here we go, i guess...

anyway thank you for making the mango poem even more good

I am so glad it brought you joy! More extended notes on my translation process can be found here if you're interested.For pretty much all of Amir Khusrau's keh mukarni, I too like to imagine them as two gals having tea together, laughing their heads off after each ridiculous poem and egging each other on to top the ridiculousness with the next one.

And I just read that post you linked me to, but like, just light processing. I read fast and process things I actually want to know about fairly slowly, if that makes sense. But I will get back to it, and I also looked up Amir Khusrau, and again - scanned a little bit, not fully mentally processing. I did look at the "quick facts" and under "genres" there was ghazal! I shouted GHAZAL! to myself in delight. I so very vaguely remember the poem form, but I remember that I had to write one of them for my creative writing class like 14 years ago and enjoyed doing so. In reading just the wiki article , I don't think I truly "got" what a ghazal was supposed to be, but hey, I was like. 16-17, soooooo.......I didn't "get" everything. Honestly, can't blame a kid for trying.

I wonder if I have that ghazal written down somewhere. If I do, I think I have an idea of what notebook it would be in. Hmnn.

Anyway!

I fully agree. Never too many mango poems. Here she is!

I wrote it..... like 8 years ago? And honest to goodness, I still, to this day, would not change a single thing about this poem. It exactly, perfectly, completely captures how I feel not just about mangoes, but summertime in chicago, and summertime in chicago in my particular apartment, and my mental state.

I think some of the best poetry is incredibly specific to oneself.

Unspecific metaphors get you nowhere, but when you dig down and flick away any shame or fear or paranoia of just being seen, known, looked at. Then you can get the good shit.

Instead of "i'm so honored to be a part of this", it's

"this makes me feel like when I was a little kid climbing the magnolia tree that was next door to us. It makes me feel like the day I finally felt the stretch and scramble to get to the higher branches, the way I fit my feet into the stub of that branch, there, just there, a little bit more.

Oops, I slipped, my knee is bleeding a little but i'm hanging on with both hands.

And there. I am as high up as any of the other neighborhood kids.

But wait.

There is somewhere else to go. Higher branches. The little bendy ones you have to be careful about.

I can sit on the highest branch amongst purple magnolia petals, reading a book and ibserving my block."

THAT.

That feels a lot better and more interesting to say than "I feel incredibly honored to be invited to your wedding."

I don't know your personal poetry preferences (unintential alliteration) but if you have not already seen, I think you would like the movies Louder Than A Bomb, and Come See Me In The Good Light.

How do you feel aboit e e cummings? If you hate him can I convince you to like him? I have a line of his tattoed on me, but in a way that's like, special, private, if you know you know.

Do you like Rainer Maria Rilke? Who's your favorite poet of all time? How do youbfeel about slam poetry, in general? (please don't say you completely hate it- it has so many problems but slam poetry got me through a lot of bad stuff in my life, and introduced me to poetry in general, and has made me a better person) What do you think about the robert frost poem stopping ny the woods on a snowy evening? I don't like the whole poem itself. But there is a lot of argument about the last stanza. Should be "the woods are lovely: dark and deep" or should it be "the woods are lovely, dark and deep". Am I annoying you? Probably, but if a god exists they put me on this earth to mostly be nice to people and annoy some people too sometimes. What poetic forms do you like, or are you more or a freeform poetry person? I'm more a freeform/slam, but actuallt I kinda like the challenge that forms of poetry give to me. Do write poetry or just read? Since you translate, have you read the essay To Speak Is To Blunder? I can't really relate because I am very monolingual. But it was such a good read.

I've been saying "sorry, not sorry" to a lot of people lately just for like. texting them. And I don't think it's nice to myself. So for me asking you all these questions, I think a more kind thing to say is:

I certainly don't hate e e cummings! I'd say he appealed more to my younger self than my current self, but I'm grateful to have had his words at that point in my life, and I still return to them from time to time. I like much of what I've read of Rilke's stuff as well, though German is not a language I speak or read, so I can't answer for what I'd think of him in the original.

I tend less to have favorite poets than favorite poems, which are often tied to specific moments or states of mind in my life. (I date my life by what I was reading at the time — a camphor-mothball-scented paperback of Robin McKinley's "The Hero and the Crown" the summer I was 10 and at my grandparents' with nothing much to do, Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death" the spring of my first year of college when I was falling headlong in love with my friend and realizing I was queer, Octavia Butler's "Kindred" in the interstices of the most demanding job I've ever worked, Audre Lorde's "The Black Unicorn" in the summer and fall of 2020 every time another of my clients died or dropped out of contact.) But a few whose work I return to often include Gwendolyn Brooks, W.H. Auden, Jamila Woods, Pablo Neruda, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

As to Frost I've always preferred "Reluctance" over "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," and I don't have a strong opinion on whether it's supposed to be a colon vs. a comma in the final stanza, but I personally am partial to the colon version.

I like free verse but tend to find it's harder to do well than metered verse; much of what I love about poetry has to do with how it lands on the ear, and the constraints of rhyme and meter can force a certain precision of image, within a frame of musicality, that all but the best free verse struggles to match. I write original poetry occasionally, but rarely to share.

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

"GIRRRRLLLLL" in fairness is probably a more correct translation of "sakhi" here and one I did consider — or at least I have a draft with "gurrrl" — but in the end I went with "bitch" because (a) read out loud, it felt like it broke up the meter less, and (b) a very good friend of mine regularly calls me "bitch" and means something close to "sakhi," so this one's for them.* But I would love to see other translations making other choices!

apologies @daemags day, i misread the date and am afraid i have nothing bespoke to offer, only this cropped WIP section from a much larger 20-person mereth aderthad classical painting i’ve been chipping slowly away at for a couple months now!

this section shows daeron and maglor judging each other’s poetry: maglor’s parchment reads ‘how much poetry can you even write about being a cuck’ as a placeholder but will be replaced with something equally bitchy but more timeline-accurate. daeron’s own notes will read ‘the noldolantë is naught but a tyrant’s lullaby’.

also features the new maglor design i’ve landed on for this painting, aka ‘wouldn’t it be funny if he had the temperament of nerdanel but looks so much like fëanor that it gives him, curufin, and fëanor himself a complex’. fëanorians are in black here, inspired by from charcoal to nigrosin by @angamaite-der-ritter, which states “the widespread usage of black dyes became firmly associated with the Fëanárian faction, starting ostensibly in the period of Kanafinwë Macalaurë’s regency” (though i did give their clothing red accents to distinguish them from other characters in black, and idk yet what i’ll go with when i paint in their circlets).

thank you so much for running the event and the daemags advocacy, @polutrope — you have opened my eyes to the best ship dynamic in the world.

Pour lui je dépense tout mon argent,

Ses baisers laissent un goût sucré sur ma langue,

Qui, meuf, ton mec ?

Pakistani Arwen Undómiel.

Celebrían, wife of Elrond and one true love of my life, was said to be travelling across the same Redhorn Pass of Caradhras we see the Fellowship attempt, when she was waylaid and dragged into the cave system in question where she was held in captivity for, as per my further calculations re: distance between Imladris and Caradhras and approximations of time required to navigate the cave system itself, a matter of multiple weeks at the very least. This happened in TA 2509.