Comments | ysabetwordsmith: Poetry Fishbowl Open!

ysabetwordsmith

Poetry Fishbowl Open!

Oct 13, 2009 12:14

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems ( Read more... )

horror, writing, fishbowl, poetry, cyberfunded creativity

Comments 68

miintikwa October 13 2009, 17:35:47 UTC

Bake-neko
kitsune

nekomata October 13 2009, 17:44:32 UTC

Ah, you beat me to it! Bakeneko / Nekomata would definitely make my day! Nekomata, in some stories, can re-animate the dead which fits in nicely with the horror aspect. They're not as well known as kitsune, it seems.

Skin walkers are also always interesting, as are creatures that rely on an item to change, like selkie.

i_id October 13 2009, 17:46:42 UTC

Which is what I was going to suggest. Selkies, and the men who take their skins.

nekomata October 13 2009, 18:12:05 UTC

Selkie vengeance would be great theme!

Thread 20

valdary October 13 2009, 18:00:42 UTC

The girl who was "hare shotten" (had a hare lip) and thus suspected of being a witch who could take shape of hare but when hare was wounded, the matching wound turned up on somebody quite unexpected.

Not sure if that is "horror" enough but the most traditional British shape shifter I could think of.

Poem ysabetwordsmith October 13 2009, 21:29:43 UTC

From this I got the poem "Hareshotten," which is written in unrhymed, unmetered quatrains. It draws on the mythical properties of the harebell flower. Now why would an ordinary girl want to turn herself into a hare? I actually didn't think of that question, and so was surprised by the twist at the end. This poem is definitely tragedy rather than horror, though.

36 lines, Buy It Now = $15

Re: Poem valdary October 13 2009, 21:34:53 UTC

Cool,

Have you ever read Precious Bane by Mary Webb?
The heroine has to deal with that prejudice, I live about 30 miles from where the story is set and know some of the places, though they are a lot less isolated nowadays.

Re: Poem ysabetwordsmith October 14 2009, 01:39:18 UTC

No, I haven't read that book, but it did come up in my search.

dulcinbradbury October 13 2009, 18:03:44 UTC

Do Gods count? Zeus had a lot of forms.

Poem ysabetwordsmith October 13 2009, 21:40:46 UTC

This one turned into humor rather than horror. "Olympian Proportions" is a free-verse poem about Zeus' marital problems. Don't worry, it happens to a lot of gods.

15 lines, Buy It Now = $10

janetmiles October 13 2009, 18:21:15 UTC

How about inorganic shapeshifters like Transformers (tm)?

siege October 13 2009, 19:57:18 UTC

I once wrote a character description based on what I thought would frighten a Transformer. No obvious armor plating, a third eye in the forehead (with extreme visual frequency range), ropy cabling woven through and around a skeletal-looking robotic framework, an apparently exposed motor, a split jaw with no mask, and an asymmetric tranformation (from a hover-cycle that looked like a motorcycle with horizontal wheels to a flying robot with turbofans on the back) because I noticed that nearly all Transformers have a symmetric transformation. There was more to it, but that's the basics.

O_O ysabetwordsmith October 14 2009, 02:29:55 UTC

I put this together with the prompt from siege:

"I once wrote a character description based on what I thought would frighten a Transformer."

and the one that wyld_dandelyon relayed from her niece:

"a creature out of the nightmare world"

The result is "The Transformations of Terror," a free-verse poem about technological lifeforms who can take on many different shapes. But they're all afraid to become starships, because something horrible is waiting for them in hyperspace. This poem draws on the ooky aspects of the horror field, with a nod to the Cthulhu Mythos, but the framework is still science fiction.

84 lines, Buy It Now = $42

Re: O_O wyld_dandelyon October 15 2009, 04:34:59 UTC

My niece said this poem is "Really Awesome".

Comment duplicated here because I didn't see where the poem was listed earlier.

Thread 5

wolfbrotherjoe October 13 2009, 18:25:08 UTC

What a wonderful idea. I might gestalt off this idea to repeat an old Nanowrimo idea...

As for my suggestion to you: Do something regarding 'hunters' of shapeshifters who are from National Geographic, shooting pictures instead of bullets.

Poem ysabetwordsmith October 14 2009, 07:23:42 UTC

From your "National Geographic" prompt, I got the free-verse poem "Shooting the Werewolf." The plot is basically what you just described.

24 lines, Buy It Now = $10