⭐️ Blog Post
📜 Of course, this one was great. I liked the way the form made it feel more circular and how intensely internal it was. It’s crazy to think this was pre-freud. Shakespeare was ahead his time in how he was writing about sex, power and gender roles. I have to admit I felt like it dragged on a little. It’s great! but reading it after Venus and Adonis… I am going to give it 3.5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Finished reading: The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare 📚
⭐️ New blog post! # A Report from Further Down the Road
Read here
We live in an age that treats self-knowledge as a project: journal your way to your true self, optimize, heal, arrive. Women are sold this endlessly, as if the self were a product to be finished. Carol was offering something more honest and, I think, more liberating, that the self is not a thing you eventually figure out but a thing you enact, choice by choice, without ever getting the full picture.
Ecclesiastes is the one book in the Bible that tries the self-knowledge project all the way to the end, applies the whole of a life’s wisdom to the question of how things work, and comes back saying: you can’t know, and the trying is chasing the wind.
⭐️ New blog post, I wrote a probably too-long review on my reading of The Dry Season. Read → here
Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, argues that erotic love and friendship are forms of preference, and preference is self-love wearing another person’s face, it says, I love you because of what you are to me. But the command you shall love cuts underneath that. It makes love a duty, and his imaginative claim is that only as duty does love become free, because it no longer depends on whether the beloved keeps deserving it or whether the tension keeps humming. Febos’s year is a year of discovering that everything she had called love was preference, and that the thing she actually wanted could not be reached through more of it.
“we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others.”
Finished reading: The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without … by Melissa Febos 📚
⭐️ 🌬️ New blog post # Lineage & The Royal I
When I was involved in church ministry, another lifetime ago, one of my favorite parts was thinking about lineage and schools of thought. How the church had changed and, when I was feeling imaginative, where it could go…MacIntyre says a living tradition is an argument extended over time about what the practice is for.
What I love about poetry is that it is born from a tradition and still seen, even in contemporary circles, as working with a tradition, even when it is breaking away from one. Some of my closest mentors have the same thread in them. They see their role as preservers of the art form and its connecting lines.
⭐️ I’ve been working out some bible breakdowns on my own thoughts around difficult scriptures. I hope you read with generosity as I am still working out these things but I hope you find freedom or comfort in it regardless of your spirtual background, beliefs and so on.
Read The Ledger Life & Mercy ⇰ here
Be patient with me and I will pay back everything.
This is the voice of a man who cannot yet imagine any relation to another that is not a schedule of repayment. I am teary even writing this. Instead, he asks for a longer term payment plan. He is given, instead of a payment plan, the cancellation of the term itself. And this is precisely what he cannot use. A payment plan he would have understood. But release? He can’t hold and instead, misses the actual gift of mercy and available grace in this story.
The servant in the parable is not sent somewhere new. He is returned to the world he never left. He walked in with the ledger and walked out with the ledger, and the master simply consents to let him live inside it. God, someone said to me once, has a terrible respect for freedom. The man wanted accounts. He is given accounts, forever.
⭐️ No prompt today. Instead I wrote a blog post after finishing Femininity and Domination by the brilliant feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky.
#Translated Reciprocity
Read the full piece → here
Bartky traces how affective care in heterosexual intimacy, including and pointedly the care owed after sex, typically flows toward men without returning, and how any inch of return gets treated as license to demand the woman give double. She names a familiar arrangement. Men report wanting a woman who is powerful yet docile, who wants them but not so much that her wanting becomes a claim. The asymmetry governs even the duration of sex, which is typically for the men to adjudicate (not the orgasm alone!) the sense of when the whole thing is finished. He leads each stage while speaking the language of attentiveness. It’s then reported she often works around his needs, afraid that disrupting the flow will render her whichever version he does not want: too powerful, too needy, too much.
⭐️ 🌬️ #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.
⭐️🌬️ 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!
⭐️ 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.
⭐️ New Blog Post Up!
# The Sovereign Interior / a door is a door is a door
The diagnostic everyone reaches for is are they sincere? That worthlessness is the first real discovery. Sincerity is fully compatible with harm, fully compatible with the total dissolution of responsibility, because the dissolution happens upstream of the sincere utterance. The question was never whether the interior report is honest… It is whether the interior has been arranged so that no honest report could ever indict it. It is artfully dodgeful.
Read the full piece thing → Here
⭐️ New Blog Post Up!
#The Common Denominator: Girlhood and the Education of the Body in Eliya Smith’s coming-of-age dramedy play, Dad Don’t Read This
We are used to thinking of a girl’s subordination as something done to her by men, and it is. But the daily labor of enforcing it, of making sure each girl learns her place and keeps to it, falls largely to other girls. This is the quiet horror underneath the whole exchange. The friends are not Sophie’s opposites in this scene, nor the safe harbor against the man’s incursion. They are his instrument, though they would be appalled to hear it, because the lesson he began to teach they finish. He tells her body it is readable. They tell her the reading is her fault.
At this age the policing is at its most merciless, because everything is still being decided — who is desirable and who is not, who belongs and who is cast out — and a teen girl often falls into the pitfall of securing her own footing by finding the fault in another.
Read the piece thing → Here