Ransacking English's resources

@thaliarchus

thaliarchus.itch.io/cosmic-warlord-kinbright

The poet they probably shouldn’t have sent. I watch anime and am sometimes accused of reading books. I'm writing a long gay giant robot story in verse—probably this millennium's best yuri mecha epic poem, through lack of competition.

'Now praise those names on tombs of steel engraved | And toll this rotting country’s countless bells.'

@thaliarchus1/17/2023, 4:41 PM

Ransacking English's resources

I'm not sure I can put this properly, but I think Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright wants to ransack English's resources. If that makes any sense.

That ransacking explains why it folds in alliterative verse and four-beat lines alongside the trusty five-beat line.

And why it loves SOV syntax.

And why it wants to thump out words like caitiff and bane and chthonic without irony: all unusual words, but unusual words that stem from different etymological heritages.

In part, it wants this because I think those words are cool.

In part, it wants this because I fear that we too often see English, so widespread, as a transparent & default medium.

Studied closely, English abounds with knots of weirdness and strange powers.

When those are brought out, I think we more easily remember that it is a language like any other.

For a long time, English wasn't even the most prestigious language in England itself. It only became an interchange language through historical processes.

Should humanity carry on, English won't hold that role forever, and history will one day discard it.

In that light, we more easily see how all other languages too have their own lovely knots of weirdness & their own strange powers.

#cosmic warlord kin-bright #history of english #poetry

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in reply to @thaliarchus's post:

Calliope @calliope1/17/2023, 6:39 PM

I thought of you, actually, yesterday, while reading a little volume of Tolkien, several iterations he wrote adapting a piece of Breton folklore. One version is aaab, for instance, while another uses head rhyme along with metered feet. Despite how poetry is actually what got me into writing, it's not actually my specialty, so plumbing the depths of how a poem works is usually a bit beyond me. But I can still appreciate the way rhyme schemes change the reader's relationship to the words, for example.

@thaliarchus1/17/2023, 10:47 PM

A lot of it is alchemy, alchemy that I feel less confident I understand the more I study poetry! One interesting effect of rhyme seems to be anticipation, that cueing that it causes in an audience's heads—most tangibly felt when a poem or song seems like it's going to deliver something rude as a rhyme word but then swerves away, but I suspect operating more generally.