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”
concept: there are lots of different worlds and all of them have different levels of access to magic. Some are just all over the place and some have no magic at all.
You would think that we would be one of the strictly non-magical worlds, but actually, that’s not the case—we don’t have like, a huge excess of magic, but we have, like, dreams, and the placebo effect, which puts us pretty solidly in the “Numinous” world category.
Bro you ever think about the amount of work they put into danger days? Like not the album, tho that was also huge, but the worldbuilding. Like yeah the canon we have is like half cobbeled together and barely makes sense but also the details on the trans am? The costumes and design? Destroya and the phoenix witch? The twitter accounts that ran for what? 2 years? The transmissions that they filmed and edited. The bli website, the mcr transmission website. The vending machine. The magazines
That sheer fucking panic when you send a message to someone after being the one to send the last two messages so now you look crazy and clingy and stuff, so to counter that you send another messages but that just makes it worse because now you think the person thinks youre weird so you just give up and watch cats being stupid
Recorded May 2003, at iMusicast in California, a venue (now closed) who used to stream gigs live on their website!! Found and downloaded from an archived webpage (currently forgot which one,,, sorry). Another one ive not seen before…