🐿️ tiny friend
⭐️ 🌬️ #Make a Ritual of the Thing You Dread, after CA Conrad, poetry prompt #5
Poetry is spiritual. It’s where you can communicate to the dead. It’s where you can meet the duende, the angel, and the muse.
Classes start back up next week, here’s an excerpt from my prep-reading, too good not to share, from The Poet as Fool and Priest by Sigurd Burckhardt:
”What sustains him in this perilous balance is the love of the Word in its absolute integrity. As Othello demonstrates, that is no easy matter; the most sacred thing is also the most vulnerable. The poet would be much safer if he did not commit himself to the Word, but in ironic detachment exploited the infinite ambiguities of speech. Or he could retreat to the safety of a socio-religious order, give up his claim to verbal priesthood and turn " mouthpiece." Both roads have been taken; but they lead to self-abnegation. The poet as a fool must be a corrupter of words, a punster, rhymster, verbal trickster, for there is no other way to break the disgraceful bonds into which words have fallen. But if he is not also, and ultimately, priest-if he is not a parson disguised as a fool rather than a fool disguised as a parson-speech will be " wanton " rather than sacramental…”
“If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves: for our own lives and actions. It is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.” – Gloria Steinem 🪽
Want to binge all of his stuff now. It’s no wonder he’s received that sweet sweet Pulitzer. Finished reading: The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips 📚
As brilliant and as devestating as I expected ❤️🩹
Finished reading: The Going Is Forever: Poems by Elizabeth Metzger 📚
⭐️🌬️ September Prompt #2
#Build a Labyrinth like an Oulipian
Oulipians are “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.“The lipogram, then, is one maze among the many Oulipo builds. But the technique is inert on its own. It becomes literature only under the Oulipian wager: that a constraint obeyed without exception stops being an obstacle and becomes a heuristic, yielding locutions the unconstrained ear would never reach. The discipline is not to negotiate the prohibition but to submit to it and let it do the thinking. The prohibition is not the poem’s cage. It’s the poem’s argument.
Read the full prompt → here
⭐️ 🌬️
Happy September! I love this month & the beginning of Fall. I figured I would do a poetry prompt series throughout the month of September. I’ve been writing a poem a day recently, and it’s because of prompts that have helped me find a (new) place to start rather than the blank page I am a little too familiar with at times. I hope you can find a piece of this prompt that is helpful on your own exploration! 💫 🔭
Read the full prompt → here
⭐️ New Blog Post!
I wrote a disjointed (sorry!) blog post on thoughts I had after watching Coyote vs. Acme (which I loved). No spoilers, mostly about poetry, nonsense, and etc.
#Coyote vs. Acme, Poetry Using Toon Logic, & Defiance Against Fascism
Read the piece → here
Fascism’s claim isn’t just that the future is closed but also the present order is necessary. That the way things simply are is how it should stay. Arendt noted that tyranny of logicality deduces everything from one premise and stops answering to the world. These are ways of saying it could not have been otherwise. Nonsense is the demonstration that it could!
🎵 One of Bob Dylan’s Theme’d Radio Hours where he talks about a theme and pairs songs with that theme. Love this one on Luck.
Had me thinking about all types of luck, I love writing about luck & thinking about it, it’s one of those words that sounds like what it is:
Bad luck, good luck, unlucky, tough luck, luck of the devil, rabbit’s foot, down on your luck, irish luck, beginningers luck, lucky charm, lucky lady, dumb luck, better luck next time, try your luck, lucky penny, four-leaf clover, run of luck, black cat crossing one’s path, pure luck, lucky break, just my luck, lucky streak, push your luck, luck of the draw, luckiest guy alive, make your own luck
love mornings in my apartment
🎵 Midweek Music! Alot of Racing Mount Pleasant (which is sad, sorry! the whole album is so good but so sad)
Your New Place (ugh and the last song on the album is your old place)
Other:
Way Out - stevestevesteve found on NTS thanks flo.
Stay - The Blue Nile so romantic & so much of their music makes me excited for fall in nyc
I added many more songs to my Spotify playlist finally - here
Like many people, I felt emotional hearing the news about Dolly Parton passing. I was touched to see people post letters they received from her. She really carried such genuine wisdom and kindness. A friend of mine who wrote a book about her (literally) always noted that her humility was the most striking thing and how she was willing to publicly own something, say sorry, and then move on. I think there is so much to learn from Dolly Parton. She will be missed.
Eminem’s post of the letter he received from Dolly. Read here.
All of Dolly’s interviews are quite astonishing. What a true example of courage on display here in her interview with Barbara Walters from 1977. I feel inspired by it.
🌬️ What an example of a debut poetry collection! I am going to keep this one in my back pocket to recommend. Finished reading: Slow Lightning (Volume 106) (Yale Series of Younger Poe… by Eduardo C. Corral 📚
Attached is a poem Want from the collection and a excerpt of Variations on a Theme by José Montoya
🌬️ Beyond excited to read Elizabeth Metzger’s new poetry book, The Going Is Forever, where she writes very specifically and honestly about the death of her father, a dissolving marriage, and her sons illness. A friend just sent me a sneak peak to share. Can’t wait to get my copy.
An honest, intricate, and breathtaking distillation of love’s true nature, The Going Is Forever reminds us that our closest relationships contain endless mysteries, and that there is never just one version of a life.
Can pre-order here
weekend again and new tattoo 🐎
come what may
⭐️ New Blog Post Up! I wrote a long-winded research essay on the temperature of reality TV called:
#Torture as Content: Reality Television, Netflix & Friends Abuse, and the New Witch Trials
Read the piece here → (warning: it’s very long and has some descriptions of suicide and violence)
An industry that measures every minute of viewing has declined to maintain a count of its dead, and the asymmetry of bookkeeping is not an oversight but a finding: the true number is unknown, is unknowable by design, and is larger than any published list.
The charge is never the act. The trials did not burn women for what they did; they burned them for what the act revealed them to be, and the genre convicts on identical grounds: not she cheated but she’s trash, not she drank but she’s a mess, not she wanted but look what she is. Conduct is the evidence. Essence is the verdict. The genre does not stumble onto its women. It hunts them the way the trials did, by knowing in advance what kind of woman it needs, finding her, documenting her, and presenting her to a community that has already agreed what the verdict means. Four centuries on, the tribunal still asks women the same two questions: what did you do with your body, and what does that make you.