Iron Gwazi
memorized a poem, without a copy of the poem present. i felt it was time to be that kind of guy. it was challenging because i am bad at memorizing things and the structure and grammar of this poem are strange. and also i did not have the poem on hand. i went back later to check my mistakes. i used memorization strategies i learned in the acting class i took my last semester of college. the poem from memory:
Me up at does
out of the floor
quietly Stare
a poisoned mouse
still who alive
is asking What
have i done that
You wouldn’t have
i checked and my only mistake is the grouping of the last couple stanzas (yay!). discovering memorizing a poem really makes you think through Why the poet made each decision and their impacts and reverberations and ways in which they pet your fur backwards and why and so on. i think i recommend trying it? i get why people do it, anyhow.
from here i’d like to get better at actually reciting this poem; i still have to stop and think about most of the lines. in addition to now being the kind of person that memorizes poems i am also now the kind of person who Has a favorite poem (Me up at does). and i think poet (ee cummings… i’ll get back to that i need to know more about him first)? for now. if you’re reading this whole paragraph i am rewarding you with this nugget. got into poetry recently because of a magnus archives fanfic, obviously. the one with a bibliography. it’s good. shoutout ao3 user supaslim. continuing on. i am woefully unversed in poetry. which is odd because i use elements of it constantly in every other narrative work i make, i just don’t actually… idk — Didn’t actually.
it’s a perfectionist thing. to me a poem has so much potential and so li… idk. i’ve only touched haikus because they are short and Ruled enough that i can almost feel okay enough writing them. ish. there is so much history to know and respect and theory and etc. we’ll touch on this issue later during Cheetah Hunt.
Serengeti Flyer
quietly admired the clearly queer teens behind me in line. And read your blogs! Listened to your music (delightful) and read your short stories and poems and rambles and got over invested in Elvis Presley’s pet cloud and went on the ride —
Congo River Rapids
— and continued reading blog posts and decided I desperately need to read Sarah Schulman’s work. I browsed JSTOR and landed on “Israel/Palestine and the Queer International” (https://doi.org/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.2019.0139) which is freely available, BECAUSE it was a transcript of a conversation she had on a public radio station based in Wisconsin which is available online (https://www.wortfm.org/israelpalestine-and-the-queer-international/).
Montu
At this point I started listening to the recording (and opened a pack of cards in Pokémon TCGP). As promised by one Lunchbox’s blogposts, she is excellent at intertwining experience, history, and theory, which is my kind of shit. The conversation’s excellent; I won’t summarize it here. I mentally dog-eared the sentiment that white suburban queers are willing to sacrifice freedom for comfort. Lancing.
Cheetah Run
(won a few solo pvp pokémon battles while) Continuing on with the recording, she talked about the effect of bringing suburban folks into the urban art scene which made me go Oh. (forgive how much i’m about to oversimplify and go listen to it yourself) She described the art scene before the migration of suburban folks to the city — people who weren’t well off, people who had fled from religious and sexual persecution, artists seeking to immerse themselves in a scene full of all types of people blending their ideas. She described well-off suburban folk flooding in, filling the art scene with academia and artistic cannons and homogenized ideas of the way art should be and… the things that rule my own pursuits and strangle me out of ever completing something.
I’ve heard an idea that an artist’s best works are made before they’re 30. I think it’s the sweet spot before you get too entrenched in the way things ought to be and focus more on the act and pleasure of creating. It’s easy for a child to make something and grows harder as we add rules and…
I struggle to complete anything. I have Everything Is Rules disorder, and it engulfs every project I take on. Always. I write this on my phone in the notes app because it is one of the few ways I’ve found that I can force myself to make something without nitpicking and considering the way it fits into the broader world of art and styles and genre and form and all of the things and all that I dwell on all of the time and apparently now memorize and
SheiKra
Listened to the kids behind me in line. Two of them, siblings. Probably 10 and 12. They played 20 questions, guessing movies. I had trouble understanding what they were saying and wasn’t watching the nods and shakes of their heads but I silently tried to play along. They asked “Is it fantasy?” “Is it a Disney princess movie?” “Is it an Avengers movie?” “Did we see it in theaters?” “Is it one of my favorite movies?” “Is it one of your favorite movies?”
I couldn’t hear them when they revealed the movies.
I watched them pluck grass and tie knots in it and braid it and put it on each others’ heads and show each other how to make what they’d just made.
I never made it to the front of the line. I got a text saying I had to meet my family at the gate of the park, had to go now. I tried to make myself uncomfortable, tried to push back and be allowed to go on the ride, wait in line with those kids. I was flooded with texts until I climbed my way out of line. I put my phone on airplane mode and walked back to the car silently.
Comments
Post a Comment