I'm Alex, my main blog is @alex-bumble-bee. Like it says in my bio, I'm 21, I'm a butch lesbian, and I write poetry- lots of it is in reference to classic literature or mythology. I feel like I'm slowly growing a little community on here, and I couldn't be happier, so please reach out! I love getting asks and I love meeting new people <3
My linktree to find me on other platforms is here!
My Redbubble shop is here, if you'd like to get some merch :)
My Ko-Fi is here, if you'd like to support me directly (I only make 20% of what items actually cost on Redbubble).
You can find all of my poetry under #mine, all of my asks under #asks, and all of my thoughts and bloggings under #musings.
Under the cut is a sporadically-updated masterlist of my work, sorted in various ways, to help you find what you're looking for :)
forms
contrapuntal poems -> twenty years across the sea, this has to be enough, can i come home?, sister i, sister ii, the guardian and the searcher, my voice is in my sword, so soft it hurts, my brother, my brother
blackout poems (?) -> are you hungry (medea, alone), i have no words for this (macduff, a girl)
villanelles -> village girl's villanelle, elkha's villanelle
sonnets -> i am become
sestinas -> SESTINA FOR A HEALED WOUND
shakespeare
macbeth -> my voice is in my sword, so soft it hurts, i have no words for this (macduff, a girl), i am become, lady macbeth grants you an interview, there are three witches and they are teenage girls
king lear -> can i come home?, stages of a king waging war on his daughters, my brother, my brother, goneril leaves albany / albany's voicemail, edmund and edgar stagger home
hamlet -> horatio's epilogue, the daisies and the drowned, the grief of growing, horatio's beginning, nostos (for ophelia, a reckoning)
mythology
the odyssey -> twenty years across the sea
antigone -> antigone was right
house of atreus -> a house tour from electra
the trojans -> kassandra rates her pain on a scale from 1-10
medea -> this has to be enough, are you hungry? (medea, alone), medea and jason, july, love is led away, chastity (medea, for whom love has appetite), catch for us the foxes (medea and jason, at the beginning)
orpheus and eurydice -> eurydice comes home
dante's inferno -> francesca falls, singing, we read of lancelot, a sonnet for the bitten fruit
poems about
being a lesbian -> boyish girl, once a month, my main character is a teenage lesbian, i have no words for this (macduff, a girl), a sailor and a siren, in moonlight, breathing (hold, hold), SESTINA FOR A HEALED WOUND, apocrypha, thesmophoria (θεσμοφόρια), my father cuts my hair and i hope we look the same
faith -> apocrypha, a tutorial, aetiology
other stuff -> middle, what i was looking for, village girl's villanelle, tesselation, war of attrition, motherhood ismene, elkha's villanelle, autochthonous (adjective), heartburn (noun), i love you until i can't look at you, ouroboros, nineteen years old / two sprained ankles / full-time student, weighing my suitcase
Did you guys know that I'm the co-director of a theater company here in Portland? The group is called Thesmophoria, and this July/August we're putting on Suddenly Last Summer, an absolutely bonkers Tennessee Williams play.
I'd love to meet up with anyone who can attend! I can give you a hug or a fist-bump, and we can talk poetry or nerd stuff for a bit :)
Possibly my spiciest take is that it's actually good to have people you respect and like that have some dogshit takes.
I think part of what is making young people lonelier, in discussing why they're increasingly isolated, is that they're so afraid of meeting someone who doesn't hold their same beliefs, and instead of being just core beliefs it is kinda ancillary shit.
It's actually okay to disagree even on social topics! Even on some political ones! But I mean, online you can start with "i love this mutual but they have a really bad/uninformed opinion about x media"
I know this is IMMEDIATELY going to be taken in bad faith, and yes babygirl, you are so right, I DO want you to go make best friends with both the KKK grand wizard AND your nearest nazi leader.
But seriously, as someone who has spent two decades doing community organization: finding ways to connect with different people is so so so important. There are people i follow here who ate 80% smart and their brain falls out of their head 20% of the time and that is GOOD FOR MY MENTAL ECOSYSTEM AND GOOD FOR LEARNING HOW TO BE A PERSON
Okay as much as I dunk on academia one thing I really need you all to take from me right now is this: you can read The Problematic Theory Book. you should, fundamentally, always, read the fucking source. You do not have to approach the source context-less, but you should be prepared to read it and make a genuine attempt to comprehend what the argument is without resorting to performatively dunking on it (yes, I get a bit silly with it when I liveblog, but I do actually do my best to understand what's being said. I don't like it when queer theory is bad? I thought it was supposed to help people). If you can't make a genuine effort to comprehend the text, then if the text truly has bad takes, you won't be able to adequately argue against why Thing Bad besides "well thing bad!!" you need to be able to construct a fucking argument. You need to be able to create a framework your worldview is built on. You need clarity of mind.
Another thing ALSO alongside this is sometimes you will read The Problematic Theory Book and you will see things that you agree with. You will see analysis in there that has potential. This is actually super normal and something people do in academia is that they identify these nuggets of Actually Good / Potential Filled Takes and they try to expand upon them. Salvaging the potential of Problematic Theory Book does not mean that you implicitly agree with Problematic Theory Book in its original entirety. It means you saw someone going somewhere, saw them swerve into a fucking tree, and went to yourself, "okay, well, they were on the highway before this, so let me try and see if I can steer the car in the right direction. Let me see if I can try and use the work they laid the foundations for and build something actually revolutionary upon it, or otherwise use it for my own, better, more intentionally progressive and inclusive theory."
Like, that's actually one thing that academia does that is good. you have to be in conversation with past work and you have to be able to see when an author was saying some shit that had potential, and identify where they fucked up and where they might've had something, and then build on it. you can't reinvent Ur-Theory from base principles in a vacuum and expect it to be good. you can't create theory that is Morally Pure Only Based On Works You've Deemed Morally Pure because that too is a vacuum, and at that point you're treating theory and like, science, as a fucking religion. It's not a religion. You are not going to go to hell if Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin or bell hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw, like, breathe on you the wrong way. You can read people who you fully disagree with, understand that at some points they may have been cooking, understand that at other points they were Absolutely Not Fucking Cooking, and try to see what you can take from their work and how you can create something that is NOT a recreation of the original fucking thing but, like, your own new thing that attempts to address real world issues. stop being afraid of The Big Evil Bad Book or suggesting that people shouldn't fucking read books. read the fucking book. engage. be an academic about it, goddamnit.
also conversely stop treating some books like the bible,
This is very correct and actually generalizes outside political theories. The further back you go in any field, the more you're going to deal with the fact that the people who originally had a really clever, useful idea also had a bunch of ideas that were ass.
For instance, Isaac Newton basically laid the foundations of physics and also thought he was chosen by God to interpret prophecies from the Bible, and dedicated significant effort to this.
For some reason, learning about force and acceleration doesn't make people learning physics today scrounge the Book of Revelation for prophecies!
hi ! i got tumblr recently but i wanted to tell you that i saw your poem on macbeth and lady macbeth (so soft it hurts) a while back and it really stuck with me to the point where i was thinking about it during a lit exam where i wrote about their dynamic and consequently aced it. so. thank you it ate
I'm so proud of you that you aced your exam!! That's very exciting, and I'm glad I could help in any way :)
Hi there! I just wanted to say that your contrapuntal poetry really has inspired me to attempt writing similarly, too. I really love your writings, please keep writing ^.^
I'm doing my best! I'm so glad I've inspired you to write- keep it up :))
I wrote this poem somewhat inspired by your contrapuntal stuff. This is about two different kinds of hauntings 💔
This is fantastic!! I'd be shocked if this didn't do numbers on here. Tumblr poetry nerds love things in which people are compared or contrasted with animals- it's a whole niche.
I discovered you and your amazing poetry last year and it inspired me to start writing poetry as well. I've always had an urge to create something of own and reading your poetry really helped me with it. I have a few questions, if you don't mind answering them:
What do you do when you have the urge to write but nothing inspires you?
What books/authors/poets would you say have influenced your writing?
What made you post your poetry online? (I've been feeling really conflicted on whether i should share my works or not)
Will you ever publish a poetry collection?
Do you have any tips? (It can br about anything)
How are you in general? I feel like its been a while since you have posted and I hope you are doing well.
I would like to sincerely thank you for helping me discover what has now become my favourite hobby: writing poetry. I hope you never lose your spark and wish you all the best.
Hi there! I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my ability :)
What do you do when you have the urge to write but nothing inspires you? When this happens, I read. Granted, that's almost my answer to everything. I have a small collection of poems that just really light up my brain, and when I'm having trouble getting inspired I just open those up and scour them. Also, I have a running list of ideas/things to write about/ways to write them.
What books/authors/poets would you say have influenced your writing? So many!! Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Sophocles, Euripides, Mary Oliver, Anne Carson, Mary Karr, Sue Zhao, @boykeats, CT Salazar, Ocean Vuong, Naomi Shihab Nye, Safia Elhillo, Danusha Lameris, Ada Limón, Wendy Cope, Rhina Espaillat, to name several.
What made you post your poetry online? (I've been feeling really conflicted on whether i should share my works or not) I just really like hearing what people thing about my work, honestly, and that's one of the nice things about sharing it.
Will you ever publish a poetry collection? One day! I swear one day I will figure out how to do that. It would likely have to be self-published or some sort of small press thing.
Do you have any tips? (It can be about anything) Delete Instagram. Delete TikTok. Delete Twitter. Believe science when it says that social media makes your life worse. Also, try your best to have conversations with strangers, and be curious about their lives. I think learning about other people makes me a better writer.
How are you in general? I feel like its been a while since you have posted and I hope you are doing well. I'm doing okay! I'm touched that you've been thinking about me. In a week, I'm moving from Massachusetts back to Oregon, so I'm doing my best to fit everything I want to bring with me into two suitcases.
hello! what book/s do u recommend for beginners who aspire to be like you? i am not a book person, i dislike reading, but seeing your posts motivates me. it somehow makes me want to explore things. i apologize for my grammatical mistakes, i am still learning. ₍ᵔ•ᴗ•ᵔ₎
Hi there! It still baffles me that there are people out there who ~aspire to be like me~ at all, you know? I'm not sure whether you meant that you want to write like me, but that's typically the question I get.
My first bit of advice is always reading more. You've said that you dislike reading, though, which makes things a bit more difficult, but you seem to enjoy what I write (I'm honored), and I'd encourage you to think about why that is. If you can identify why I motivate you, you can begin to explore and find similar things!
If you have more questions, feel free to reach out :)
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
some verses from James 5 to keep in your heart this International Workers' Day and Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker <3
what do you do if you're ever writing contrapuntal poetry and it gets Really Long? i'm trying to write a poem, but it's gotten a bit too long for the page i'm doing it on and if i just line things up sideways it'll probably be read wrong....do you just add extra space in-between?
I've never actually had that problem? I format all of my contrapuntals in Canva, and if I run out of space on my canvas, I just copy all of the text, make a longer canvas, and paste it onto the second one!
I've seen your work around here for a while but was recently reminded of it when someone from my university Advanced Poetry Writing class wrote something in a similar style.
I left your url in my feedback notes for them, so maybe they may find some inspiration from you (and if I bring it up in class maybe some of the others will too).
Just wanted to let you know, thought maybe you'd think its cool to know your reach offline :)
I love it whenever people tell me what they've done with my stuff offline!
I haven't been on here as much recently, partly because I haven't written anything in ages, but also because I've deleted a bajillion apps off of my phone. I have ~a week of school left, and when I get back home I'm planning on getting a flip phone. It's going to be a bit of a life adjustment, but I'm looking forward to it- I'm just really sick of Apple and Google and co. coming up with new ways to make our phones even more addictive. It pisses me off, and I want out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's 8:30pm on April 25th right now, and I turn twenty-two tomorrow, which is totally wild.
I haven't written anything in ages, because school is keeping me super busy, but after May 12th I'll be heading back home, and I hope I'll have more time <3
