My Apparent Thing for Rhetorical Questions in Poetry

Jul6

So I am still working on my epic poetry about Xena: Warrior Princess, and I have started to notice some patterns, which I have noticed in my work before, but since this is (so far) a 260+ page project on a single subject, I am noticing them more now. One of these patterns is the use of rhetorical questions, which I think I use to show how the character of the speaker of a particular poem is either wrestling with a problem or coming to a solution, or just my capturing their voices. These I took just from the (so far) 54 pages I have written about Season 5.

Eli (Read: Jesus/Gandhi)

You let me heal the broken,

But what good is that gift if I cannot stop them from being

Broken in the first place? How does fixing the problem

Afterwards solve the problem? Why did you give me this

Troubling gift and what do you expect me to do?

Gabrielle

How can we live in a world in which

Fear is stronger than love? But how can we protect love

Without fighting for it?… She says, “Why don’t we all

Just walk away?” But is that even an option anymore?

Ares

Remind you of any particular Roman warlord? Yes, I do use this

Line on all my warlords, but it’s true I used it on you first.

Talia

Why are we never prepared for the surprise,

For the consequences of dalliance or domination?

Why are we never prepared for love and its confusion?

Xena

Her easy smile, her trust, how will I win those back?

Xena

I could pretend to be humble, but

What purpose would that serve?

Xena

What is it about rabbits?

What is it about her and these young men?

Gabrielle

You don’t think after four years as her sidekick

I would not recognize the heroic moment when it comes?

How many times now has her soul left her body?

How many times have I had to fight to keep her safe?

Athena

But how could a single god take care of all your needs?

How can a god that preaches love manage a world

At war? How can a foreign god come to our Greek soil

And reign over our people?

Ares

Mongolia? The Battle of Corinth?

I was always a fan.

Athena

Hestia, as always, focuses on the wrong

Thing, muttering in despair, “Isn’t anybody a virgin?”

And the family, as always, ignores her.

Xena

Why not fruit? Why not my body?

Why can’t I use both as weapons of opportunity?

So talk to me, peoples, how do you feel about rhetorical questions in poetry? And also, this, because it’s one of Lucy Lawless’s cuter expressions.

That a Woman Can Stand Up

Jun13

In Ester Forbes’ classic young adult novel, Johnny Tremain, the protagonist, Johnny overhears a meeting of the Sons of Liberty in 1773, where James Otis says, “We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills . . . we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.” Though I read that book for the first time maybe 35 years ago, that line has stayed in my head ever since. I thought about it recently, when I read the two blogs I reposted about Agent Peggy Carter.

I have been lucky not to have to deal with much overt sexism throughout my life. I recognize that as an overeducated middle class white woman doing a relatively “female” job (teaching English), I may have an advantage that other women don’t have. As we have seen with the recent tale of the Nobel Prize-winning sexist idiot who called women in the lab “distractions,” sexism hasn’t gone away and probably won’t any time soon. But it is another reason why we need shows like Agent Carter, to remind us of the time when women had to put up with that kind of bullshit all the time. We remember what our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc. fought for and we sign on for the fight too.

Because it isn’t only sexism. It’s racism, classism, homophobia, me-first politics and religion, and all the other intersecting forms of institutional oppression. And the people most hurt by each of these problems, and that may well include us too, need us to stand up and fight so that others may stand up. But how do we do that? Well, when I went to seminary the first class we took was on anti-oppression, and it required us to face our own isms and untangle them, admit to them, and start habits that would help us stop doing some of the things, having some of the thoughts, that lead us into participating in the oppressions. It’s hard work. You will disappoint yourself more often than not.

So how do we find the strength to fight this battle? Well people like King and Gandhi found religion/God helpful. That can be good for some, although for others sometimes religion has only taught them to be ashamed of themselves, not to respect themselves. So I also like how popular culture heroes, and the writers behind them, offer us a line here or there that is just jam-packed with wisdom. In the last episode of the first season of Agent Carter, we see Peggy jump all the hurdles with her many skills: hand-to-hand fighting, code-breaking, shooting, parachute jumping, and most of all a crack brain and a big heart.

At the end, when one of her so-called “superiors” at work takes all the credit for Peggy’s efforts, another colleague asks her, “How can you just sit here and take that?”

She says, “I don’t need a congressional honor. I don’t need Jack Thompson’s approval or the president’s. I know my value. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter.”

And that could just be a single line in a single episode in a single season of a single show. But it is going beyond that. Because when Hayley Atwell goes to ComiCon and other nerd-fest conventions and people ask her for advice on being strong, facing sexism and other oppressions, she tells them, “Know your own value.” And I just bought a T-shirt with her image on it and the phrase, I know my value, because although I do often know my value (thank you, many years of therapy), I also often forget and need a reminder. And this is what characters like Xena, Buffy, and Agent Carter fight for, inside the stories that transfer from TV to our heads: that a woman also can stand up.

Negative Traits, Or, Is That What I Was Doing with That Character?

Apr23

So I was just reading Author Matt Bowes and the Dogs Breakfast blog (and I still have not figured out how the dog comes into the picture) and lately he has been talking about how you make characters more well rounded by, duh, giving them negative traits. This is an aspect I have never really given much thought to because I just find my characters fully formed in my head most of the time, so if they have those traits I run with it and often they do not and are unconvincing, but when you are writing fantasy, as I did for many years, we expect characters to be a bit larger than life, so you can get away with it.

But now that I am writing about Not My characters, e.g., Xena Warrior Princess, the negative traits come with the fully formed character. The thing I have been noticing is that it is the other characters who discuss the negative traits. Face it, especially during the first season, Xena is dismissive of anybody who is not an actual warrior. And throughout the first few seasons she has, as the characters in the Buffyverse would say, really honed her brooding skills. She often speaks in monosyllables and pretends the emotional things do not matter.

So my job is to somehow highlight those traits, which are for the most part lacks or absences with the possibly more positive traits of talkativeness and emotional availability/frustration in the other characters and, by contrasting those things, show the whole relationship. The cool part about poetry rather than fiction is you get to write lines like these from Gabrielle:

Life on the road is better. Even when

Whole days go by without her talking,

More is said than in weeks of talk back home.

…

Versus this from Xena:

…

And after, it was hard for us to speak

Of any of it. The silence between you and me

Crashed through the trees behind us like a kite.

…

Because, oh, the glory of the metaphor and abstraction to describe the bone deep emotions we all feel when the relationship is a struggle.

The Stories We Tell and Live Into

Apr6

As a writer who is also a Christian, I find I think about Passover and Easter as being about the Story. We tell the stories of Exodus and the Passion of Christ at this sacred time of year to remind ourselves of who we are. That is what ritual is for: we eat specific food and tell specific stories and sing specific songs and we know ourselves as a people descended from the people who chose those foods, stories and songs, gathered or invented them and gave them meaning.

I think of this in the context of the popular cultural narratives that have been occupying my thoughts these last few weeks, in particular, the two separate and very different first century CE localities of ancient Greece and Rome, brought to us by Renaissance Pictures, Rob Tapert and Lucy Lawless, Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Xena: Warrior Princess. The more recent Spartacus (2010 to 2013) was about men (and women) bound to the gladiatorial arena. It was about despair and meaningless death. In contrast, the earlier XWP (1995 to 2001) was about changing one’s way and rising from death into something better.

I have binge watched XWP more than once. I rented the DVDs of Spartacus once; while the half naked gladiators were nice, there is no way I would watch those shows again. They are too much like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in that when blood sprayed across my computer screen, I automatically found myself throwing up my arms to keep the blood from splashing across my face.

Yep. That bad.

I think about all this now because of the two major interpretations of Christ’s death and resurrection. There are people who talk about Christ’s dying for our sins, as if God was so pissed off with humans that he (it is always he in these readings) needed to kill his own Son to make up for our sin. Weird shit, that. In contrast, a more liberal reading says that humans killed Jesus, but God the Father/Creator/Mother resurrected him to prove to us lame humans that death is not the end, that God can overcome this enormous problem.

So when I look at the stories I use to constitute my identity, I often choose the ones that are not about characters trying to see how much they can get away with but about characters engaged in rescue and redemption, rather like the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. It is an ongoing project, a battle that never is entirely won. All you can do is stay on the road, take good friends with you for the journey, and keep telling yourselves the stories that remind you who you are, and how strong you can actually be.

In Which Our Hero Learns Nifty New Pop Culture Slang

Apr3

I dedicate this post to my sister, Michelle Spilecki, whose birthday it is today.

So over the weekend I learned a catchy new abbreviation and the idea that goes with it: OTP, One True Pairing. Think about some of the TV pairs from the last twenty years. These are just the shows I watch. I am sure you could come up with plenty more yourself, especially if you are more of a Zombie Apocalypse kind of individual.

Scully and Mulder

Buffy and Angel

Booth and Bones

Castle and Beckett

Phil and Melinda

Carter and Martinelli (or Sousa, if you prefer)

Xena and Gabrielle

These are all pairings in which the chemistry between the actors almost immediately got conveyed to people who were prepared to see it. When I think about The X Files, Buffy, and Castle, in addition to Xena: Warrior Princess, I would argue that in the pilot of each series you see the kind of chemistry before the end of the episode.

I think one of the things that makes these shows so effective is that most of the pairs develop their relationship–their knowledge of each other, their professional and personal respect for each other, how they work together and when they give the other person space or slap them upside the head (usually metaphorically)–on the job, working to make the world a better place.

I have often observed that some of the solidest seeming marriages were between two people engaged in one or more complex, long term projects together: leading a church choir, producing community theater, things like that. Raising children together is not the ideal project for marriage building, simply because at some point your project learns to, for example, talk, and then express her/himself, and often what s/he might be projecting is disagreement with one or more of the aforesaid partners in the marriage. In comparison, plays and concerts don’t talk back (although to be fair, actors, singers and the like often do, although as they are not part of the marriage, even if they are part of the family, it does not matter as much). Anyhow, that is what it seems like to me.

So a friend was writing about OTP on her blog an I saw it and thought, as one does, Huh? So I asked her and she said:

One true pairing. As in, “Xena and Gabrielle are my OTP,” or, “Gabrielle and Xena are OTP more than any OTP in the history of fiction, and if you don’t see it, you’re crazy.”

Which makes sense. One of the big problems I see with all my favorite pairs is that they are never completely equal. One person, usually the man, is a little better, smarter, stronger, more… Part of that is how the star billing goes. Part of that is our culture. Part of that is our culture running how star billing goes.

But even on something like Buffy, whose two main squeezes were superpowerful vampires, well, Angel couldn’t be around her without problems, so their equality was made out to be impossible. And Spike was morally her inferior (that whole century of killing sprees thing not followed by a quest for redemption as Angel managed). So they were only equal at fighting not at being in the world and making decisions about good and evil, until really close to the end. And when Spike finally did something to redeem himself, he blew up hell and died with it. Whoops. One more sorta equal relationship bites the dust.

I think what they are doing on Castle is hopeful, with Stana Katic as Detective Beckett matching wits with Nathan Fillion and frequently taking on the more physical roles, but we will have to see how that goes. Hell, the fact that they are so much more often casting women who are five foot nine, and then putting them in four inch heels so they are as tall as the men, goes a long way toward changing how we see women as possibly strong and still lovable. But there is still a sense of women’s sphere and men’s sphere as different and probably not equal. Once Bones had her baby, she stopped going out into the field.

In comparison, what we see with Xena and Gabrielle is two people who start with a very uneven friendship, and end up, six years later with one of the most equal, solid friendships/ partnerships I think I have ever seen on television. I think we would all like a relationship like that. And to some extent I think one reason we often watch these shows is to try out what we think we want and see whether it works. Some writers serve their characters better than others, and we love best the ones that not only show the chemistry and respect between the pairings, but also resist the inorganic cultural forces that try to bend the relationship into an old familiar pattern at the risk of the relationship.

Because, you know, mystery babies are NEVER a good idea. And I would love to see more of Philinda…

How Line Lengths and Breaks Might Convey Voice

Apr3

So the other day, I went back to a poem I had started about Callisto, Xena’s arch-nemesis. This one is about episode 2.7 Intimate Stranger, where Xena and Callisto get their bodies switched by one of the gods, primarily because Lucy Lawless had broken her pelvic bones in a fall from a horse she was practicing stunts on for the Tonight Show. It was a great choice, not only because it is always fun to see characters we know switch (Enver Gjokaj is a genius at this; check out the Joss Whedon series Dollhouse), but because it pointed out how similar these two women are. With the right (or wrong, really) set of circumstances, they actually could have been each other: Callisto the warlord who set a village afire that would turn the orphan Xena into a psychopath. We like them better as they are, because let’s face it, Callisto is the BDVE (Best Damn Villain Ever), with her creepy line delivery and spidery physicality.

So anyway, I wrote version 1.0 below and did not think much about it. But then I was looking at the previous poem I wrote about Callisto, with the first two lines:

“As children we come to experiences bone to bone,

with no kind skin to muffle the uproar. Imagine:”

I realized that the new poem was at least a full inch thinner, 2 1/2 inches, than the old one, which has line lengths of 3 1/2 inches. Well, the thing is, at 5’ 8” and 120 pounds, one of the first things you notice about Hudson Leick is how thin she is, an impression fostered by her costume being even more revealing than Xena’s, especially at her midsection.

Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself: X. Reflects on C., v.1.0

…

In the night season, I dream memories

Misremembered, death in the form of

My perfect nemesis, a woman born

In the fire that killed her family. She is

Me. And I did create her as she claims,

Though it was not my hand that lit

The spark that tore her world away.

She revels in her pain. I did that

Once, as she does, and spread it

Far and wide: if I suffer, so too must

Everyone. I will wring out the world

Like a map weeping blood. I am

Her now, our minds and bodies

Switched by the gods in their infinite

Unfairness. My enemy is me. I look

In the river and the body that I know

Does not look back. She promised

Once to take away everything

I loved, my friends, family, horse,

Reputation, everything it took me

So many years to win back.

Now in her body I must race

Against time, again, to stop her.

Both of us suffer from my monumental

Guilt. Like a crashing wave, once

It starts, there is no stopping it.

So then I thought about a poem I wrote many years ago titled Cancer Barbie, using the image of a Barbie whose hair as been loved off, a là The Velveteen Rabbit, to talk about cancer as I have seen friends experience it. Given that the image is Barbie, the shape of the poem really matters, so I tried to make a poem about Barbie look like Barbie, to wit:

Cancer Barbie

for Jackie, Anita, Judy

…

Some

little girl

has loved

this doll

completely, loved her

long blonde hair

right off

just the

way these

chemicals

coursing

through

your body

love you down

to the very follicle

love you right

all

the

way

down

your

roots.

…

At first, I thought I could do a similar thing by centering what I have here as version 2.0, but it ended up looking like, depending on how generous you want to be, a stubby gingerbread man or something my cat coughed up. So forget the centering. What the erratic breaks and short line lengths do is to make the voice of the speaker, in this case Xena inside Callisto’s body, sound more erratic. I can’t decide if the body you are in should decide your voice or if it is only the mind. In that case, I should go with Version 1.0 for this, but if I find a way to write a poem using Callisto’s voice, regardless of which body she is in, I will totally use this style. So let me know: which do you prefer, version 1.0 or 2.0 and why?

Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself: X. Reflects on C., v.2.0

…

In the night season, I dream

memories misremembered,

death in the form of

…

my perfect nemesis, a woman

born in the fire

that killed her family. She is

…

me. And I did create her

as she claims, though it was not

my hand that lit the spark

…

that tore her world away.

She revels in her pain. I did that

…

once, as she does,

and spread it far

and wide: if I suffer, so too

must everyone.

…

I will wring out the world

like a map weeping blood.

…

I am her now, our minds

and bodies switched by the gods

in their infinite

…

unfairness. My enemy is me.

…

I look in the river and the body

that I know does not look back.

She promised once to take away

…

everything I loved,

my friends, family, horse,

reputation, everything it took me

…

so many years to win back.

Now in her body I must race

against time, again,

…

to stop her. Both of us suffer

from my monumental

guilt. Like a crashing wave,

…

once it starts, there

is no stopping it.

…

Spilecki, Susan. “Cancer Barbie,” Midwest Poetry Review. Summer 2002.

The Ups & Downs of Giving My Brain a Home

Apr1

We each have a unique brain, but my lately my own brain has been acting particularly unique. On Tuesday, as I was heading for work, I started thinking about what I would write in the next blog. When I got to the train, I dug around in my coat for a file card and wrote 24 lines in very tiny handwriting to capture my ideas before class. I do realize that a lot of you young whippersnappers, especially those born after the bicentennial, probably would have tippy-tappy typed yourself a text or email, but you would, I argue, be losing out. The e-world does not have the serendipity of the material world (Oooh, now there is an epigraph. Everyone: go write me a poem with this as its heart’s kernel! Report back.) It is hard to accidentally come across something you have put into the ether as I did yesterday when I found the file card my cat had knocked off the dresser, a file card scribbled last year when I was at a bookstore, remembered the book and the line in it and copied it down, knowing I would eventually use it to write something (which I had done a few years earlier when I first read the book, but I lost that particular note). Serendipity on top of serendipity.

Anyway, my brain. So as I was entering the building where I teach, looking at my notes, I suddenly started singing in my head:

Chicken scratch blogpost, I don’t care!

Chicken scratch blogpost, I don’t CAAAAAAAARE!

My master’s gone away!

Sigh. But there is also an upside to hosting my particular brain. On Monday afternoon, just as I was waking up from a nap, I could see, as if typed on the inside of my skull, the line, “As children we come to experiences bone to bone, with no kind skin to muffle the uproar.”

I know, right? Amazing!

I immediately knew that it was the beginning of a poem, at first I thought the poem about Troy but as I sat up and scrambled to get to the computer to write it down, I realized that instead it would enable me to write about the origin of the character I would argue is the Best Damn Villain Ever in popular culture, Xena’s nemesis Callisto, portrayed by the very talented Hudson Leick, who apparently now teaches yoga. That seems a trifle ironic, given that Callisto is a very likeable psychotic mass-murdering fiend. I even saw a short, 4 minute, YouTube video that explains with clips from the shows, just why Leick’s Callisto is the Best Villain Ever (so it is not just my opinion, huh!).

This is why, despite all my protests that There Is No Muse, GRRR!, I can absolutely understand why the ancients would make up the idea of the muse. Even I, after briefly minoring in psychology in college, have a hard time giving my own mind credit for such an unlikely phenomenon as the perfect gift of a perfect line after a damn fine nap. It is easier to give somebody else credit, whether that’s nine generous Greek chicks or God. The Greeks are the ones who handed us down the idea of hubris, the dangerous self-pride or arrogance that offends the gods. For writers, inspiration is a precarious thing, as illustrated by all the blogs on WordPress alone that focus on writers block. Even for me, the instinct is to be cautiously humble…

Inhabiting the Xenaverse

Mar30

So I did not make it quite as far as Troy this week, alas and alack. Instead I found myself working on FanFic or perhaps FanEpicPo instead. These two poems comment on Xena Episode 1.8 Prometheus. The first speaker is Hercules and the second Gabrielle. It is a start.

Reconnecting: Hercules Speaks

…

“You‘re not much for girl talk, are you?

Of course, you‘re not like most girls.” –G. to X.

…

Your friend is right. You are not like most, whether

Girl or epic hero. Your rage still lies close

To the surface, a tool to be saved, and used

When the time of danger comes, and returns,

And returns, and returns. At a moment’s notice,

You turn it outward, with glee, a strange set

Of companions to hold in your heart. We made

A pretty good team once, too, the son of a god

And the daughter of an innkeeper, turned warlord,

Then reformed. I hear you’ve been helping people

To find your purpose. So yes, I do believe

The world needs you at least as much as me.

…

I will not see you sacrifice the life I helped turn

To the service of the world, not now. You mean too much

To me. It is easier to hold up a wall of rocks

On my back than to change your mind when you

Have made it up. Any other time I would find that

Admirable, but now you are risking your one, sweet

Life when I could do it for you, save the world

Without your cold corpse haunting my days.

Selfish? Yes, but sometimes I wonder if

We shared a soul once. And if I can do

Anything to prevent your untimely death,

That would be a labor worth undertaking.

…

What We Might Regain: G. Contemplates

…

Sometimes I wonder what she sees in me.

Sometimes I think of that story Plato wrote

About the people with four legs and two heads

That Zeus got all upset about and split

With lightning bolts, leaving us all asunder:

Only two legs, one head, and half a soul.

…

If, when Prometheus was rebound and doomed

To have his liver eaten by foul birds,

Day after day, mortals lost his gifts:

Fire and healing. Then what would it mean

If some heroes saved him? What does it mean

That she lets me travel with her, unable

…

To help with her adventures? It is intimidating,

Sometimes, watching her work like she is

A female Hercules. The sword is one thing,

But backflips and double kicks? I have begun

To write it all down, as Homer did for Achilles

And Odysseus. More people should know of her

…

Brilliance. Too, I sometimes wonder, if

Saving Prometheus will bring us back our fire

And ability to heal ourselves, what would we

Gain if she ever found that hero, the one

Who somehow in another human body holds

The other half of her enormous soul?

Line Lengths and a Viking Bunny

Mar25

So I have been thinking about line lengths lately. I am working on a set of poems loosely set in ancient Greece, which has led me to sorta kinda use iambic pentameter, which means ten syllables with an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, times five. But sometimes for the sake of either a conversational sound or to end a line on a solid word (generally not a preposition, although I am not opposed to that), I add or take away a few syllables. The Alexandrine line, so called because it was frequently used by Alexander Pope, the misogynist bastard, is twelve syllables, and I recall my English teachers saying that he chose it because twelve syllables is about the maximum you can say on a single breath. But the poem I wrote today about the Roman criminal punishment of crucifixion (you have remember that all this has been inspired by Xena: Warrior Princess) has lines of fifteen or more syllables and I think the breath is fine. It might be that shorter syllables take less breath, I suppose, which would make sense if you set a poem to music and hold some notes longer, probably frequently the longer syllables.

I guess for the most part, I am looking for a line of three to four inches in Times New Roman 12 point font, though how I got that line length, I have no idea. The writer of the blog Optional Poetry uses extremely short lines, sometimes only a few words. What kind of line lengths do you use in your poetry?

Also, this Viking Bunny appeared in my email inbox today, so I am doing you the favor of sharing. Pass it on.

More Damn Muses, But These are the BEST

Mar13

So all this talk about Xena has made me realize that I know damn little about ancient Greece, and given that one of my friends actually teaches high school Latin and Greek (in 2015. I know.), I figure I should fix this grave lacuna in my knowledge. So I started messing about online, figuring that the interwebs would point me in the right direction. After getting sidetracked by a statue of Aphrodite having a bad hair day, I got down to business and found a translation of the The Theogony of Hesiod (Greek, ~700 BCE) translated by Hugh G. Evelyn White in 1914. And who do you think he starts out talking about?

(ll. 26-28) `Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.’

(ll. 29-35) So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvellous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last. But why all this about oak or stone? (2)

(ll. 36-52) Come thou, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice. Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spread abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympus resound, and the homes of the immortals. And they uttering their immortal voice, celebrate in song first of all the reverend race of the gods from the beginning, those whom Earth and wide Heaven begot, and the gods sprung of these, givers of good things. Then, next, the goddesses sing of Zeus, the father of gods and men, as they begin and end their strain, how much he is the most excellent among the gods and supreme in power. And again, they chant the race of men and strong giants, and gladden the heart of Zeus within Olympus, — the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus the aegis-holder.

Now aside from the fact that this is just awful darn pretty, it is still making out poets to be mouthpieces who just channel the Muses while the girls do the work. This old hat formula has, as I have asserted before, had a negative affect on wanna be poets who don’t get that writing is work.

Although, now that I think of it, this is the first hat…

“The Dance of the Muses at Mount Helicon” by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1807).

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All about Poetry: Sublime, Ridiculous, Useful

Tag Archives: Xena Warrior Princess

My Apparent Thing for Rhetorical Questions in Poetry

That a Woman Can Stand Up

Negative Traits, Or, Is That What I Was Doing with That Character?

The Stories We Tell and Live Into

In Which Our Hero Learns Nifty New Pop Culture Slang

How Line Lengths and Breaks Might Convey Voice

The Ups & Downs of Giving My Brain a Home

Inhabiting the Xenaverse

Line Lengths and a Viking Bunny

More Damn Muses, But These are the BEST