#and i didn't get to do a latin a level which I'm also sooooo not bitter

[lonesomedotmp3]

it does genuinely piss me off how much of the greatest things about my old school was built off the blood sweat and tears of this one incredible passionate lovely teacher and they never ever ever gave him anything in return until he left for a better school during my a levels 😐 and then I had to have the shittiest teacher alive for othello instead of him who would have slayed it and I'm NOT bitter about it out all

[britneyshakespeare]

Hello! How about #10 & 40 for the weird questions for writers?

Thank you!

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

Hm. I suppose so. But it's been several different types of hauntings that have occurred, from my own work and other people's.

I used to feel very drawn to "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger, for instance, when I was in high school, because I discovered the poem when I read somewhere that that was John F. Kennedy's favorite poem and he would have Jackie read it to him. I was a big literature AND U.S. history nerd then and that felt incredibly ominous to me, and as someone with a lot of health issues and a constant death wish it resonated with me on a personal level too. It's still one of my favorite poems of all time. (It was one of the first poems I didn't write that I posted to my poetry blog.) I've imitated that form many times. The relentless iambic tetrameter and the unpredictable rhyme scheme really work to make it feel like fate is running at you, especially with that inimitable refrain. As much as I can mimic the form, I don't think I've ever had one of my own refrains hit me like the image of rushing to a rendezvous with Death. Of course, it's hard for me to ever really shock myself.

But sometimes I do, and I guess that's when I feel haunted by my own writing. I almost never feel like I'm writing something significant in the moment I'm writing it. Far more frequently, whether I think I have a decent idea or not, I'm just writing to pass the time while keeping busy. When I reread something after I've forgotten it, it sometimes does surprise me like "wow, I actually had something really good going on here." I can think of one poem I wrote on April Fools Day 2019, the month I was going to turn 20, that I've never actually posted on Tumblr. It was a free verse about the relationship male influence has had on my development of self-efficacy. That one only took a few weeks for me to be like, "Damn, this is one of my best."

But there are also things I notice in retrospect that I wrote into poems before I understood myself consciously. A big example of that is before I realized I was aromantic, I would write about the loneliness of trying to force myself to feel love. Teenage Diana never thought she just wasn't made that way. It didn't occur to me at all. I liked romance sooooo much in theory but it was so fleeting and futile in execution. Yeah fuck that.

40. Please share a poem with me, I need it.

Hmmm, okay. I'll do one of mine, and then one from someone else.

First one that came to mind of my own work was this little ditty I wrote on Halloween of 2018. I was well into my self-described "Ghostfucker" era, in which I was knowingly (but sometimes still self-doubting) aroace, but I would still get a lot of comphet I didn't know how to sort out, most passionately though, for dead men I could romanticize without a threat of them harming me or the love ever being unsatisfyingly "consummated." I had been writing these elaborate, self-deprecating poems about being in love with spirits and throwing all my hopes into the high heavens for like a full year at that point, and would continue those redundant themes for about another year from then on. And around this time I started exploring the split I felt between fantasy and reality, mind and body, so on. Lots of metaphors pertained to duality and contradictory ideas. A very strange time for my writing. This is my favorite one of those poems I can think of that I posted, and it still has a special place in my heart.

As for something by another writer, I think I'll go with "Íntima (Intimate)" by Julia de Burgos. Last year I checked out her Complete Poems translated by Jack Agüeros from my library, and read the whole damn thing, only renewing it once. I've never gobbled up a poet's entire body of work so fast. I was just skimming the shelves and found her in the Latin American section, had a little look-see, and I immediately fell into it. I have at this point in my life read so many many poets and it's such a rare and magnificent thing when, especially at my current knowledge and familiarity with the medium, I am instantly hit with the realization that I have found a new favorite. Not just something good, or great. Those I find all the time. I can name hundreds of good or great poets whose works are worth reading. But FAVORITE. Something that blows my mind and sucks me in. And Julia de Burgos is that, a fascinating woman with an incredible mind and a list of accomplishments worth reading about. Her gift for natural imagery is something I envy deeply. I think she's far, far too underappreciated in the Anglophone world. She's just the best.

Send me weird writing asks :D