put down the world, soldier mine.
your body is strong, i know, but you are not granite.
your shoulders were not made to bend so steep.
your knees were not made to buckle so low.
your bones were not made to hold so much.
Atlas was a condemnation,
not a guidebook on how to bear the weight of the world.
rest your wings, soldier mine.
you were made to fly, i know, but not like this.
the sun above is not meant to be your seduction.
the ocean below is not meant to be your enemy.
the jetstream is not meant to be your companion.
Icarus was a warning,
not a challenge to see how high you can soar.
lay down your weapons, soldier mine.
you fight so well, i know, but not every battle is yours.
your fists are not damned to be perpetual weapons.
your scars are not damned to mark you in disgrace.
your blood is not damned to spill upon a sword.
Achilles was a cautionary tale,
not an instruction manual on how to fight to your death.
soldier mine,
you are not Atlas
nor Icarus
nor Achilles.
you are only you, soldier mine,
and i am only yours,
and we are only this
here
now.
- by sylvie (j.p.)
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For those who engage w/ poetry and poetics in the face of injustice, a new issue of Exceptional Poetry, which I write as associate editor of Frontier Poetry, is out, with some space for Palestinian poetics and other entries related to power, violence, and epistemic in/justice.
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thinking a lot about how fatal flaws are misconstrued as being moral failings when actually hamartia is a moral neutral.
the best kind of fatal flaw, in my opinion, is one that’s both a character’s greatest strength and biggest weakness at the same time. it needs to be their biggest weakness intertwined like vines with what makes them admirable. it’s their very virtues that bring them to ruin!!! it’s something they can be lauded for that spells their death!!
it’s macbeth’s ambition. it’s oedipus’s loyalty to his state and unending thirst for truth and justice. it’s hamlet’s obsessive contemplation and wish to make sure his every decision is the right one. it’s being loyal to the point of blindness or confident to the point of hubris.
in any other story they could succeed because of these traits, but they aren’t in any other story, and in theirs it’s exactly what damns them.
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Triolet Poem #62
Some will still bite the hand that feeds,
yet they will still beg you for more.
More flames are all a fire needs.
Some will still bite the hand that feeds.
Follow the light, see where it leads,
we don't need reasons to lie for.
Some will still bite the hand that feeds,
yet they will still beg you for more.
"The Hand That Feeds", JEP
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i love those lines where ancient poets were like "i wonder how much alliteration i can put in before it starts sounding like nonsense"
ἔσωσά σ᾿, ὡς ἴσασιν Ἑλλήνων ὅσοι (Euripides, Medea line 476)
Ō Tite tūte Tatī, tibi tanta tyranne tulistī (Ennius, Annales frag. 104)
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Alejandra Pizarnik on gardens and desire:
"One of the sentences I'm most haunted by is spoken by the little girl Alice in Wonderland: "I only came to see the garden". For Alice, and for myself, the garden is the space of encounter, or as Mircea Eliade put it, "the center of the world". The garden is green in the brain. A sentence of my own, which brings me to another one by Gaston Bachelard, which I hope I remember correctly: "The garden of dream-memory, lost in an after-life of the true past". [...] Proust analyzing desire, says that desire doesn't want to be analyzed but satisfied. In other words, I don't want to talk about the garden, I want to see it. Of course, what I'm saying is still puerile since, in this life, we never do what we want to. Which is another reason to want to see the garden, even if it is impossible, especially if it is impossible."
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And so I read everything that brought me agony, and then I called them all my comfort books.
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:-!
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I have cute pride poetics tomestones as stickers! Just don't give them to Rowena. 💖✨
You can get them here!
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I buried that little girl I used to be in my garden
beside Jesus and my mother
She laid under marigolds
They salted the ground above them
I don’t think I’ll plant there anymore
When spring comes
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someone once told me
there is no demon more frightening
than a good man
who has gone to war.
someone once told me
the only things we get to choose
are a hero's death
or a villain's life.
so they said.
so they said.
so they say.
but no one ever told me
what happens when a good man
goes to war
and becomes the demon.
but no one ever told me
you can die a hero
and be resurrected
to a villain's afterlife.
- by sylvie (j.p.)
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Not a haiku, but fun nonetheless. "Always, ALWAYS up at 6. I can't stand this woman."
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All poetry is goth, but some poems are more goth than others. And by “goth,” I mean totally unsparing of the twin wildnesses of love and death.
—Anne Boyer, from her description of the Diane Seuss poem “[All things now remind me]”
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Triolet Poem # 61
Looks like I'm off the hook, scott-free.
Who will notice when I am gone?
In the night, I will gladly flee.
Looks like I'm off the hook, scott-free.
You'll lose me the way you got me,
With all that brain and all that brawn.
Looks like I'm off the hook, scott-free.
Who will notice when I am gone?
"Off The Hook", JEP
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new kind of found poetry where you pretend that a series of unconnected lines in a linguistics book are all part of the same poem
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It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against...everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using. I try to maintain no continuous restrictions in my poetics except with regard to particular works, since writing at all means making some sort of choices. But NO DOCTRINES. Rather I tend to maintain a sense that a particular form or set of rules at a certain point might serve me for a while. Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don't work, I know they aren't it. I don't in the least feel that everything is language. I have a sense that there has been language from the beginning, that it isn't fundamentally an invention. These are contradictory positions but positions are just words. I don't believe that the best poems are just words, I think they're the same as reality; I tend to think reality is poetry, and that it isn't words. But words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we're in all the time. I think words are among us and everywhere else, mingling, fusing with, backing off from us and everything else.
Alice Notley, from “The Poetics of Disobedience”
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