jennekaivo

[jennekaivo]

it is so fucking sad to watch tumblr falling into first place through sheer incompetence only to trip over their own feet (start updating the site) at the finish line. you coulda done it, you stupid assholes. we were back in a 'tumblr good' phase, you had actual word of mouth marketing going strong at the time a bunch of other social medias are collapsing. i could have recommended that my job to open a tumblr account during the height of the craze with all the articles about how tumblr is up and coming. i did not and would not because i'm a long time user actively watching the site crash and burn. i am no longer even recommending that my friends join tumblr. i have deleted the app from my phone. i am contemplating deleting a blog i've maintained for over 10 years. i feel actively bad for the friends who did join tumblr before you saw the influx of users, lost your fucking minds, and started tearing the site apart. what a colossal waste

[jennekaivo]

that thing about how if you sign up as a new user in a certain way now, you have to follow some people before you even get to change your profile picture or bio... like surely @staff know that empty blank blogs look like bots, they must have gotten thousands of reports off us about them by now. this seems like a really counterproductive and ridiculous move, almost by design keeping new users from interacting with old users, and therefore keeping the charm of this website from new users. this isn't going to help draw in new users, it's just going to alienate new users from the platform as they immediately get blocked en masse... if they were sensible about it, they would prompt new users to put something in their blog title and bio and change their avatar BEFORE prompting them to follow other blogs, that way new users would be very easily distinguishable from bots

[jennekaivo]

wish tumblr would gut extraneous features and manage a humble but functional site instead of trying to be as profitable and overencumbered as Facebook

[jennekaivo]

Notice how the syllables flow, without a set meter. Notice the rhyme- he has chosen to rhyme end consonants, without matching vowel sounds or even syllabic emphasis.

(I've worked in a Welsh style called proest rhyme, where the vowel must not match, but the consonant must. For me, it has created violent poems.)

Poetry is not taught in so many American schools. You learn abab rhyme, aabb rhyme, limericks, and (if you're lucky) sonnets. Then you learn free-verse. Rappers know how to write English-language poetry, but so many English lesson plans leave kids thinking it goes like this:

this is the time,

for my line to rhyme,

and I successfully rhymed it just now,

let me take a bow

“Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney

[jennekaivo]

your bruised (just freckled) lips your secret smile the way your teeth are smooth like corn, don’t meet my cracked-corn teeth and our lips meet like slugs (slugs mate for days- and we kiss for days- we can’t stop kissing, neither can the slugs- the last part is a secret)

[jennekaivo]

Devin Kelly, All that wanting, right?

[jennekaivo]

something something the poetry of science etc

[jennekaivo]

Franny Choi, Soft Science

[jennekaivo]

Megan Arkenberg

[jennekaivo]

It’s poetry! It can be all or none of the above. Poets will ask the question “what if I was a dog” and answer it in a way that leaves you with further questions.

umm how to be a dog by andrew kane. btw.

[jennekaivo]

one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it

[jennekaivo]

After my best friend died I became jealous of the fireflies and kept smashing them against my forehead. I wanted my loneliness to be visible to those I loved. For people to see the yellow balloons I hid in my lungs. What I’m saying is I couldn’t breathe for an entire year. When they tore down her elementary school, we all lined up, days later, for bricks. We held them against our bodies. I’d like to think this is how we embrace our ghosts. Years later, it took my grandfather three days to die. I grew so bored I left to get ice cream. In the car, with the July sun soaking my back, I let my tongue protest death. Hours after my grandfather died, I wanted to take a photo of his body. His skin the color of faded marigolds. As a child, when my goldfish died I mourned the entire ocean. My father told me children in Palestine die every day. Hours before dying from cancer, Jim said take care of yourself. I said you too. When I visit graveyards now, all I see is grass and grass and grass. I think about how it takes forever to get to nowhere. Maybe I’ve outlived my life. And would like to become a bird. Dear God. Dear Earth. Dear Clouds. Why should anything die? I want it all to live forever. What I mean is I want to stand in my garden and gaze at the sunflowers. Amen.

— Noor Hindi, “Against Death”

[jennekaivo]

This makes me feel like I was first in line for childhood traumas. Neglect, loneliness, and poverty, these are my traumas, but all in just the right amount to build my strength, in just the right amount to make me feel it was the childhood I wanted.

the years by alex dimitrov

[jennekaivo]

glory be to the topsoil. to the worms. to the private church of mushrooms. what makes for a better angel than the quiet promise of decomposition - that thankless, endless task. returning to the earth: this is a final prayer.

you said to me - we understand so much of history through the lens of how each society handled death. i have been thinking about the funeral industry. about embalming. how the devil is supposed to be almost-human, charming. i was raised on teflon pans. the poison in my blood came from good intentions; sprinkled over pancakes and scrambled eggs. will those particles go, too, when i go?

i keep thinking about how many cultures personify death as being gentle. as being a friend. as being kind-of-beautiful. an outstretched hand. oh, we scowl so much at carrion birds; but they make their nests by the worship of a carcass. something about that feels beautiful to me.

i am often scared. i understand why some people seek immortality, even if it's not something i desire. i spend a lot of time worrying about coffins. i spend a lot of time thinking about how if they dug me up, my bones would tell very little about my soft spots. so many of my friends say - i just want to be a tree. i want to find a quiet space and go home. the other day, we got the bill from the funeral home, and i just stood there, staring. this is death?

you said: it's learning backwards. from how a society approaches death, we might learn how they celebrate life. i worry about what that means, sometimes. about what others will think about us. divorced from our contexts, maybe alien archivists will have a fondness for our tendency to call death sleep. maybe they will write essays titled towards the light: an analysis on how some sects of humanity worshipped solely facing east.

oh, there's so much about my life that won't survive. especially these days. there's so little that lasts in-the-same-shape. oh, if the universe is kind - i want them to know that we loved moss. that we loved lichen. that even decay could be beautiful for us; the little warm space of mulch. how i will go home, one day, in the body of a bird. in a worm. in a leaf.

how when we lay a body in the ground, we say: be at peace.

oh, to go to sleep so gracefully. when i go i want to leave no mark. i want the dirt to take me. // r.i.d & a.b

[jennekaivo]

Love the first stanza. It really is a summation of so much of the best poetry, whether the subject is love or any other strong emotion.

This Anton Jarvis work from the Great War begins with longing and ends with responsibility, for example:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Nikki Giovanni - Where Do You Enter (fragment) from Bicycles. Love Poems

[jennekaivo]

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut

[jennekaivo]

another heavy handed symbolism moment: my mom has a potted sunflower in the kitchen. because it is a sunflower, it keeps turning towards the light from the window. my mother keeps rotating it so it faces inward because she wants "to see its beautiful petals and have it really brighten up the space!" . the sunflower is visibly wilting .