hi! i like poems!

i'm bee (they/them), also known as @ilovecoelacanths.

this year i want to try new things. i'm going to do my best to try new hobbies, meet new people, go to new places, learn about new topics, and experience new art.

one way i'm doing this is by participating in @lesmisletters, where you read one chapter of les misérables every day (although so far for me, it's been more like two chapters every other day.)

another way i'm doing this is by reading more poems! this is where you come in. i made a google form for people to recommend poems to me!

please submit your poems here:

poem recommendations!

hi! i want to try to read more poems this year. please tell me some poems you like! (1 poem per form please) i want to discover poems i've n

Google Docs

more about what i'll use this blog for and other general info under the cut :]

#bee's poems #pinned #poetry

beespoems reblogged

tepot

saintsebastiensbf

Mary Oliver, Everything

beespoems reblogged

fuckyeahcoelacanths

berylthebarrel

You swim, and I do too. We aren’t the same, but long ago, I was you.

Your fins, my hands, your tail, my legs. Or maybe fins to legs. You have a lot, you see.

Do you look at me, and wish it was different? Maybe you want legs and hands too.

But I tell you this; enjoy the sea, and its deeps. Maybe one day, I’ll be there too.

beespoems reblogged

coelacanthropology

People forget, but about a thousand years ago they thought the world was coming to an end so people sold their worldly goods and gave away their money and went to the top of a mountain wherever they happened to be to wait for the end of the world. And they waited and waited. Some of them may still be there. The millenarians. That's what they were called.

What they saw, finally, was that after the world comes to an end life goes on. That's how it was for the Greeks and the Romans. That's how it was for the Millenarians. Then, later on, a couple hundred years later, people in 1200 they didn't even realize the world had come to an end. They just grazed their sheep amid the ruins and got on with stealing and fornicating. When you go to Arizona you see the levels of sediment in the rock in the mesas that come up out of the desert all dried out for thousands of years hundreds of thousands of years and that horizontal stripe of red in the rock that was where the sea came up to where you're standing now it was nothing but underwater animals and then the water levels fell the fish all vanished and here you are sitting at a picnic table thinking how beautiful this is like heaven.

-Charles Mee, Heaven on Earth

beespoems reblogged

orcposts

do not go gentle into that good night

orcposts

be a bit of a bitch about it

#not bee’s poems #pffft #i mean yeah that’s basically the poem #rage rage against the dying of the light #and all that

beespoems

bee's poems entry 1: "introduction to poetry"

thanks for all the submissions so far! i've already had 12 responses! i hope if you think of poems to share, or if you find a new poem, you'll submit them throughout the year.

i want to officially kick off this blog with my thoughts on one of the submissions: "introduction to poetry" by billy collins. the submitter said that i should read it first if i could, and although i did read one other poem before it, i think this is a good place to officially start this project.

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

i really liked this one. i especially like the beginning imagery of the color slide because that is how a lot of poems feel to me when i read them, like they all have a light shining through that comes from the same place, but the color film over it is unique to each poem. you know what i mean?

i also agree that many people try to analyze poetry completely separately from the emotion of it, thinking that if they can name all the devices it uses that means they understand it. while dissecting a poem can help you to understand it, trying to do that without first just letting yourself experience and think about it is more like hacking it apart with a meat cleaver. i think this is why lots of people think they don't like poetry! i believe there's poetry out there for everyone, some people just haven't been introduced properly.

#bee's poems #day 1 #submitted poem #introduction to poetry #billy collins