P | 30s | NB | Primarily reposting to @southernerd & @boowho
680 posts
Panella - Pondering, Always Pondering - Tumblr Blog
New York City ballet production of Midsummer Nights Dream
something i have always found really weird is when english texts italicize words from other languages.
i remember reading a book as a kid and the author continually italicizing the word tamales
thinking about the time when movie posters and book covers had detailed original paintings made for them compared to what we have now
thinking about desire paths
— Lullaby for Myself, Vahan Teryan
[text ID: Finally it's dark, / a peaceful night. / The stars telegraph: / Nothing lasts but light.]
thank you to walt peregoy for making scooby doo where are you! even more memorable as a child
Bog Trail by Shane Garlock
He was so pleased with the garden that season.
hadal ‘love language' robe
Embroidered onto the sleeve is an Arabic love poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. It reads: قالوا: تموت بها حبـاًً، فقلـت لهـم ألا اذكروها علـى قبـري فتحيينـي English translation: They asked “Do you love her to death?” I said “Speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life.” All proceeds from Hadal’s ‘Love Language’ pieces will be donated to Palestinian aid organisations.
In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”
i say i like tragedies and everyone’s all like ‘why do you like sad stories? are you depressed?’ and never ‘how was the catharsis? was the catharsis fun?’
