, Nam began starring as Felix Lutz in Westworld (2016–present) which brought him widespread recognition.

Nam was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to South Korean immigrant parents. At the age of six, he moved to Sydney, Australia. Nam attended Sydney Technical High School and studied architecture at the University of New South Wales. Nam left Sydney to follow his dreams of an acting career in New York City, United States, at the age of 19. He studied with several acting teachers in New York, including Austin Pendleton and William Carden at HB Studio.

Before his Hollywood success, Nam travelled to New York City to pursue his acting career. His first few nights he slept in Central Park and then found jobs working as a waiter and bartender. His breakthrough role came in his performance of Roy in The Perfect Score (2004).

He had a small role in the 2005 film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants as Brian McBrian, a hardcore gamer. He played Brian again in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2; in the sequel, his character has a larger role. In 2016, he joined the cast of the HBO series Westworld. In 2018 he was featured in the music video "Waste It on Me" by Steve Aoki featuring BTS.

Nam is married to Michael Dodge. They have twin sons (born 2017) together. The family lives in San Diego.

1983 – Andrew Hayden-Smith, born Andrew John Smith, is a British actor and television presenter best known for his work with CBBC.

Auditions for popular CBBC children's serial drama Byker Grove were held at his school and he won the part of Ben Carter, making his first appearance in the eighth series of the show in 1995.

Initially just using the name Andrew Smith, he appeared as a guest on Saturday morning CBBC show Live & Kicking with several other characters from the show. Smith soon became a regular guest on the show. This led to appearances on other shows and also in teen-magazines, as well as two pantomime appearances. In 2001 he applied for Equity membership and was accepted under the name Andrew Hayden-Smith (Hayden being another surname in his family), as the name Andrew Smith was already taken.

In 2004, the ex-Byker Grove actor and CBBC presenter Andrew did the unthinkable for a young man on kids' TV - he told the world he was gay. At the risk of being outed by a newspaper, he beat the tabloids to the punch and did an interview with Attitude magazine:

"Coming out is pretty scary. It's bad enough when you're almost certain that the majority of people around you will be totally cool with it. I was 21 and presenting kids TV at the time and was commended for what everyone kept saying was such a brave step."

It did his career no harm, and he's proved an inspiration - and eye candy - for young gay men across the country.

Andrew has since appeared regularly on stage and in Doctor Who. Hayden-Smith appeared in the episodes "Rise of the Cybermen", "The Age of Steel" and "Doomsday" as Jake Simmonds in the 2006 series of Doctor Who. He returned to CBBC having completed the filming, but decided that he wished to concentrate on acting. His final day of presenting was on 7 July 2006, the day before his third and final Doctor Who appearance.

[circumference-pie]

Wordplay in Xie Wanqing's fate poem

One of the things that confused me most in Love Between Fairy and Devil is why our protagonists insist that Xiao Run has to be the destined lover and murderer of Xie Wanqing, when the English subtitles only say she has to die at the hands of her "beloved," which could be Dongfang Qingcang, right??? Easy! Why do they lose all hope when Xiao Run doesn't follow their plans?

The TL;DR is that there's a bit of ambiguity in Xie Wanqing's fate poem, and xiao-Lanhua and co. interpreted it a little too literally, while the Netflix subs gave us the more abstract meaning.

Here is the crucial line, according to Netflix subs:

Then she meets her beloved who understands her well

In Chinese, it is

偏逢萧郎解语人 pian feng xiao lang jieyu ren

In particular, the two characters 萧郎 or Xiao-lang, superficially mean "a man whose surname is Xiao," the same Xiao character as in Xiao Run. This line could conceivably mean, "Then she meets Mr. Xiao, who understands her well," which is how xiao-Lanhua and friends interpreted it.

However, if you search for Xie Wanqing's fate poem on the web, you'll find lots of posts in Chinese explaining that 萧郎/Xiao-lang is actually a poetic way to indicate a woman's beloved. It has origins in multiple historical figures surnamed Xiao, but the definitive usage is in a poem by Tang-dynasty poet Cui Jiao, in which he laments that his lover, a maid, was purchased by another man, and alludes to himself as Xiao-lang [See https://www.gushiwen.cn/mingju_576.aspx]. Hence "Xiao-lang" became a way to refer to the person a woman loves. And as we see later in the show, the Netflix subs are actually right in interpreting "Xiao-lang" as "beloved," and not an actual person named Xiao.

To draw an English parallel, I think it's a bit as if the poem had mentioned a person named Romeo, and there just happened to be a guy named Romeo in the vicinity. I, as a viewer with a modicum of English literary education, know that "Romeo" can be a general epithet for a loverboy, but a thousands-years-old immortal with no connections to the human world might not.

That's not the end of the wordplay in the fate poem, though it is the most important. Here are some small things I found on the rest of the lines:

半世锦绣半世尘 ban shi jinxiu ban shi chen Mine: Half a lifetime of splendor, half of dust Netflix: Half a lifetime of glory, half a lifetime of dust Notes: The word 风尘, meaning prostitution, literally breaks down into "wind-dust," and the 尘 (dust) in the poem probably alludes to this, according to https://www.douban.com/group/topic/273507772/?_i=8820568QDrpMtA.

一舞惊鸿倾鹿城 yi wu jinghong qing lucheng Mine: The elegance of a beautiful dance overwhelms Lucheng Netflix: A magnificent dance stunned the whole Lucheng

韶华等闲随烟柳 shaohua dengxian sui yanliu Mine: A beautiful spring thoughtlessly follows the budding willows Netflix: Her beauty is just like the willow's Notes: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/273507772/?_i=8817957xu4lIgj suggests that this means Xie Wanqing is unhappy with her life and fate despite her status as Lucheng's number-one courtesan. https://edu.iask.sina.com.cn/bdjx/6fnw1wJF5xw.html explains that 烟柳 yanliu refers to the time when willow trees are covered in tender budding leaves that are not yet green, giving them the appearance of being shrouded in smoke.

凭栏元夜闻笛声 pinglan yuanye wen di sheng Mine: Leaning on the railing, she hears a flute on the night of the Lantern Festival Netflix: She hears the flute on the night of the Lantern Festival

断肠几欲飞仙去 duanchang jiyu fei xian qu Mine: Grief-stricken, she almost flies to the heavens Netflix: She is heartbroken and wants to end her life Notes: 仙去 is a poetic or figurative way to say someone dies, but also literally means "goes to the fairy realm," a nod to Xie Wanqing's real identity as the fairy God of War.

偏逢萧郎解语人 pian feng xiao lang jieyu ren Mine: Unexpectedly, she meets a man surnamed Xiao who understands her Netflix: Then she meets her beloved who understands her well Notes: Discussed above.

缘定花朝丝萝梦 yuan ding huazhao siluo meng Mine: Fate ordains a dream of marriage on the second month's fifteenth day Netflix: They are destined to be together

红烛剑影断芳魂 hong zhu jian ying duan fanghun Mine: The shadow of the sword in the light of the celebratory red candle cuts the young woman's soul short. Netflix: Her husband kills her on the wedding night Notes: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/273293366/?_i=8819367xu4lIgj agrees with me that this does not necessarily mean the groom will be the killer.

[starlitwishforu]

青玉案 · 元夕 - 辛弃疾 english translation (and notes!)

ok well. all this chinese poetry posting has put me on a bit of a translation high so i wanted to share my most recent translation project, which i actually just finished recording and uploading yesterday after two whole months of waffling. the poem itself is SO fucking cute but SO hard to translate and i'm honestly very proud that i stuck with it to the end. it instantly became one of my top favourites the very first time i heard it so i hope other people can also find some joy from it!

here is the original:

青玉案 · 元夕

【宋】 辛弃疾

东风夜放花千树，更吹落、星如雨。宝马雕车香满路。凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞。

蛾儿雪柳黄金缕，笑语盈盈暗香去。众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在 灯火阑珊处。

and here is my translation:

Qing Yu An: Lantern Festival at Dusk

by Xin Qiji

Fireworks blossom beneath the touch of evening's eastern breeze; flurrying as they fall, sparks shower like stars. Prancing steeds pull chiseled carriages, sweeping fragrance across the path. The xiao’s decadent notes adrift, the jadelike light’s prismatic shift; the dragon-fish dance as the night-hours pass.

Combs shining in their hair, golden, silver, silken sway; sweet perfume and tinkling mirth linger in their wake. My searching gaze is futile as I scan the thronging crowds; at last I turn, and you are there, in the quiet dark of evening wane.

translation notes beneath the cut! there is a LOT, be warned!

translation notes:

so to start from the very top, let's first introduce the title 青玉案 · 元夕.

青玉案 (pinyin: Qing Yu An, lit. the matter of the verdant jade) is actually the name of a 宋词排名 (song cipaiming, song dynasty poetic/musical form). just as shakespeare wrote sonnets and basho wrote haiku, so the poets of the song dynasty wrote, among hundreds of other forms with fun names like this, Qing Yu An poems.

each 词排名 had a set number of characters per line, set rules for its tone patterns, and even came with its own tune. maybe a better western parallel would be twinkle twinkle little star, which uses the same tune as the alphabet song and baa baa black sheep.

the end result is that there are many titles under the heading of Qing Yu An, and even, according to chatgpt, another 青玉案 · 元夕.

anyway, this one by Xin Qiji, the most famous one, is titled 元夕 (yuanxi); 元 refers to 元宵节 (yuanxiaojie), the lantern festival held on the fifteenth day of the lunar new year which marks the end of the spring festival/chinese new year, and 夕 is dusk. hence a very naturally poetic name, lantern festival at dusk.

before i get into the text of the poem, i want to note that i often sacrifice rhythm/rhyme for precision of meaning. i ✨artistically✨ speed up/slow down some syllables while recording to preserve some sense of metre lol, but it does read quite awkwardly on paper. i'm a very inexpert student and have a lot to improve on!

ok so! line by line!

东风夜放花千树

--is a literally genius pun. it transliterates as: the east wind in the evening blows open the flowers of a thousand trees. very spring, right? haha spring festival get it.

however! its a chinese celebration, so what will there definitely be? fireworks 😎 and it just so happens that one word for "setting off fireworks" in chinese is 放烟花 (fang yanhua). yep, that's the same 花, which means flowers, but when combined with 烟 (smoke), it becomes a "fire-flower" 🎆!!

it's also the same 放, which in the context of actual flowers means the opening of petals, but in the phrase 放烟花 means to set off (the fireworks).

together, this line evokes both the blooming of the spring flowers under the eastern breeze* and the blooming of a thousand fireworks in the evening sky.

*spring comes from the east ofc; this is folklore and not science i think but lends to the spring-ness of the line

更吹落，星如雨

this one is pretty straightforward. lit. blown through the air by aforementioned wind, falling like a rain shower of stars.

宝马雕车香满路

oh boy. when i tell you my mom (who is my chinese teacher) and i got in several petty arguments over baomadiaoche...

so 宝马 (baoma) are just well-bred horses, prize steeds with a pedigree. a 雕车 (diaoche) (lit. carved chariot) is a very expensive carriage carved with lots of intricate decorations. in other words, these ppl are RICH.

however, it was difficult to convey the sheer decadence of 宝马雕车 without either using a miles worth of syllables or entirely losing the original cultural context. carved was too direct and ugly to hear besides, etched was not elite enough, sculpted conveyed entirely the wrong image... also, for some reason, "proud" to describe steeds was vetoed for being inaccurate???? hence the arguments.

in this scenario, the final word choice really is a matter of the least bad option.

at the same time, the second half of this line 香满路 (lit. fragrance fills the path) implies movement: the carriage is passing by, leaving the fragrance of rich people perfume in its wake. for the sake of syllables, i shifted that movement to the fragrance part of this line. i also like that this evokes a high-headed noble sweeping elegantly through the crowds.

overall, this line adds to the picture of a decadent, bustling market street during the most joyous celebration of the year.

凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞

lit. the notes of the phoenix xiao (chinese recorder) move, jade gourd light shimmers, the fish dragons dance all night.

chinese ppl, ok, use two motifs to describe the beauty and virtue of every artistic thing ever: phoenix and jade. phoenix xiao means NOTHING. it's like virtuous xiao. jade gourd is a little harder; some say it's the moon, some say it's the lanterns. jade and light put together kinda implies moon anyway, so i just sidestepped the problem entirely.

as for 鱼龙 (lit. fish dragons), theyre a type of dragon lantern which supposedly has some characteristic of a fish. they are puppet-danced on sticks - dragon dancing, the classic. my mom and i both had a vivid image of this dragon-lantern-dancing, but we couldn't find it ANYWHERE. if anyone knows the right search query to pull this up, please lmk how to tame 谷大哥*. anyway, i left the lanterns implied because idk how the fuck to explain this whole thing in four syllables.

*lit. big bro google. its funnier in chinese

蛾儿雪柳黄金缕

this is the line that, when i finally bothered to properly research it, made everything about this translation click into place. these are all hair decorations. 蛾儿 (lit. li'l moth) are silk moths, 雪柳 (lit. snow willow) are silver tassels, and 黄金缕 (lit. yellow-golden cords) are gold cords lmao. hence golden silver silken sway, which was SO satisfying to come up with.

笑语盈盈暗香去

lit. laughing speech tinkles and faint fragrance goes by. this one is also fairly straightforward. 去 means to go, so we specifically want the image of a group of giggly teenage girls fading into the crowd.

众里寻他千百度。蓦然回首，那人却在 灯火阑珊处。

and finally we reach the most famous line, the 千古名句 (qiangumingju) - iconic line of a thousand histories!

lit. within the crowd, searching for him* in a thousand hundred directions; suddenly the head turns, it turns out that person is standing in the darkness where the lights have gone out.

*"him" is highly debated. 他, used in modern chinese like the pronoun "he", was historically a catchall pronoun for people of any gender. iirc, 她 for "she", and the gendered distinction, was only introduced when china started integrating to the west. in this line, 他 could be the teen girl that just passed by, or her beau. whichever way, one is the searcher, the other is the searched. i chose here to sidestep this by using i and you bc fuck gender.

anyway, when the searcher's head turns - even this bit had to be suitably poetic, a nightmare - they find their lover in the 灯火阑珊处.

灯火阑珊处 this phrase refers to a very specific image. imagine, in the early hours of the morning, a dwindling market street; the stands are closing one by one, lights winking out, leaving a gentle blanket of dark and calm behind. it is the quiet after the rain, the breath after the shout; it is the sigh of closing your front door at the end of the night. it's not the absence or complete lack of light, but rather the exit of it. a place of that just-left-behind dark is a 灯火阑珊处.

this sentence gave me so much grief and i am so proud to have done it even just a little bit of justice.

so after all that, the scene described by this poem is something like this: a lively late-night market street. people from many walks of life fill the path, celebrating the lantern festival, the turn of a new year and coming of spring, a riotous party of light and noise and joy. as the night slips into the sixteenth, the market begins winding down, stalls closing and lights winking out. amongst the teeming crowds ambling their way home, a young person searches for the their lover from whom they were separated; on some sudden instinct, they turn, to find their lover already looking back from the darkness of the fading festival, gaze caught in the divide between light and dark, wake and sleep: a quiet young love on the edge of spring, something fresh and new.

if anyone made it to this point, thank you and i hope this was an interesting read! please feel free to add comments questions and observations!! i would love to discuss at any level with someone other than my mom and chinese poetry truly is one of my passions even when it makes me want to kill, so i'm always down to talk. :] <3

[inspofromancientworld]

The City in the Sea and its Ancient Origins

By Unknown author; Restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden - Derived from File:Edgar Allan Poe, circa 1849, restored.jpg; originally from http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=39406, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77527076

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, and literary critic who lived from 1809-1849. His subjects tend to lean to the macabre and the mysterious credited with being the first American to make their living by writing and with inventing the genre of detective fiction as well as making contributions to science fiction and cryptography. He published two ciphers under the name W. B. Tyler that remained unsolved until 1992 and 2000, while including simpler ciphers in some of his detective stories that made them popular among the general public.

By anonymous - eapoe.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2829735

He was abandoned by his father when he was one and his mother died when he was two. He was then taken in by John and Frances Allan (he used their last name as his middle name), who continued to support him through young adulthood. He started schooling at the University of Virginia, but was only able to attend a single year before he had to quite due to a lack of money. He and John fought over his tuition fees and gambling debts. He enlisted in the US Army when he was 18 under the name Edgar A. Perry. While there, he published his first collection of poetry as 'a Bostonian'. In 1929, after the death of Frances, he and John were able to reach a truce that lasted until Poe did poorly at West Point and decided he was going to be a writer. The two parted ways after that. He left the Army and began working for literary journals, gaining a reputation for his particular type of literary criticism and had him moving from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York City. When he was 27, he applied for a special dispensation to marry his 13 year old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis when she was 24. He published perhaps his most famous poem, The Raven, in 1845, when he was 36, to great success. He was in the process of trying to start his own literary journal when he died at the age of 40 under mysterious circumstances, possibly disease, alcohol or other substance abuse, or possibly suicide. He was found 'in great distress, and…in need of immediate assistance' per Joseph W Walker, the person who found him at 5 am October 3, 1849. He was unable to explain his state, though some say he called out 'Reynolds' on the 6th, before he died on the 7th and that his last words were 'Lord help my poor soul.'

The City in the Sea was written around 1831, originally published as The Doomed City in 1831, but the final version was published in 1845. In it, a personification of death rules over a city in the west ('Lo! Death has reared himself a throne/In a strange city lying alone/Far down within the dim West') which echoes the ancient Egyptian idea that death is in the west because that is where the sun sets. All are drawn to the city, '[w]here the good and the bad and the worst and the best/Have gone to their eternal rest.' In the next verse, he adds '[n]o rays from the holy heaven come down/On the long night-time of that town;/but light from out that lurid sea/Streams up the turrets silently--', adding to the unsettling feeling about the city, then explains that 'from a proud tower in the town/Death looks gigantically down.' The wind itself is indifferent to it's path ('No heavings hint that winds have been/On seas less hideously serene'). In the end, '[t]he wave--there is a movement there!/As if the towers had thrust aside' until '[d]own, down that town shall settle hence,/Hell, rising from a thousand thrones/Shall do it reverence.' The poem was based on Flavious Josephus' (37-100 CE) retelling of the fall of Gomorrah, one of the two cities destroyed for being 'wicked' and Titus Lucretius Carus', better known as Lucretus, (99 BCE-55 BCE) On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), which is a 7400 dactylic hexameter poem that was divided into six books that explores natural philosophy, consciousness, and the development of the universe as guided by chance rather than the gods. Other influences include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen.

You can read the poem here.

[nanowrimo]

NaNoWriMo and the Meaning of Sunshine

Did you know that National Novel Writing Month is a 501(c)3 nonprofit? Today, NaNoWriMo Executive Director Grant Faulkner explores the guiding metaphor for how he thinks of NaNoWriMo—and how we’ve been approaching fundraising. (For more, see Community Fundraising Means Showing Up for Each Other.)

NaNoWriMo is an ecosystem.

No, NaNoWriMo is part of an ecosystem—it’s a community within an ecosystem, like a grove of apple trees in a wider ecosystem that also includes butterflies and bees (let’s say they are the writers, pollinating the world with stories), forest sprites (because ecosystems hold magical possibilities), flora and fauna, and a running brook.

The organisms that live in our ecosystem go beyond writers and forest sprites, though, and include schools, readers, teachers, libraries, book stores, and other writing organizations—all interconnected because we develop our stories, our voices, our discipline, our joy, our purpose, and our imagination with others, not just alone.

A single tree, no matter how large and mighty, can not sustain itself without the tiniest microbes of life teeming in the soil around its roots.

The ecosystem flourishes when all of its elements are working together—when organizations like NaNoWriMo can nourish writers and teachers and schools, and everyone grows creatively, lifting each other up, cheering each other on.

But to flourish, the ecosystem needs something else: it needs sun and water, and the sun and the water take the form of donations. This is why we ask for donations. Without the sun and water of others’ support, the ecosystem becomes stressed—as if there has been a drought or deforestation (or a “destorystation,” God forbid). 

The Symbiosis of Stories

Some people view ecosystems and the species within them through the lens of competition—i.e., only the strongest survive. But the definition of a healthy ecosystem is one that’s symbiotic—where relationships are formed and resources are exchanged and growth happens in harmony. 

We are all called upon to contribute to this ecosystem, whether it’s by donating or volunteering or simply spreading the word. A healthy and diverse ecosystem is one that provides abundance to those who live in it—food, shelter, recreation, and natural beauty.

"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home,” said the poet Gary Snyder.

Just like our stories are our home. Our stories provide shelter. Our stories give sustenance. Our stories help us breathe. Our stories connect us to others. And our stories help us see the forest sprites that would otherwise be invisible.

Our contributions to this story-powered ecosystem are meaningfully rooted in the support of our donor community. Year to year, we’ve had anywhere from 6,000 to 8,000 of our writers join us with a small dollar donation. Thanks to this support, we’re proud to be a largely community-funded organization with more than 35% annual revenue coming from individual donors. 

We’re deeply grateful that so many shine your light on NaNoWriMo each year. As we head into our busiest season, we hope you think of how you can contribute to the NaNoWriMo community and the ecosystem it’s part of. We want to provide the apples on our trees to everyone so they can taste the sweetness of their creativity.

Grant Faulkner believes in NaNoWriMo because stories tell us who we are and shape the world we live in. He has been a writer since his earliest memory, and he’s proud to be the author of Pep Talks for Writers and Brave the Page. He struggles with rough drafts (hence his love—no, his need—for NaNoWriMo), but luxuriates in revision. His dog Buster serves as his lap dog/lap desk and has traveled with him for thousands and thousands of words.

Top photo by Dan Freeman on Unsplash  

[barmans-fault]

You made a good point of how this staged photoshoot will lead to increased exposure and ticket sales esp ahead of the US tour, because correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think all their US dates are sold out? They’re not as popular in the states and it’s been a couple months since I checked but I only saw a handful of shows that showed sold out. All this just reminds us of a curated version we have of him. Someone who likes privacy and wants to be lowkey doesn’t date attention seekers consistently and calls the paps on themselves. He just lost all credibility he had

Words of wisdom here from a lovely anon and thank you for sharing these thoughts, i agree with every word 💘

I think people generally get very caught up in the whole "alex is a romantic little prince too busy with his mind on clever lines he's innocent and private and not like other celebs and his privacy has been violated" narrative and tend to forget how much of a business this whole thing is.

The primary purpose of any business, be that show business or not, is to make money. The band is an asset that needs to generate revenue. American market has huge potential for that, alas, as the anon above correctly pointed out, very few of the US shows are sold out at this point, just a month ahead of the tour and the sales need to be boosted. The best strategy would definitely be to hype it up a little. American audience seems to be really into the whole straight dominant greaser bad boy persona (where do you think all those endless alex/your name fics with that shitty 50 shades of grey vibes come from?) and the target audience must be catered for. Both parties benefit: Alex gets the publicity of a cool rockstar kind of tired of his fame with a beautiful gf by his side on an expensive posh Italian resort. The pictures will now be all over insta/twitter/tiktok igniting interest in new fans and rekindling the old ones. The girls will fantasise about taking Louise's place in his arms (oh to be a girlfriend of this rich handsome millionaire musician who is also intelligent and talented and famous and who will fuck you like a whore then treat you like a princess!) and the boys will be jealous of him and his beautiful French girlfriend, wanting to be like him (oh to be this rich handsome millionaire and get all the girls!). Some more tickets will be sold, some more records, some more merch, and a couple of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars will be made. Louise on the other hand, will get more followers and will have more ads, which will also lead to more revenue for her and hence whoever is managing her. Not bad, no?

Alex is usually perceived as a poet with his head in the clouds, an ethereal creature, a poetic and storytelling genius, vulnerable, autistic woodland creature, too exquisite for earthly problems, fragile and defenseless. He is, however, in no way disconnected from reality or too naive not to know how the business works - after all, he's been in it for almost twenty years. And I am supposed to believe his privacy has been violated when it has hardly been violated for the 5 years he was hiding from everyone and no paparazzi whatsoever gave a fuck about him? Oh give me a break. His net worth is estimated to be millions of dollars, same as the band. He is one of the richest rock stars of the generation. I am not saying it is a bad thing - well deserved, he is a genius after all, - but money, even for geniuses, has to be earned. Their music is a product that needs to be sold, and their public image is one of the means to increase those sales.

I do not think that Alex or Louise called the paps themselves last minute - I am pretty sure the whole thing has been set up by the management in advance, with Alex's explicit consent. Again, it is just a marketing strategy which the sales and marketing department decided to go with in order to maximise the revenue. Why would Alex refuse? And please spare me the argument of 'he doesn't need any more money'. Maybe he doesn't (although i am not sure), but the band and the whole machine working for them definitely does as it employs hundreds of people who need to get their paychecks from this whole thing. Mr. Schwarz is staying strong for them, remember?

Once this is all over, the tour is over, the contracts are done and he disappears without a trace, we'll remember this and count how many times paps will ever try to take pictures of him or his gf (zero, mark my words).

Thank you for coming to my ted talk (or thesis defence, more like)♥️

[ausrache]

the power of emotions. | voidborne meta.

i've talked about this quite frequently on gaia's blog before but voidborne creatures are heavily reliant on their emotions to regain control over their powers or amplify it. with gaia only being a half-voidborne — the effects of that are quite limited. the same goes for zaya since he's not even from the void, his powers are just due to an old god's blessing.

but mali? mali is a fully-fledged eldritch entity who used to be the strongest within her domain, otherwise she wouldn't even have been able to dwell within the mortal plane. it is generally unheard of that old gods traverse the void without messing up reality in itself, however, she was still able to do it. she is, without a doubt, quite unique in that aspect.

another unique thing about her is that, unlike most old gods, her emotions are extremely regulated — hence her general inexpressiveness & lack of grand displays of such. eldritch entities sometimes fall to the whims of their emotions which can end in self-destruction. their source of power are their emotions, primarily their anger, frustration & sadness. mali has learned to regulate those whilst spending her time upon earth, but there are definitely exceptions . . .

she feels the emotions, but she often represses the full extent of it to the point where they sometimes feel as if they're not even her own. her face isn't expressive nor is the way she talks; sometimes you see an emotions within her eyes, though. the reason for this? the fear of losing control & since she has been doing it for thousands of years, it's hard to un-learn. under b'aelzei, mali was & still is an incredibly powerful being, revered under the eldritch entities for her outstanding feats & power.

in the void, eldritch entities often had their own domain over which they ruled; overstepping, killing off lesser gods that were under the command of another, etc. — it was all seen as incredibly disrespectful & would end in fights. mali never started one, though, she was sure to retaliate tenfold. the defeated was often consumed by the winner; the soul & being of the god strengthening the other's power. mali must have consumed the souls of hundreds whilst she still dwelled within her domain.

but then . . . she decided that it was senseless. a war in the dark that went on forever. & as such, mali left the void & assumed a mortal form. and the being that was revered for the control over her own emotions, fell victim to the one she never understood: love.

love was her downfall.

her rivals only waited for a moment of weakness & that was it. they lured the poet into a pact & made him kill her. they thought she was gone for good until . . . she emerged once more. all of these things contribute to the way she is now; her emotions are still her source of power, however, they're far less volatile or destructive. but because she has been neglecting her own emotions for thousands of years, it is hard for her to express herself.

[capriccio-ffxiv]

@selene-ffxiv and I play A LOT of Puzzle Games / Walking Simulators -- I took them through Obduction, they've taken me through The Room series (no relation to the films, lol); we went through Superliminal together, we're BOTH big Myst fans (and really need to go back and check out the user-created content for Uru Live!) -- and I just keep thinking, our Azems (tbh Selene's 'the' Azem, but Hyperion's her First Officer, basically) would absolutely make horrible space-warping puzzle boxes as gifts for Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus.

Emet would outwardly bitch and moan about this HORRIBLE PUZZLE BOX which has TRAPPED HIM in a SITUATION while secretly being intensely enamored of the entire thing. Enrichment in his enclosure. He's going to complain the entire time, but every time he solves a puzzle he'll be like haHA! NO MATCH FOR MY SUPERIOR INTELLECT.

Hyth is like "haha neat" and doesn't put any effort into actually solving anything, but manages to accidentally brute-force several puzzles (... put in by SelHype for this reason) much to Hades' consternation.

Both of them put in silly little symbolism to represent their friends. Hyperion is Sunshine; Selene is Moonshadow; together they're Eclipse. Venat's Starglow/Earthglow. Hades is Gravekeeper. Hyth is Hypnos/Sleepwalker. Sappho is Poet and Lover. Etc etc.

... and then I think to myself, did Emet-Selch keep a little puzzle box? Even after Selene 'disappeared', and Hyperion outright defied him? Kept it in his pocket, unsolved out of spite?

... was (in our story, at least) that how he got the Azem Crystal? In our story, Hyperion made it -- a solid representation of that Calling magick, which happened to be in the shape of a memory crystal because that was the simplest way to store it. It has a twin, made by Selene, for her precious, brilliant Sunshine...

At first, it was the way they called to each other. But when a stranger in Elpis showed Hyperion the very crystal he made, but from twelve thousand years hence... he gave that stranger the crystal Azem had made for him. "You know who this belongs to," he said.

So.

Did Emet-Selch keep that box? The last thing Azem gave to him, before she left without a word? In the dust and despair after the Sundering, as the broken crawled on their bellies, did he solve it, for lack of anything better to do?

Did he see Azem's First Adjutant in each twist and turn, in the angles of the cuts, the casting of the gears? Did he weep for his daughter student friend Azem when he held the treasure the puzzle hid in his hands?

[instruth]

Anthropological Poetry

Anthropology is the study to discover what makes us human. It is an approach, called Holism, to understand the many different aspects of the human experience, that would involve an excavation of the past, through archaeology, to see how human groups lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, and why.

Many poets and anthropologists have done interdisciplinary studies between poetry and anthropology.

While anthropologists consider how poetry may assist them to study how we and other people live in a creative aspect, some poets integrate anthropological elements intuitively with their poems.

Anthropological poetry, hence, is the application of the study of human cultures, societies, and their development into poetry writing, which should help anthropologists and poets to write insightfully about the nature of the human being, and his development. This project would also be a poetry portfolio which combines creative work with anthropological features.

It is this project that helps in the development of the perception of complex parameters between anthropology and poetry writing.

Invariably, human studies and poetry writing often merge as one to present a more complete analysis of the relationship between human emotions, strong feelings, intense imagination, and intuition - that establish the concept, “We are only human.”

Are we?

©Johnny J P Lee

26 December 2022

[leahsfiction]

Song of the Bronze Immortal Leaving the Han - Li He

Foreword: In the 8th month of the 1st year of the Qinglong Era (237 AD), Emperor Ming of Wei ordered his palace official to move an immortal of the Emperor Wu of Han (d. 87 BC) south by cart. This immortal, holding a dew-plate, had been installed in front of the palace hall.

The immortal started its journey once the palace official dismantled and removed the plate, whereupon it shed silent tears.

Upon which Li Changji, scion of the Tang royal house, composed "Song of the Bronze Immortal Leaving the Han." [1]

--

In fall the youth Liu came lightly by his flourishing mausoleum[2], One heard his horse whinny in the night; he left no trace at dawn.

The rich scent of autumn is hemmed by osmanthus[3] and balustrades, Thirty-six palaces, all, mossing over jade-green.[4]

The procession begins its thousand miles, led by the man of Wei, Out the East Gate, a sour wind like arrows to the eye.

The Han moon was lured outside the royal walls in vain; Our tears turn to drops of lead in imperial solemnity.

Fading orchids in mourning garb[5] line the Xianyang road, If the heavens too could feel, the heavens would grow old.

Bearing our plate of dew alone through moonlit desolation, River and city[6] far behind, the voice of waves grown small.

--

Li He, Tang superstar "demonic poet", wrote this poem en route from Chang'an to Luoyang -- the same route the statue was taking. (The statue, in actual history, never made it to Luoyang and got left in Ba City, due to the troublesome size or manifested tears, who knows.) The poet was leaving the capital bc he had to quit his post due to chronic illness. (You can see more of my research notes in my tumblr tag for this poem.)

1: I've inserted the corresponding Gregorian dates, but this is all Li He's own foreword contextualizing the poem.

There are 3 dynasties, 3 nested layers of history, at play here.

Emperor Wu ("martial") - birth name Liu Che - the Han dynasty flourished under his rule due to all the conquering and wealth; like many emperors before and after him, he became obsessed with attaining immortality. hence the poet calling his statue "bronze immortal". According to the commentary in my 1983 Chinese-lang Tang anthology by one 朱世英 Zhu Shiying, the statue this emperor commissioned of himself was enormous: 20m (丈) tall and 10m (围) in circumference. The "dew-plate" is a dish designed to collect morning dew as an offering to the heavens (in hopes of exchange for immortality?) - they're found on top of some Buddhist pagodas also.

Emperor Ming - birth name Cao Rui, grandson of the Cao Cao - 300 years later in the Wei dynasty, he ordered people to remove many Han artifacts from the imperial palace to Luoyang, an expensive and dangerous affair, replacing them with his own commissioned statues, etc etc. The "palace official" refers to a court eunuch - not sure if this is meant to be a specific person.

Li Changji, scion of the Tang royal house - the poet himself (Changji was his courtesy name). i wasn't able to find a genealogy but i do know his was a minor branch of the Tang dynasty founding line; he was quite poor and unsuccessful at getting a good court position (poets is the same). You can read more wild facts about his life on his wikipedia page.

The Tang poet is imagining the statue in the Wei remembering the living Han emperor. History repeats. Rulers grow dissolute and wasteful. Dynasties break, unite, then break again.

2: This first couplet seems unmoored from the rest of the poem. Is it a ghostly vision? a memory? The youth Liu, Liu-lang, is a ballsy way of referring to Emperor Wu. He's visiting his own royal tomb, Maoling Mausoleum (it's on wiki - highly rec the satellite photos, it's still standing), literally translated as "flourishing mausoleum". He started constructing it in his 2nd year of rule - he was 16 years old.

3: 桂树：Commonly mistranslated as "cassia" (chinese cinnamon) due to its prominence in traded goods, but in poetic context usually means 桂花 osmanthus - the smell is peaches, not cinnamon. The blooms are associated with the much-vaunted imperial examinations in eighth month (around September); sort of the equivalent to the greek laurel.

4: 三十六宫 土花臂：A difficult line to fit in english metre, because "thirty-six palaces" takes up the entire first half of the original line. And then the second half is an odd phrase probably coined by Li He - "earth flower jade-green".

5: I know my friend has explained this one already but I just need to yell again about how many images are packed into two characters, 衰兰 "withered orchids". (a) 衰 pronounced shuai, "frail," "old." The flowers are withering because it's autumn. (b) shuai, "reduced." There are few flowers left, and the flowers represent the crowd seeing the procession off. Barely anyone cares about the statue in this new dynasty. (c) pronounced cui, "mourning garments." Now this is a bit of a stretch, but I'm imagining the orchids as white with brown edges (the withering) - as in white and sackcloth mourning clothes. They're symbols of mortality they're the last few loyal mourners they're moved by emotion and thus are able to age, unlike the unfeeling heavens in the next line.

6: Originally says 渭城 "Wei City" in the poem, i.e. city on the Wei river, i.e. Chang'an. Both the Wei and Jing are famous rivers - Chang'an sits near where they touch. There's a nice parallelism b/t the sound of the waves growing small (or faint) and the heavens not growing old in this stanza that not many existing translations point out.

[writer59january13]

A definite bonehead moment

since revised when das scribe made laughing stock of himself

(circa ~ 8:30 post meridiem

December twenty eighth, 2022).

A retrospective account

revisited courtesy the following

honest to dog doe eyed,

doofus dopey dilemma

allows, enables, and provides

figurative fodder from readers,

who ordinarily lavish honorable voluntary praiseworthy feedback, now your chance to chide me

viz when senior moment struck

(an admitted absent minded fella, could least afford to dodge responsibility being driven to the brink of despair) of my own accord

hence after perusing poem go ahead and character assassinate yours truly regarding

earning convincing appellation

as overgrown latchkey kid

damning himself as nincompoop ace.

Forsooth, he locked the entire set of apartment and car keys right there on the driver seat, and quickly did brace himself, asper the most logical strategy to proceed forthwith to resolve quandary and chase away (any hat tinned man) liable to bust windshield

or window as true to form hooligan vandalism disgrace,

despite that then two thousand eighteen holiday season,

(year wordsmith crafted reasonable rhyme), when good willful deeds ought to pervade everyplace across all four corners of the world wide web, no doubt insinuating snivelling

buffoon – pitch perfect

for Monty Python crew lampoon written across visage of crankcase impossible mission to maintain

buoyed spirits (r)oiled countenance

scotched calm, cool,

and collected demeanor

series of unfortunate

circumstances did displace blockhead chassis to maintain stern face

obligations of maintaining,

forthright, embarrassing, commonplace and healthy rapport between poet (writer in general), and fanbase

necessitates apprising dedicated

civility, docility, fidelity, gentility,

humility, integrity, jocularity...

of course how could thine spouse

sabotage amazing grace, (no matter she tried in vain

not to smirk or grimace), cuz the missus burst out with peals of hearty laughter at hardcase

eluding obvious solution only futility venting exhaustive expletives, while unconsciously, nervously, and grimly interlace

sing and interweaving fingers

of both hands reckoning how jace

son and the Argonauts, superman,

or even a lab bottom sized drone weighing no more'n freckle on face nor measuring, no more than a bajillion kilobase, all the time cockamamie ideas race sing thru my mind lovingly crafted in lowercase,

asper premium, sans amidst fifty shades of gray

cerebral cells wherein memory banks perhaps indicative, viz early onset dementia praecox could be outpace

sing mental acuity slowly becoming unhinged preface sing senescence, where nonsense minus sensibility dost seem to replace former sharp as a pin focus, though body still spry

enough to hoist me petards

attempting to climb thru bedroom window,

(inevitably falling flat on my ass), yet that mean feat

(if successful) insufficient stunt to join superrace,

who could help me vanish

into dark shadows of outer limits of twilight zone without a trace.

[curls101]

If I could offer "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence by James Elroy Flecker" to add to your haunting

some ghosts i've been thinking about lately

sappho, 'stung with love' , trans. aaron poochigian // lucan, pharsalia 9.983-987, trans. jane wilson joyce // horace, odes 3.30, trans. terry walsh // ovid, amores 1.15, trans. a. s. klein // john donne, the relic // catullus 1, trans. a. s. klein // shakespeare, sonnet 55 // robert harris, dictator // virgil, eclogues 10, trans. a. s. klein // ovid, metamorphoses 15.877-879, trans. a. s. klein // phillip larkin, an arundel tomb

[alfamuzcina411]

*SLAVERY OF MEN BY WOMEN*

Every Man irrespective of who they are must read the book by a German writer Esther Villar In her book "The Manipulated Man"

This book has caused outrage and *hostile criticism* from women, it explains how women since the earliest times have manipulated men and turned them into their slaves, they have *pretended* to be the oppressed sex while in the real sense they are the oppressors.

She explains how a woman manipulates a man skillfully by steps like *courtship* and finally *marriage* , hence the saying “ *a man chases a woman until SHE catches him”* .

In her book she explains how the man is *tricked* to care for the woman all his life and her offspring.

He rolls the stone like *Sisyphus* and in turn gets rewarded by a few minutes of sexual pleasure.

We can, by observing Esther Villars assertions that a man is a slave of his desires and the woman uses and has used it for thousands of years as a stick and carrot to keep the man chasing vanity and commit his life to serving her.

She goes ahead to explain the *rivalry of women* , how each woman feels the powerful urge and need to own a male for herself.

Like a *slave owner* she detests any move the man would make to offer his services to another woman. She uses all means to keep the man to herself and her offspring alone.

Esther Villar's sentiments are captured by Nigerian Poet, critic and writer, Chinweizu Ibekwe in his book, “The Anatomy of Female Power” (AFP) and Will Farrel's, “The Predatory Female”.

They all push the theory that all societies are matriarchal and not patriarchal as we are pushed and forced to believe. *Matriarchy has ruled not through brawn but wits and tricks;* women feigning weakness to be protected etc. Thus the male becomes the most exploited sex in human history, (in wars the man is always ready to die for the woman; he has been trained to do that).

Chinweizu calls the idea of *dating* and *courtship* , *training* , like that of a horse. It is during this time that a woman having kept the man on a leash by denying him sex and getting him addicted to her by false charms, trains and breaks him to whatever she wants him to become.

The marriage celebration becomes a celebration for the *woman and her friends,* and they all congratulate her for having succeeded in getting herself a *slave* .

A man on that *wedding* day waves goodbye to his independence and his coalition of males and commits himself to a *Sisyphean* life, rolling the stone, an act he cannot abandon having *society* and the *government* checking on him and always ready to *jail* , *shame* or *exile* him for absconding his duties of slavery.

Thus the government and society helps the woman in keeping her *slave*(man) in check.

Chinweizu gives a narration of how women are trained by older matriarchs to *tame* men. He explains how a man is trained to rely on women by his own mother.

A man is *shamed for cooking* for himself and other domestic chores by his *own mother* who is an agent of the global matriarchal rule.

By getting the man to hate *domestic* works and having it enforced by culture which warns men against going into the kitchen, doing *laundry* etc.

The mother trains his son for the woman who will captivate him and when the time comes she takes hold of the man's stomach and by getting the man addicted to her body she holds him by the two, in *bed* and in the *kitchen* .

With those two weapons she manipulates the man and turns him into her plaything.

In the “Myth of the Male Power”, Esther Villar's “A Man's Right to the Other Woman”; “The Polygamous Sex”, the authors of those books challenge the narrative that men oppress women, and by detailed research across African, Western and Eastern both in ancient and modern societies, the authors unravel the hidden power of the ruthless matriarchal power that rules the world.

Also Helen E. Fisher did anthropological research of ancient human societies and wrote the book "The Sex Contract, The evolution of human behaviour" 1982. She too came to the conclusion that Marriage is a selfish creation of a Woman, where she uses sex to manipulate a man to take care of her and her offspring. Other male animals do not carry the same burden and responsibility.

*Presidents* , *Emperors* and *Kings* are all puppets of the matriarchy forces that rule the World by pulling the strings from behind the curtains.

A noble piece which is a must read for every Man under the globe...