some of my favorite video essays
lady bird, fences, and why you don't need to forgive your parents
racebaiting, queerbaiting, colorism, featurism, and performative diversity
girlhood disrupted : the pseudo-maturtiy of traumatized girls in film
let's talk about the japanese school girl
the coraline bug theory
breaking down true womanhood & black girlhood in media
bill cipher : one fatal mistake
the philosophy of mob psycho 1000
why only goblins matter
soul eater : beneath the surface
perfect blue : the fear of yourself
the villain of edith finch
art vs the artist
how regular show saved cartoon network
big plotholes in reality
detroit : become human retrospective
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ON DEATH, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION,
or: a few of my favourite poems about dying, being dead, & the ones who are left behind. some melancholic, some upbeat, some morbid, some euphemistic, some sombre, some tongue-in-cheek, some direct, some not, all good. in no particular order:
“on death, without exaggeration“, wisława szymborska (oh, it has its triumphs, / but look at its countless defeats, / missed blows, / and repeat attempts!)
“the suicide’s room”, wisława szymborska (a lamp, good for fighting the dark / a desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers / carefree buddha and a worried christ / seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.)
“the letters of the dead”, wisława szymborska (poor dead, blindfolded dead, / gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.)
(can you see that i’m very fond of wisława szymborska?)
“harlod’s leap”, stevie smith (it may have killed you / but it was a brave thing to do.)
“not waving but drowning”, stevie smith (i was much further out than you thought / and not waving but drowning)
“a meeting”, wendell berry (he has, / i know, gone long and far, / and yet he is the same / for the dead are changeless.)
“the dead”, billy collins (the dead are always looking down on us, they say)
“memory”, hayden carruth (my dear, / how could you have let this happen to you?)
“her long illness”, donald hall (daybreak until nightfall, / he sat by his wife at the hospital / while chemotherapy dripped / through the catheter into her heart.)
“this is a photograph of me”, margaret atwood (the photograph was taken / the day after i drowned.)
“owl song”, margaret atwood (i do not want revenge, i do not want expiation, / i only want to ask someone / how i was lost, / how i was lost)
“anne sexton’s last letter to god”, tracey herd (i have just lunched with an old friend / saying goodbye and something / ‘she couldn’t quite catch’.)
“ophelia’s confession”, tracey herd (i didn’t drown by accident. it was a suicide. / at least let me call my mind my own / even when my heart was gone beyond recall.)
“the promise”, marie howe (he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if / there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.)
“aubade”, philip larkin (being brave / lets no one off the grave. / death is no different whined at than withstood.)
“lady lazarus”, sylvia plath (and i a smiling woman. / i am only thirty. / and like the cat i have nine times to die.)
“edge”, sylvia plath (her bare / feet seem to be saying: / we have come so far, it is over.)
“sylvia’s death”, anne sexton (what is your death / but an old belonging, / a mole that fell out / of one of your poems?)
“a curse against elegies”, anne sexton (also, i am tired of all the dead. / they refuse to listen)
“tomorrow they’ll cut me open”, anna swir (i have many powers in me. i can live, / i can run, dance and sing. / all of that is in me, but if need be, / i’ll walk away.)
“biology teacher”, zbigniew herbert (in the second year of the war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies)
“dedication”, czesław miłosz (you whom i could not save / listen to me.)
“dirge without music”, edna st. vincent millay (they are gone. / they are gone to feed the roses.)
the rosie probert scene in “under milk wood”, dylan thomas (remember her. / she is forgetting. / the earth which filled her mouth / is vanishing from her.)
“do not go gentle into that good night”, dylan thomas (old age should burn and rave at close of day; / rage, rage against the dying of the light)
“a quoi bon dire?”, charlotte mew (and everybody thinks that you are dead, / but i.)
“myth”, natasha trethewey (you’ll be dead again tomorrow, / but in dreams you live. so i try taking / you back into morning.)
“i watched you disappear”, anya krugovoy silver (are you there? where? / are the others there, too?)
“i am asking you to come back home”, jo carson (my mamma used to say she could feel herself / runnin’ short of the breath of life. so can i. / and i am blessed tired of buryin’ things i love.)
“the night where you no longer live”, meghan o’rourke (was there gas station food / and was it a long trip)
“condolence”, dorothy parker (but i had smiled to think how you, the dead, / so curiously preoccupied and grave, / would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.)
“death at daybreak”, anne reeve aldrich (i shall pass dawn on her way to earth, / as i seek for a path through space.)
“fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, william shakespeare (golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.)
“sonnet xciv”, pablo neruda (don’t call up my person. i am absent. / live in my absence as if in a house.)
“funeral blues”, w. h. auden (the stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, / pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood)
“the drowned children”, louise glück (but death must come to them differently, / so close to the beginning.)
“because i could not stop for death”, emily dickinson (the carriage held but just ourselves – / and immortality.)
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