silver fish shining in black water

writing sideblog (main @gotyouanyway) my writing

[plasmapop]

03/04/2026 • did you know mt etna has its own species of birch? did you know im normal about mt etna

[pastperfectcontinuous]

I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft

[partiallithopseffect]

[appointmentwithmryeats]

Seamus Heaney

[mildlydiscouraging]

[ID: The poem "Postscript" by Seamus Heaney in its entirety. It reads:

"And some time make the time to drive out west / Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, / In September or October, when the wind / And the light are working off each other / So that the ocean on one side is wild / With foam and glitter, and inland among stones / The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit / By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, / Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, / Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads / Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. / Useless to think you'll park and capture it / More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass / As big soft buffetings come at the care sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open."

End of description.]

[blue--deer]

*slides this across the table* you're going to want to read this

[havingapoemwithyou]

February by Rachel Mannheimer

[neoyorzapoteca]

Recently, I began a weekend creative writing workshop with this exercise: write your sexual life story in five sentences. Short of gratuitous usage of semicolons, there was no wrong way to do this; the five-sentence story could be as abstract or as concrete as my students wanted. It could be a chronological list of the five most high-topography sexual events in their lives, or it could be a list of images more akin to a surrealist poem. After the allotted five minutes, they all set their pens down with a touch of weary accomplishment. Then I asked them to do it again. This request was met with stares, some uncomprehending, some with a touch of contempt. I pressed on. The only requirement was that they not reiterate any of the previous five sentences—they could zoom in to a single event, zoom out to a philosophical summary, make it silly, make it emotionally opposite, make it more honest, make it less or more abstract. After they’d finished, I asked them to do it for a third time. A fourth. At this point, many of their stares implied that I was unhinged, sadistic, or simply ridiculous. Eventually they stopped staring and started writing faster. Here’s the point: Their writing got better. It became truer. It became more theirs. I told them, We could do this all day. I meant: and not run out of ways to tell that story. More importantly, they would bear witness to something greater than mere improvement. Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day’s words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part. That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, a barrier between me and a new idea. It is the end of the ideas that I already had when I came to the page—the exhaustion of narrative threads that were previously sewn into me by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity. It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false wall.

==========

Body Work (Melissa Febos)

[catilinas]

what is the caroline bird shipwreck poem you mentioned the other day?

it's called s.s. suppression and i thiiiiiink it's in the collection 'in these days of prohibition'

[aeide-thea]

it is, and the poem actually appears in full in the amazon sample!

[havingapoemwithyou]

Useless is as useless doesn’t by Bob Hicok

[ashstfu]

i feel totally normal about this and the scope of my desire is completely average

[patienz]

insie basement outsie yard glovely hands and glassy shard moonlight see you à plus tard doorknobstacle averted housey wealthy finerly majorly and minorly gemstone blink unshinerly thief pocketwise inserted diamond heavy tollbooth pay drawbridge lower all the way operator slept all day sneaky crawl blackshirted back to jail the nightly plotter bend the bars back where they oughter bedspread lift and tiptoe totter night watchman unalerted

[likesomethingelse]

untitled new year’s eve poem // ajc // january 1st, 2023

—

[text from image below]

the point of course being to let the new year catch you by surprise in a fever of whiskey and yellow light

pouring from recklessly open balcony doors into the frozen city dark,

a countdown hidden somewhere between phone calls and kisses and shouting out blessings to drunk singing strangers

to drown out the death rattle birthing cry with fortune so loud it rings all the way round the sun,

ushered past that frightful midnight impact as safely as dancing through your bedroom door

to wake from a dream of warm hands spilled drinks laughing eyes on gravel rooftops to find the new year like a fresh snow fallen around you while you slept, pristine and calling for you to run out into it no socks but shoes laced tight

[macrolit]

[tranz-josef]

Of the early 20th century modernist female Yiddish poets there are a few contenders but I do think celia dropkin would be the most likely to kill it on tumblr

[havingapoemwithyou]

Xenotransplantation by Sam Sax

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Me, picking at my wound: ow

Wound: what did you think would happen?

Me: I don't know. I didn't know. I wanted to find out.

Wound: well, this is what happens. You hurt and my work is done a little less.

Me: what work? Bleeding?

Wound: no, not-bleeding. You seem to misunderstand. I am not the violence. The violence is no longer in the body. My job is to be a wound - so that you won't bleed out on me - and then a scar, so that you can go on with your doing. I am not smooth skin, sure, but I am not the violence.

Me, suspicious: but you come from the violence. I remember. Perhaps if I dig in a little I will find the thing, the secret thing to pull out to heal all at once and to not even have the memory of violence, which is what you are.

Wound: what you'll find inside is just tired old flesh. There is nothing here but you. Even I is you. That's why you are the one hurt when you pick at my scabs. I am not telling you anything you do not know.

Me: but the knowing doesn't help.

Wound: yes.

Me: I am still unhappy with having a wound as opposed to not having a wound, even though I know that isn't the choice in front of me.

Wound: yes. You will just have to wait.

Me: for you to heal?

Wound: maybe, if I am a wound that heals all the way. I do not know. Perhaps you have to wait for my work to be as done as it gets and for the itch to stop. The itch, at the very least, will subside with time.

Me: okay.

Me: that sucks but, okay.

Me:

Me:

Me:

Me, picking at my wound: ow

Wound: what did you think would happen?

[kvothes]

richard siken’s new poem in the new yorker—at the link, you can hear him read it in full