January talking meme: why poetry means so much
Enjoyable problems to have: between adding more threads, replying to threads, and trying to keep the list of threads remotely up to date, I am sort of drowning in love meme. YOU GUYS ROCK.
But! I am still attempting to catch up on the January talking meme, writcraft wanted me to talk about poetry and why it means so much.
Now, I think ultimately I’m a prose girl, but it’s true there are poems and lines of poetry that mean so fucking much to me, that can make me breathless. This reasoning I think is maybe very idiosyncratic? But to me, poetry means so much because there’s something about the form that just… cuts straight to the heart of an emotion, a moment, of what lies beneath a myth or story and makes it powerful.
It’s like… a climactic scene in a book, a moment of intensity or emotion or just a line that stays with you - they kind of have to be more earned. If a book goes straight into intense drama (or a play, or TV programme, or film, for that matter) it feels like it’s cheating and the emotion doesn’t land, for me anyway. 500 words of prose couldn’t make “stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold” or “she doesn’t read books. She devours them, like a little wolf” or “go then, there are other worlds than these” stay with me forever. I needed the context, all the other thousands of words around those words. It’s true even with fanfiction - because of course there are lines from fanfiction that have stayed with me - even though fanfiction often does take a lot of its starting emotion impact and energy from canon rather than its own text, like spacecraft that takes extra energy from a gravitational field in its slingshot round the moon, before it flies on through space. But poetry is a different form of storytelling and it does work. And it’s amazing to me, how a few minutes of spoken word or a few lines of poetry just crash into me that way.
I really did love you, I just couldn’t claw my way out of the ground to do it properly
To be frank, I knew you’d never make it.
Yet how my heart felt pierced with a sword
when your lovely body drowned. O my rebel son.
To be a slave is bad enough, but I refuse to be
A flunkey’s flunkey, Maximus. My master must be free.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?
Be well, be safe, be wise. There's nothing more.
when I see
de rainbow
so full of glow
and curving
like she bearing child
I does want know
if God
ain’t a woman
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Inhabit the splendid risk of flesh and bone.
This was originally posted at http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/286721.html. Comment wherever you like :)
But! I am still attempting to catch up on the January talking meme, writcraft wanted me to talk about poetry and why it means so much.
Now, I think ultimately I’m a prose girl, but it’s true there are poems and lines of poetry that mean so fucking much to me, that can make me breathless. This reasoning I think is maybe very idiosyncratic? But to me, poetry means so much because there’s something about the form that just… cuts straight to the heart of an emotion, a moment, of what lies beneath a myth or story and makes it powerful.
It’s like… a climactic scene in a book, a moment of intensity or emotion or just a line that stays with you - they kind of have to be more earned. If a book goes straight into intense drama (or a play, or TV programme, or film, for that matter) it feels like it’s cheating and the emotion doesn’t land, for me anyway. 500 words of prose couldn’t make “stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold” or “she doesn’t read books. She devours them, like a little wolf” or “go then, there are other worlds than these” stay with me forever. I needed the context, all the other thousands of words around those words. It’s true even with fanfiction - because of course there are lines from fanfiction that have stayed with me - even though fanfiction often does take a lot of its starting emotion impact and energy from canon rather than its own text, like spacecraft that takes extra energy from a gravitational field in its slingshot round the moon, before it flies on through space. But poetry is a different form of storytelling and it does work. And it’s amazing to me, how a few minutes of spoken word or a few lines of poetry just crash into me that way.
I really did love you, I just couldn’t claw my way out of the ground to do it properly
To be frank, I knew you’d never make it.
Yet how my heart felt pierced with a sword
when your lovely body drowned. O my rebel son.
To be a slave is bad enough, but I refuse to be
A flunkey’s flunkey, Maximus. My master must be free.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?
Be well, be safe, be wise. There's nothing more.
when I see
de rainbow
so full of glow
and curving
like she bearing child
I does want know
if God
ain’t a woman
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Inhabit the splendid risk of flesh and bone.
This was originally posted at http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/286721.html. Comment wherever you like :)