lament for sir kay by me. thinking about him always. i can't imagine having my younger brother become king and. like. just. what the fuck. i love him. no one understands him like i do.

Bertolt Brecht, In Dark Times [from ‘Later Svendborg Poems and Satires 1936-1938’], in Bertolt Brecht: ‘Poems’, Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, with the co-operation of Erich Fried, Eyre Methuen, London, 1976, p. 274

WOLFMAN ON HALLOWEEN. "hey - why don't you check it out on substack?"

Merlin, Lancelot, & Tristram by Edwin Arlington Robinson PDFs are now available! Enjoy!

Medieval Literature scans | Arthurian Retellings scans | Ko-fi

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain..."

by Emily Dickinson

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading – treading – till it seemed That Sense was breaking through – And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum – Kept beating – beating – till I thought My mind was going numb – And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space – began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing – then –

edna st. vincent millay, what savage blossom

you cant even begin poems with "i will sodomise and facef uck you" anymore. because of woke .

Holy fuck

An experiment; an erasure, if you must. Hopkins, I think, is the one of our poets who uses language most like Sappho, as a thing to be worked and moulded, but not as bronze is worked, as clay is, fluidly and with the hands; his “couple-colour” is a coinage the Greeks would have approved of. This is to show how our understanding of the poem would change based on the deterioration of its preservation. 

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”

[image transcript:

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

—Kyle Tran Myhre. end id]

Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke tr. by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann

you cant even begin poems with "i will sodomise and facef uck you" anymore. because of woke .

even better- the poem is not actually about sex

it's him calling out other poets for criticizing his sexually explicit poems. in the sense of "fuck you, my racy poetry is great actually"

(also there were full English translations published earlier than the 20th century, but with rather coy, censored language- one rendered "I will sodomize and face-fuck you" as "I'll snag you and gag you," for example.)

feeling the need to inform people who were not already aware that charles baudelaire was specifically a horny poet. whole sections of les fleurs du mal are poems about how sexy his mistress was. i feel like the asoue connection has made him known for writing bleak poems (which he did) but i must set the record straight that this man wrote about fucking just as much

i'm literally not joking

he also wrote yuri!!