#w todd kaneko

[asoftepiloguemylove]

suddenly childhood ended and now i am supposed to know how to live

Franz Wright Entry In An Unknown Hand / Elena Ferrante (tr. Ann Goldstein) Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (via @luthienne) / Jenny Zhang How It Feels / Anna Kamienska Astonishments / unknown / Gabrielle Bates & Jennifer S. Cheng So We Must Meet Apart / W. Todd Kaneko The Day After / image; SZA Blind / Ethel Cain Dog Days / @darkerthanerebus / pinterest

[faecaribou]

Michael Afton Web Weave

Jukebox the Ghost, "Under My Skin" // Taylor Swift, "seven" // Elizabeth Jennings, "Song for a Birth or a Death" // the unsent project, to mom // Rick Riordan, Demigods and Magicians // Grail Quest #3: The Gateway of Doom // whispertothem00n, "The chain bound" // Anne Carson, "Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides" // W. Todd Kaneko, "THE DAY AFTER" // Audre Lorde, "Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde & Pat Parker" //

Third Michael Afton Web Weave ( 1 - 2 - 3)

[blizzardsuplex]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY POETRY PARTNER-IN-CRIME, @powderflower! I hope you enjoy your day, have this edit :) Thank you for the opportunity to learn a lot making this, and also for the privilege of being your friend! Let's talk more ;)

[text from the poem Heart of the Texas Tornado by W. Todd Kaneko. Images, from top to bottom: Tornado Over St. Paul by Julius Holm; A field of Blue Bonnets, late afternoon sunlight by Julian Onderdonk; Richard Humphreys - The Boxer by John Hoppner; The Goddess Melissa Reclining By A Beehive In A Landscape by the French School]

[genderdrift]

Thank you Ilanot Review...

And many thanks to Marcela Sulak, Jane Medved, Alison Powell, and W. Todd Kaneko for nominating my poem for Best of the Net!, “I Made a Roof out of the Wolf” in the Want Issue http://www.ilanotreview.com/want/poems-cassandra-whitaker/ 

[writernotwaiting]

Where the Sky Meets the Earth

by W Todd Kaneko

A man can’t die where there is no earth because there will be no place to bury him. His body is the sky and understands the language of birds. His body says the earth is made of everything that has fallen from Heaven while no one was looking. He promises to defy gravity and then return home. A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds talk about the awesomeness of flight while the oxen labor in the fields, while the cows eat grass and dream of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight because one day, there will be no sky, just the body covered in earth. And now the sky is empty of birds. And now the earth is covered in flowers.

[via poets.org]

[theomnipotentslimshady]

A man can’t die where there is no earth because there will be no place to bury him. His body is the sky and understands the language of birds. His body says the earth is made of everything that has fallen from Heaven while no one was looking. He promises to defy gravity and then return home. A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds talk about the awesomeness of flight while the oxen labor in the fields, while the cows eat grass and dream of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight because one day, there will be no sky, just the body covered in earth. And now the sky is empty of birds. And now the earth is covered in flowers.

“Where the Sky Meets the Earth” by W. Todd Kaneko

[missedstations]

“All the Things That Make Heaven and Earth” - W. Todd Kaneko

The soil, the livestock, our memories of the war, everything flourishing before it vanishes—breath severed clean from our bodies, our shadows sunset-deepened and woven with dirt, whole family trees succumbing to the blight. My grandfather returns to life, back still bent by history’s quiet yoke, his memories of camp forever decaying into the tiny garden behind my house where my father’s death is the soil, where silence blossoms now all year round. Or the soil is my grandfather eating darkness, the spectral memory of camp that feasts upon my father and his father, me and my son. There are no such things as ghosts—I tell my son this every evening as he gazes up the dark stairwell towards his room. What will be waiting for us when my boy is old enough to ask where he comes from? What will we find when our memories of camp finally molder back into the ground?

[lifeinpoetry]

My father died a year ago and I’m still writing poems to bring him back

to me—

— W. Todd Kaneko, from “Elegy for Mr. Spock," published in Split Lip

[andreablythe]

Culture Consumption: March & April 2022

Culture Consumption: March & April 2022

Hoo, boy. Time slipped right by me. I was planning to do my Culture Consumption for March on time, but then the next thing I knew it was April. In addition to putting two months together, I’ve done a lot media consumption over the past two months — which means I’ve got a huge stack of things to talk about. I’ll try to move through it all as quickly as I can. If I have the wherewithal, I’ll try to…

[cl0udbursting]

2022 reads!

since everyone is doing this, i figured i might as well join in! i track my reading through thestorygraph and aim for 30 books in a year, though i don't usually count shorter texts read for class or the plays i skim when looking for material in my acting classes. favorites in each category are bolded. feel free to ask questions on any of these!

FICTION: 

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters

Sula – Toni Morrison

The Infinite Noise – Lauren Shippen

A Neon Darkness – Lauren Shippen

Some Faraway Place – Lauren Shippen

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

Paradise – Toni Morrison

Gideon the Ninth (Reread) – Tamsyn Muir

Harrow the Ninth (Reread) – Tamsyn Muir

Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn

A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers

This is How You Lose the Time War – Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

A Room Called Earth – Madeleine Ryan 

Nona the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir

Frankenstein (Reread) – Mary Shelley

Hell Followed with Us – Andrew Joseph White

Dracula (through Dracula Daily) – Bram Stoker 

Eartheater – Dolores Reyes (trans. Julia Sanches)

My Heart is a Chainsaw – Stephen Graham Jones

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 

NON-FICTION:

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right – Angela Nagle

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Reread) – Alison Bechdel

POETRY: 

War of the Foxes – Richard Siken

Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology – W. Todd Kaneko & Amorak Huey

Life on Mars – Tracy K. Smith

Anglo-Saxon Judith – Unknown

Beowulf – Unknown

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – The Pearl Poet

PLAYS:

Cloud 9 – Caryl Churchill 

How I Learned to Drive – Paula Vogel

Mr. Burns and Other Plays – Anne Washburn

In the Other Room (The Vibrator Play) – Paula Vogel

Becky Shaw – Gina Gionfriddo

The Skriker – Caryl Churchill

The Tempest – William Shakespeare

This is Our Youth – Kenneth Lonergan

Bully – Amina Henry 

The Merchant of Venice (Reread) – William Shakespeare

The Marriage of Bette and Boo – Christopher Durang

Measure for Measure (Reread) – William Shakespeare

[slateblueearthbelow]

A man can’t die where there is no earth because there will be no place to bury him. His body is the sky and understands the language of birds. His body says the earth is made of everything that has fallen from Heaven while no one was looking. He promises to defy gravity and then return home. A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds talk about the awesomeness of flight while the oxen labor in the fields, while the cows eat grass and dream of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight because one day, there will be no sky, just the body covered in earth. And now the sky is empty of birds. And now the earth is covered in flowers.

Where the Sky Meets the Earth | W. Todd Kaneko

[bowlsola]

Blog Post 4: Image and Metaphor

If there is one thing to take away from the imagery section of Amorak Huey’s and W. Todd Kaneko’s book Poetry, it’s this: “What the poet thinks of as a ‘modest house might be one reader’s mansion and another reader’s hovel…You should never assume that your judgement is ‘normal’ or somehow universal” (70). This idea, coupled with the authors’ distinction between concrete and abstract imagery, is great advice to consider when creating imagery. It’s something I’ll have to consistently remind myself while writing, to make sure I’m clearly conveying to my audience what I am envisioning in my head. When I think of imagery in lyrics, Nas’s Illmatic album stands out as one of the best to do it. The entire album does a fantastic job at incapsulating a 90’s crime-fueled New York City and helps the reader envision the struggles that native new Yorkers like Nas go through. The whole album feels as though it was made to be used as the city’s own personal soundtrack.

               On the topic of metaphors, one of my biggest concerns when writing is coming across as cheesy, cliched, or shallow. Metaphors can greatly heighten or lessen one’s poem depending on how well or how poorly they are executed. Huey and Kaneko point this out when discussing extended metaphors and how poorly executed metaphors obscure the poem’s subject matter when they should instead be expanding on it. Extended metaphors in poetry are certainly something I would like to experiment with down the road once I feel more confident in my ability to incorporate metaphors in my writing.

[gregsantospoet]

Thank you to @toddkaneko for referencing “Hulk Smash!” in this essay about diction in poetry alongside @maggiesmithpoet’s outstanding and viral poem “Good Bones” in the new book The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft (Terrapin Books, 2021) edited by Diane Lockward. Hulk is humbled, honoured, and grateful. 💚 Photo credit: W. Todd Kaneko. . . . #gregsantos #hulksmash #toddkaneko #maggiesmithpoet #dianelockward #poetry #poetrycraft #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity https://www.instagram.com/p/CVB2TicN1WG_ljLfWHTDA0VR1u5TW4vEm8XJFY0/?utm_medium=tumblr

[thealliteration]

Blog Post 8: Haikus and Sonnets

This week the class wrote Haikus and Sonnets:

Sonnet

A sonnet, according to an article on the Poetry Foundation, is “a 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme… the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or “turn” of thought in its concluding lines. There are many different types of sonnets” (“Sonnet”). The formal rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG:

Syllables in Sonnets matter; in a typically Shakespearean poem the writer uses a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables to create their lines. In our assignment, we could either follow a Shakespearean sonnet format or create a Shakespearean sonnet that has 10 syllables per line. When deciding what to write I chose to create a sonnet with 10 syllables per line. Writing my poem was an… experience. The first thing I did was decide how I was going to split the poem in my head, I wanted to use the 14 lines 4 stanza format to create a 3 act and an epilogue structure. I find it easier to do poetry when I think about it like I am creating a story. I find it easier to wrap my head around everything, at least for the first time writing that poetry genre. I wrote out what I wanted each “act” to be before writing, it was a lot of fun deciding what to do and how to format it. I had been thinking about Lewis Carol a lot lately and wanted to create a story loosely inspired by “Alice in Wonderland.”

One of the biggest issues I came across when writing my poem was how big my ideas were compared to the size of the poem. Instantly realized that 10 syllables per line was not a lot to work with and I struggled to cut down every part of my poem to try and fit into the formal scheme. The second issue I realized was how hard it was using syllables alongside a rhyming scheme. I remember writing out a line that I was proud of and then realizing that I had forgotten to make the poem rhyme. Writing the sonnet was extremely hard, I kept scrapping and rewriting a draft over and over again until I was content.

My sonnet:

Haiku

According to Poetry Foundation, a haiku is a short 3-line poem from japan consisting of a 5 7 5 syllable scheme that is inspired by nature (“Haiku (or hokku)”). Before taking this course, I knew about haikus from a middle school class I took. I remember learning about them and never wanting to write one. I was intimidated by the short and strict format and didn’t know how I could write one. However, when starting this assignment, I was shocked at how quickly the words came to me.

The class had to choose a season to write about for the assignment, I went with my favorite season, Fall, I get engulfed in the serene atmosphere and the calming smell of the world-changing and getting cooler. I decided to link my sonnet and haiku by having the haiku set up the time of the sonnet. While I did struggle with the syllable length of the haiku, it was a lot easier than the sonnet, the thing I struggled with the most was deciding what lines to use. When drafting my haiku, I wrote many different versions of each line until I was happy with it. I ended up liking my haiku so much more than my sonnet, my younger self was worried about nothing. If I could rewrite my haiku outside of the class, I may try writing each line to be the setting of each act.

My Haiku:

Works Cited:

“Haiku (or Hokku).” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/haiku-or-hokku.

Huey, Amorak, and W. Todd Kaneko. Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. E-book, Bloomsbury, 2018

“Sonnet.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/sonnet.

Photos used from:

Limericks vs Haiku: What is the difference? - King of Limericks

Getty Images

Summer Boredom Blaster 9: Pursuing Poetry (solaro.com)

Economic Botany & Cultural History: American elm | Urban Forest Initiative (uky.edu)

[mortalpractice]

Anybody can get married, start a family and dance to songs on the radio. I am the alligator’s smile, perilous and sexy like a cocaine spoon, like a barbed wire kiss. I fight in a cage because some nights I am showered with beer bottles and old vegetables. Other nights men seek shelter from my elbows and knees. It’s easy for stadiums to rally against me, for cities to curse my name all night. I’ll always be the heel, desire and violence flickering together like a house and a fire, like your house and my fire. ---W. Todd Kaneko, from “Mae Young Has Always Been the Heel,” published in The Normal School

[classyurbanscholar]

Blog 4: Image and Metaphor

 This week has been quite the challenge! Brainstorming for our ekphrastic poem made me feel like it would be easy as the ideas flowed but putting it together has been a struggle!

Our book references the idea behind “Show, don’t tell” and I cannot count how many times I have used the same statement. Image is a huge part of what engages me within a piece. I enjoying feeling as if I can experience the writing in a way that almost seems like virtual reality.

For example,  David Kirby's "Teacher of the Year," took me on a mental journey. While the poem switched in thought without any clear development, I was able to experience every part of the journey. Kirby created an image for every scene/moment. I was mentally trying to figure out what may have broken the window and unfortunately even tried to rationalize through the options. I saw the dog wearing clothes and the smiles on the faces of the elderly.

I have always felt that metaphors add so much to writing. The flow of metaphors have even been more favorable to me than similes. The ability for so many different interpretations to come from piece of work is magical to me as it opens so many possibilities. When I think about the catchy parts of songs or the lyrics that people pull for quotes on their Instagram posts, they are often metaphors. As our book points out, the balance in the tenor and vehicle is important and one must use metaphors strategically as they are not merely analogies.  

Huey, Amorak, and W. Todd Kaneko. Poetry: a Writers Guide and Anthology. Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018.