Thoughts swilling around, a miscellany

[kaberett]

• Despite not even a tiny bit being in MCU fandom, I look forward enormously to recessional's Winter Soldier shortfic snippets - they seriously make my day; they feel like a gift every time, as does Mia's art, as I've mentioned, and a whole bunch of things the rest of you do, that just feel like moments of grace. I was feeling slightly wistful about wanting to be able to provide that, those bubbles of joy, and then I realised that probably actually I do - probably some of you do react to my poetry the same way, and that is a wonder in itself.
  
• I had an excellent conversation with @taliskimberley at WorldCon about craft vs inspiration wrt poetry/lyric, and about how the 50-poems-in-a-year project I have going on is about teaching myself to trust craft more.
  
• I was at a poetry event a few months ago, about mental health and poetry, and one of the participants - I think one of the support acts? - made a derogatory comment about "confessional" poetry. It's been getting to me; I'm struggling with the fact that most of my poetry is very short, is intensely personal, and is about experiencing the world as myself in a very direct sense, rather than having... grand sweeping scope? And I'm mostly okay with that, but occasionally I let the thing rattle me (and, surprise, it was a middle-aged white dude being all "pfft who needs confessional poetry anyway it's just DULL"), and I'm trying to work out how to work with that.
  
• On an entirely different topic, while drifting off to sleep the other night I had an obviously brilliant insight about why we're so drawn to narratives where a protagonist has a destiny to fulfill (into every generation, The Boy Who Lived, etc), and then I fell asleep before writing it down, and now I am managing to reconstruct it only piecemeal - something about having purpose, about external executive function, about finding a place in the world, about what it means to turn away from manifest destiny and why we seek it out, and so on. Perhaps I will be able to put it back together at Some Point; perhaps not.
  
• One of my bits of brain-homework that I've been stuck on for a while is "It’s easy to ignore our talents when we measure them with the wrong yardstick. Not everyone is good at public speaking, computer programming, or heli-skiing—and not everyone should be. This diversity of talents is what makes the world so interesting. Ponder: Which of your own natural talents, preferences, and abilities have you been judging by a faulty yardstick?" Now I reckon I'm pretty good at knowing my capabilities and ways I want to improve them in; I don't think are many things I'm actually good at that I'm overlooking/ignoring. So, er, would you all mind saying if you think there's anything that meets this? Because I suspect finding it this difficult is a good reason for me to keep staring at it. *chinhand*

Comments

[redbird]

This is a bit meta, but I think you're under-valuing your awareness of your capabilities and what you want to improve.

[kaberett]

Hah! Thank you :-)

[highlyeccentric]

Middle Aged White Dude sounds like the poetry version of 'women's novels are too confessional' - when you look at it, men can write about the same topics and be considered *insightful*, women confessional.

Appropos of a while ago, your commentariat seemed to think you could be mis-measuring your level of academic independance by conflating it with your life-independance, if i recall correctly.

[kaberett]

Hm'n, thank you!

And yeah, good point about the sexism inherent in the system...

[highlyeccentric]

WHOOPS that was supposed to be a comment to entry, not to redbird specifically. Oh well!

[redbird]

Putting it there got me a bonus notification of something I'm glad to have been notified by, so call it serendipity.

[kaberett]

:-)

[cadenzamuse]

Um, wow re: middle-aged white dude and confessional poetry. Perhaps asshat doesn't need it because he gets to work out his issues all over the place because he is The Default Privileged Category?

Sorry, it just totally got my hackles up in general, and then in regards to your poetry specifically. I don't remember when I got the advice to be specific, because when you generalize there isn't enough detail to identify with and there's enough generalizing to leave people out, but when you're specific about your own experience people can live in that and figure out where their own experience fits in--and that's what confessional poetry is, and yours is a particularly good example of it.

Am excited to hear your thoughts re: Heroes of Destiny, if you ever remember them. The tiny bit about extrinsic motivation already has twisted the trope around in my brain.

[kaberett]

ffff thank you <3 I have been Having Feels about this comment since you made it.

Re Heroes of Destiny -- yep, will see if I can't work it up into an actual post! Might all else aside be suitable for the LashBlog...

[shanaqui]

I had an excellent conversation with @taliskimberley at WorldCon about craft vs inspiration wrt poetry/lyric, and about how the 50-poems-in-a-year project I have going on is about teaching myself to trust craft more.

Somewhat related: I wrote a lot of poetry based on "inspiration" when I was a teen, and it was nearly all rubbish. Now I can rarely turn out anything spontaneous, but it turns out I love working with an extremely tight structure, whether that be one of the traditional ones or a challenge someone has set me. Inspiration can give poetry a spark, but craft makes it really shine, I think.

Also, bah. Sometimes I think confessional poetry is the only stuff worth reading: I'd rather be discomforted by someone opening their soul than bored by timeless poetry about a landscape. (Unless it secretly also opens up someone's soul.)

[kaberett]

aaaaaaaaah I have so many feelings! like, I genuinely think some of my best stuff arrived fully-formed and I was just a conduit? But I ALSO think I'm making amazing things with craft, and -- yes, I need to write this post up properly already, heh ;)

[shanaqui]

I don't have that kind of inspiration, heh. Not for poetry, anyway -- prose-poetry, though, I so know what you mean.

[cosmolinguist]

I think it's easiest to be a conduit for stuff you've worked on crafting, though. I'm never going to be a conduit for a great mathematical proof, because I have no relevant skills and have put no time/effort into acquiring any. So yes inspiration, but working on craft makes the inspiration more likely and of a higher caliber, I reckon.

[kaberett]

yes! these things!

[birke]

I think poetry is 100% about taste. Which is not to say that there's an equal amount of time and talent behind each poem, but there is no point to criticizing other people's poetic work. They like it. Someone else probably likes it. Middle-aged white dude can go find his own poetry.

There's some political stuff as well about whose themes are valued, etc. but that's a different issue.

[kaberett]

Good call on the political stuff, which I hadn't articulated quite that way around!

Thank you lots for the saying of the thing.

[davidgillon]

probably some of you do react to my poetry the same way

Or even just ideas, such as volcanoes as windows into the soul of the planet - adored that (as I said).

middle-aged white dude being all "pfft who needs confessional poetry anyway

We write (/create) for multiple reasons and one of those reasons has to be ourselves, everything after that is a bonus. And a valid part of writing for ourselves is using it as a medium to understand ourselves/the world around us. And who needs to be long-winded for 'grand sweeping scope', my one successful poem of the past decade deals with the WWII War in the Pacific and the arms race that preceded it. It's a haiku...

[kaberett]

Thank you for saying <3

[fyreharper]

Bubbles of grace, yes, yes you do :)

Meh, dude clearly has no taste... ;p

[kaberett]

Thank you <333

[shehasathree]

Bet i'd prefer your confessional poetry to Middle Aged White Dude's poetry any day.
<333

[kaberett]

WELL I CERTAINLY DO

(♥)

[silveradept]

I would like to see the reconstructed fragments of your thoughts on destiny characters, should they resurface in a postable way.

As for measuring with the wrong yardstick, I think I've been doing that all my life. Certainly in regard to my virtues, what about yours?

[kaberett]

With regards to the post -- yep, enough people seem to be interested that I think it's going to be one of my projects for this round of Mass Spec Theatre (along with getting the introductions done...)

Several people have made really insightful comments about my yardsticks on this post, for which I am v grateful :-)

[calissa]

Brain is fried today, but wanted to let you know that it is not just your poetry that provides those bubbles of grace. It is also entries like these.

[cosmolinguist]

Yup.

[kaberett]

Thank you <333

[kaberett]

<333 Thank you so much for saying.

[azurelunatic]

Pfft, who needs middle-aged white dudes who dismiss confessional poetry anyway: they're just DULL.

[kaberett]

WELL I THOUGHT SO

<3

[inoru_no_hoshi]

Re: bubbles of grace, it's not just your poetry - I enjoy seeing your posts on all manner of subjects, since you get a lot of delight out of so many things, and even more delight, seemingly, in sharing how wonderful those things were/are. It's just happy-making to see. :)

Not sure Middle-Aged White Dude gets the point of confessional any-form-of-art; it's about baring a bit of your soul and hoping like hell it doesn't end up hurting you to show it. Takes way more out of you than just describing the much-less-personal, in my experience. So keep on keeping on. <3

[kaberett]

fff thank you so much - I have been carrying this comment around close to myself today, because it - just - to know that I am not only learning to seek & feel wonder but to communicate it - that is such, such a big deal to me, and -- FEELS. ALL THE FEELS. EVERYWHERE.

[inoru_no_hoshi]

You're welcome! <33 I feel quite pleased and, well, fuzzy-happy that I engendered so much feels. Hee. <3

[liv]

I kind of interpreted the "faulty yardstick" thing differently from some other commenters: it's not so much things you're good at but you underestimate how good you are at them, it's things you're good at but you only notice the domains where you're less successful. My example for you would be something to do with independence and community.

You're a couple of years out of university, there's a kind of expectation that people at your life-stage are going to be very focused on being independent, so you're perhaps measuring yourself by a yardstick of things like paying for your living costs, organizing your time so you can have the lifestyle you want while getting all your necessary tasks done, all the sorts of things that teenagers and maybe young students are just learning how to do for the first time and are supposed to have mastered by now. I'm not saying you're bad at this, but it's maybe not your main strength. Instead what you're good at is creating community, finding ways to rely on other people successfully without being a drain on them, contributing love and beauty and education and making connections between people as well as the more immediately visible practical tasks.

Or, to take a more concrete example: are you "bad at" feeding yourself because you don't always manage to schedule, prepare and eat regular meals? Are you "bad at" cooking cos you tend to improvise and put things together intuitively and your go-to dishes aren't the most obvious ones for the majority culture? I think no, I think a better framing is that you are good at food-related hospitality, inviting people round spontaneously and throwing together something delicious. Making people happy by suddenly appearing with cake. Dealing sensitively with other people's dietary needs. Maybe that's a bad example because you already know that you're exceptionally good at cooking in a somewhat unconventional way, but it's one where I can imagine the faulty yardstick thing applying.

[kaberett]

Huh. This is a very good call: thank you. I will ponder reframings, and expect to bring this up with my counsellor next session (along with everyone else...)

Brief comment because still chewing on this. It's a big thought to take in, and I am grateful.

[azurelunatic]

*draws hearts around this comment*

[kaberett]

*DRAWS HEARTS AROUND ♥YOU♥*