poetree

I owe

jjhunter a lot for how this poem turned out in the end. My initial idea for remixing Sappho Fragment 16 was to translate (more in the sense of 'moving sideways' than in the sense involving multiple languages) the concepts into a poetic form to which English is better suited. In a way, that's what I did in the end. The images of armies and Helen are Sappho's, but Sappho was writing about her conception of beauty, speaking as a queer woman of Lesbos millennia ago, and I am here writing of mine, speaking as a queer woman of today's USA.

The meter is not Sapphic, more's the pity, but, uh, Wiki 'Sapphic stanza' and scroll down to the poems by Lee and Tranter. Someday I'll write a true Sapphic poem in English; this is not that day. Anyway, English iambic pentameter is eminently suited to describing beauty, as any student of Shakespeare knows.

I present:

( Anaktoria )

elisabethhewer

Hello again! First of all I apologise hugely for having been absent during the course of the week so far - all of the social duties I had seemed to deliberately drag themselves out so I had no time to post! As soon as I'm done with this post I'm going to go back and finish replying to all of your lovely comments on my first post.

So with this post, if you all don't mind, I'm going to share a couple of my poems that I put under my general sort of "love and the despair it causes" umbrella. The first is one of my oldest poems (that I dare show to the light of day!) that prompted a fairly positive reaction when I posted it on tumblr which gets borrowed every now and again to go on graphics concerning James T. Kirk (from the rebooted Star Trek mostly) and Enjolras from Les Misérables, and although I never actually intended it to be about either of those two I'm very flattered that people think it applies enough to have a creative reaction of their own to it. The second is one of my newer ones which was prompted for some very strange reason by listening to Crack the Shutters by Snow Patrol, and I couldn't tell you why exactly I'm afraid!

Anyway, I'm going to place them both under cuts, and I would really appreciate your thoughts on and reactions to either or both of them! I struggle most with flow and line breaks (I can never decide where to put them); but apart from that I would be very interested to hear what feelings you take away from them, as I'm curious to know whether the message I intended actually comes across. Thank you very much in advance for reading them!

( the boy i love left me for a revolution )

( Modern Geography )

raze

Introduction
Poetry is, to many, a medium of love. What springs to mind are Shakespearean sonnets and awkward limericks in Valentine's day cards and how to impress your 7th-grade crush. ( Read on... )

Friendship as Intimacy
Romantic love may be passionate and exciting and able to sweep you off your feet... but friendship will always be there to buy you ice cream and say, you were too good for him/her, anyway - and it won't say, I told you so even though it probably did. ( Read on... )

Featured Poem: An Origin Story
Project V.O.I.C.E. founders Phil Kaye & Sarah Kay are two friends who found each other through a mutual gift for poetry, storytelling, and the spoken word. ( Listen & Read, plus things to pay attention to )

Optional Challenge
Is there a special friend in your life who you feel you need to say something to or about after reading/listening? Take this opportunity to write a poem of any format for or about them and share it in the comments. I'll share a silly little Haiku below, and will post a longer poem in the comments to get the ball rolling.

( A friendship poem by yours truly )

Additional Reading
The Vinegar Club by Andrea Gibson
Love and Friendship by Emily Brontë
Helen Steiner Rice also wrote a number of poems about friendship, which you can find together in a collection here.

kaberett

One: I am trans and I am disabled. For me, intimacy often has physical aspects:

lightgetsin wrote an excellent essay on some of these intersections, last year, entitled Do I Do It For You? Service kink and disability, on some of the ways in which disability can encourage or compel physical - and emotional - intimacy.

Two: when we talk about intimacy, about trust, we often frame it in terms of the physical. In terms of romance, yes: we fall in and out of love, and making that fall physical is only a little stretch; but also in terms of closeness, as Simon Armitage's Homecoming: Think, two things on their own and both at once/The first, that exercise in trust, where those in front/stand with their arms spread wide and free-fall/backwards, blind, and those behind take all the weight...

These are my two things, each on their own and both at once. These are what I carry with me when I offer you this poem.

For more about this poem - in origin terms - please see Gabe Moses' website, and his reading of the poem.

( How To Make Love To A Trans Person, Gabe Moses [explicit; detailed discussion of surgery] )

jjhunter

Society members by code numbers: 9 – ardyforshort; 16 – fyreharper; 24 – J.J. the Pointed Verse of Reasoned Debate; 28 – firecat; 29 – untonuggan; 34 – okrablossom; 35 – Pau Amma; 40 – bookblather; and 41 – primeideal.

"There's something intimate about secrecy. When someone glances about and lowers their voice, you instinctively lean in. Whatever it is that the two of you discuss, your soft-voiced conversation creates a illusion of a private space, one set apart from the crowded world outside.

"Let's create such a space here [...]" Thus begins the Covert Collaboration Challenge, "a little experiment in secrecy as a recipe for intimacy". Over the course of a week, myself and my eight fellow Society members wrote two original sonnets; the majority of the lines in each were written with only one to two preceding lines for reference, and in the case of the second sonnet, the prompt ("spontaneous musicals, or What if life was more like theater?'").

==

METAMORPHIC UNDERSTANDING

( full text of the 'Shakespearean' sonnet behind the cut )

==

HELLO, TROLLEY

( full text of the 'loose Petrarchean' sonnet behind the cut )

===
All are welcome to comment and discuss. Society members, was this experiment successful in fostering intimacy? Do you have any favorite exchanges or quotes you'd like to share from our Top Secret discussion threads?

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Entries tagged with theme: intimacy

advancing Sappho into the English-speaking modern day

elisabeth hewer: "the boy i love left me for a revolution" and "modern geography"

How Rare This Is - Friendship, Intimacy, and Poetry

Exploration of a poem: How To Make Love To A Trans Person

the Secret Society of Stealthy Sonneteers

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