To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Crowdsourced poetry

2012-08-02T01:19:12Z

What sorts of things should be done festina lente ("by making haste slowly")? I have it in mind to write something with that title, but my original concept is just not working out for me.

I'm equally of a mind to write it as a villanelle or some equally obstreperous form (NOT A SESTINA AAAARGH). I think villanelle would be the best, with its plodding repetition. (Why do I do these things to myself? Whyyyy?)

In return for your help, have a villanelle I just discovered: "If I could tell you," W.H. Auden.

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Parting thought for the night

2012-02-21T05:23:42Z

Resolved: Shippy adventure tales about space pilots can only be improved by inclusion of references to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Seriously, though, doesn't part of "Renascence" remind you of a rocket launch? Specifically this part:

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ’most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast...

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Links of interest

2011-10-07T01:15:26Z

Someone took photos at some recent location filming for Fringe. Spoily! ( Spoily comment )

This one is not spoily at all, but it is very weird. Is it bad that I can't be absolutely certain whether it's just the biggest stage light in the world (apparently attached to a blimp? It seems tethered to the buildings rather than supported by them), a plot-related UFO, or an actual UFO.

On a different note, here's an undated picture from what appears to be a con: Anna Torv and Josh Jackson. I'm sure it's not been taken out of context at all...

A movie version of Midnight's Children is coming out next fall. I imagine it'll leave out a lot, as that is one packed book, but I bet it'll be gorgeous to look at. I learned about this from Salman Rushdie's Twitter, which just kind of blows my mind. Is he actually supposed to talk to mere mortals? I have no idea.

Apparently a Swede named Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. An author named Teju Cole wrote, "Tranströmer's words remind me of Arvo Pärt's music," to which I immediately said, "WHERE DO I FIND HIM?"

The answer is here, here, definitely here, and most certainly here. Cole is right about the Pärt comparison.

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Ed, are you hallucinating? / Oh, yeah, but not right now.

2011-08-21T23:25:56Z

O Flist, I've found myself watching some Northern Exposure episodes of late, and I'm contemplating a complete (well, complete through the first six episodes of S6, anyway) rewatch. Anyone feel like joining me? (P.S. If you like quirky, charming, intelligent, unexpectedly moving dramedies, now would be an EXCELLENT time to discover this one!) I've given a thought to making a rewatch comm, although I only lasted until the end of S4 on the recent B5 rewatch. Then again, NX only had fifteen episodes total for the first two seasons, so it wouldn't be quite as long as five seasons with a show that had 20+ episodes each year.

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In other news, JMS is trying to re-acquire the rights to B5. What for, no one's sure.

My first reaction is OMG REBOOT REBOOT REBOOT!!!!, but I'm not sure how one would change the story significantly enough to make it worth it.

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Finally, a poem I recently read and loved:

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

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Stockings and poetry

2010-12-02T04:45:17Z

Stockings are going up at fandom_stocking! You can still sign up here. You know you want to...

(Mine, if you are so inclined, is here.)

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Made a Wiki Walk over to incandescens's journal today, and found that she posts marvelous poetry by many different people all the time. I really like quirky, but not to the point where it stops making sense, and it's like incandescens can read my mind. I've been backreading like crazy.

My favorite so far is this one:

( Winter Solstice, Camelot Station )

I also really like this one, for entirely different reasons:

( People )

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Perfect poems

2010-11-10T04:40:28Z

All right, gamesiplay wrote this epic post about "perfect" poems, and now I have to navel-gaze about that for a while. A perfect poem is different from a "favorite" or "best" poem, though for me there's significant overlap. The working definition that she came up with is that "it has to do with some kind of intersection between an idea that affects me viscerally and a structure/progression/formulation that mirrors the way my mind works." I'm defining it as a poem (or section of a poem, if it's long) that you get and understand down in your soul. Of all the possible ways to put whatever it is that the poet has written into words, this is the one that makes the most sense to you, and you can't imagine it working as well in any other formulation.

(I'm stealing the Alan Bennett quotation gamesiplay used as well: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.")

To be honest, any number of Millay poems could be included here, because I think of all the poets I've read, her verse works most similarly to the way my mind works--very odd since she so often wrote in sonnets and other forms and I hate writing like that, but I guess it speaks to a certain organization of thought that functions similarly to my own. In the interest of brevity, I will limit myself to four: "Recuerdo," "Journey," "Renascence," and "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why."

Others: "The Wild Swans at Coole" and perhaps "The Circus Animals' Desertion" (Yeats), "The More Loving One" (Auden), "Patchwork" (Boland), "Diving into the Wreck" (Rich), Sonnet 73/"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Shakespeare), "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (Heaney), "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (Wright), "Horses and Men in the Rain" (Sandburg), the untitled poem that begins In Search of England (Morton), the last twenty-one lines of "Little Gidding" and possibly also part I of "Burnt Norton" (Eliot), maybe "Nostalgia" (Collins), maybe "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Gray), and perhaps "Church Going" (Larkin).

Yes, fully 75% of them were written between 1910 and 1963, WHAT OF IT. Modernism and its close successors ~speak to me~. And yeah, a few are cliches; I'm gonna say it just speaks to how perfect they are, how not a word is out of place, and so they're recognized as such by many people.

( Further analysis )

What are yours?

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