i am of course furious about the bad faith article on slate despite not having actually read it (i like my blood pressure where it is, and no i am not going to link to it), but it is simply not my problem that the author of said article is bad at reading and wants to make that everyone else’s problem. he thinks only litfic counts as reading, which is so insane that i can’t actually respond, so instead i will do this (by which i mean commit newslettering).

i am, like most romance writers, pretty damn well read. i’m currently rereading one of my all time favorite books, geek love (which was a finalist for the nations book award and is therefore Art), and for what is, remarkably, the first time, i am trying to figure out how she did it. so far my analysis is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ probably sorcery.

anyway. the other morning i had a long talk with my sixteen-year-old son about poetry. he was info dumping about his special interest, umamusume, in which the horse girls (literally girls who are horses) are based on real racehorses, which means he has done a great deal of reading about the real life horses. until now, my sole contribution to every discussion we’ve had about this game has been my lifelong love of the black stallion. this time, however, he brought up a horse named stay gold and i asked if he knows what that’s a reference to. he knew it was from “stay gold, ponyboy,” but lacked any context beyond that.

I HAVE BEEN TRAINING FOR THIS SINCE I WAS ELEVEN.

i told him about the outsiders and then we talked about the robert frost poem. we read it and then i remembered that his first draft is extent, three stanzas, and uses plurals where the final poem uses singular. we talked about the magic of editing and how in poetry it often means stripping away rather than adding.

then we talked about forms and i told him that i’ve never written a villanelle but would love to try. we looked up the exact pattern villanelles follow and i read him an example (do not go gentle into that good night, of course).

he asked if i'd be interested in checking out the in-game poetry from doki doki literature club, i said yes, and we agreed to reconvene at a later date for that. then he went and did his thing and i wrote some more on the most shenanigans-filled and challenging romcom i’ve ever attempted.

i was going to write about this already, and now it feels like i am defending my honor against this illiterate bully, but you know what? i’m okay with that. and i’m going to the used bookstore asap to see if they have any beat poets, because i think he (my son, not slate’s rudest opinion writer) might appreciate them the way i did at his age. (if i'm really lucky they will also have a copy of the waste land! obviously we need it for continued analysis of how to edit a poem. homeschooling rules!)

xxoo
annika

p.s. it’s interesting that this article came so close on the heels of timothee chalomet dissing ballet and opera as things no one cares about. white men really are out there saying high art is bad and so is low art. skill issue, lads!

p.p.s. book links are affiliate links, all other links are informative only.