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dyke, poetess, games writer, &cet.

wow! this lesbian can pierce space and time!


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bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat

look i know its passe to like Billy Collins or whatever. i'm willing to accept that even as a fan. but when he said that the average reader thinks the poet goes through their book of rhetorical devices and says "hmm, I think I would like to sprinkle in a line of polysyndeton here to further my Themes" i just look at the average article made For Writers with a title like "Five Ways to Use Narrative Dissonance To Make Your Character More Nuanced" and sigh


bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat

ME: yeah so i agree with collins' "Introduction to Poetry" that you shouldnt beat a poem with a hose to find out what it really means, but in the defense of readers around the world it's hard to "press an ear up to its hive" or "drop a mouse into the poem and watch him probe his way out" you know? like ultimately it's okay to want or use systematic ways to read or write--

ANOTHER WRITER: Yeah so I need a good Hook to Engage My Readers while also Presenting The Preliminary Themes of the book. I think an instance of chiasmus could add musical effect while reflecting the upside-down logic of my hard magic system--

ME: put down that hose or so help me god


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in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post:

lolll yeah. I like the systematic method wayyy more as a reader than as a writer. as a reader it helps me find something to hang onto in a poem, as a writer it tends to flatten out the most interesting, jagged bits of my writing

hmm yeah I like that way of thinking about it. "post-hoc realizing what the effect of your words is and maybe warping the world around them" is honestly what a lot of editing feels like. like there are patterns in there, but they are only found and emphasized after the initial writing, and this "after" is sometimes editing and sometimes interpretation by others. and yeah once a writer is a Big Deal it's often written about as if every bit of word-effect was the conscious plan all along in a way that simply is not how writing works