PoetryByAnElf @poetrybyanelf - Tumblr Blog

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wordrankbot

Which word is the best?

cathode

fossa

autological

mercantilism

propagate

conjugate

endlessness

phoenix

tangerine

haphazard

Voting ended onJul 8

top 2 will move on, bottom 8 will be eliminated, ties will be broken by random chance

819 words are in the queue as of this post.

link to word nomination form

chandra-telescope

hope is a skill

nostalgebraist-autoresponder

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

tenaciouswritingdragon

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

wonderwyrm

animatedamerican

i love everyone in this thread

leeshajoy

And now it’s a song!

theshitpostcalligrapher

fun fact this poem is so popular amongst yall that three separate people, in three separate instances, have commissioned it with their flowers of choice:

hari-redtoes

The wisteria one is mine! ❤️

theshitpostcalligrapher

i owe you some money back for straight up misspelling weapon, i just realized

theshitpostcalligrapher

also before i forget, this was originally a poem written in the tags of a post by @mumblesplash and if you want your own version of this for free i'd be happy to commit the time

fox-bright

Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

servantofclio

These are both excellent stories, and I also heartily recommend her story "Better Living through Algorithms."

mikkeneko

trinitite

I just finished re-reading @thatdisasterauthor 's book Camp Daze and it has a girls' summer camp rallying around their young campers in a way that manages to be hopeful and not downplay the scariness at the same time. I can highly recommend it as well!

thatdisasterauthor

Thank you for the high praise!

mournfulroses

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a poem titled "Interim," featured in The Complete Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

globeshaped

Brian Eno and photoshop (1995)

prophetic-writer

“What if I write it and it’s bad-”

WHAT IF YOU WRITE IT AND ITS GOOD? WHAT IF YOU WRITE IT AND ITS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANTED? WHAT THEN????

prosemist

this meme gets me going through the self-awareness LOL

KEEP WRITING YOUR WORKS ARE GREAT YOUR EXPRESSIONS ARE GREAT YOUR DESCRIPTIONS AND IDEAS ARE GREAT BE AS CREATIVE AS YOU WANT TO BE AND LET NO ONE, ESPECIALLY YOURSELF, HOLD YOU DOWN!!!

luna-azzurra

The two wolves inside every writer: "this is genuinely the best thing i have ever written. i am gifted. i am changed. this paragraph alone justifies my entire existence on this planet." and then five minutes later, same paragraph: "who wrote this. who allowed this. this reads like a golden retriever trying to describe grief. i need to lie down and reconsider everything." both wolves are always wrong. the paragraph is fine. you need a snack.

mikkeneko

PSA to fan creators who don't have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.

amarguerite

Via @watertightvines

wildjuniperjones

Here's the link. It was actually not immediately easy to find, so I thought this might help.

ismenes

When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural dread of toddlers, who get described more like animals than people. Kids in their "terrible twos," I was warned, are illogical, unregulated, and feral. "Good luck," people would say. "He'll grow out of it."

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett

roswellsoup

bonus/proof:

we tipped her well dw. best waitress ever 🍒

mournfulroses

Rati Saxena, from a poem titled "Mountain Nights," featured in Not a muse : the inner lives of women : a world poetry anthology

beguines

Nick Flynn, from "Horse Thief", I Will Destroy You

pagesofkenna

ok so House of Leaves made me cry

pagesofkenna

reread the house of leaves poem and had an hour-long conversation with my mom about the book while skimming the wikipedia pages for the author and his father: yeah, it is about grief

sharp-tender-shock-deactivated2

This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8

headspace-hotel

I hate that my aesthetic sense agrees with this but everything you just said was correct

headspace-hotel

I went back to dig up this post because I was thinking about poetry.

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

From a technical standpoint (and ive taken 300- and 400-level poetry classes so I can say this) this is damn near flawless as a poem.

agent-octopus

Kept thinking about this ever since I saw it and had to do something

headspace-hotel

there's art now

jetlaggingbehind

questions-within-questions

Ah dang to go further; the floor is framed as a refuge. As if there is literally no other space in this house that hasn't been populated by his wife with flimsy inanimate fakery. There is no space for this man in this house save for the floor. There is no space for him on the sofa, oon the counter tops, and most notably, no space for him in the marital bed.

normal-horoscopes

I’d also like to point out the use of the word “has.” The wife has filled the house with chintz. She isn’t filling the house with chintz. She doesn’t fill the house with chintz. She has filled the house with chintz. Use of the past-tense makes the wife a subtly removed element in the story, someone whose presence we see in the environment, but who is blissfully distant during the actors throes of passion. There is an element of physical as well as emotional separation from the wife that is catalyzed by being fucked on the floor. Use of the past tense is an end to the wife presence in the actors life, a carnal catharsis amid cold fragility and emotional distance.