Urns
Shipwrecks that happened a long time ago
Non-specific odes to heroic masculinity
Specific odes to a masculine hero
A woman who is taking a bath
What your friends should do when they stand at your grave someday
Greek independence from the damn Turks
The Light Brigade
Highwaymen
Chicago
A woman who is beautiful now but who will someday be old and not beautiful at all
Any other, lesser brigade
Any mortal who was ever captured and taken as a lover by a Greek god
Drummer Hodge
Moral lessons you have drawn from the industriousness of bees
London
Dead prospectors
England
What it might feel like to be hanged to death
Vases
Your friend from your undergraduate days at Oxford who died in the Boer War
The tomb of a king of a country you have never been to
A dream about your lover, who is dead
O tempora o mores
Pastoral metaphors for having sex
Jabberwockies
The trees of your homeland
Turkish independence from the damn Greeks
Your friend from your undergraduate days at Oxford who died in the Great War
Statues
Your friend from your undergraduate days at Oxford who drowned
Tags: don’t you die in that war buddy, i am not a poems expert, i bet your poems are very good, i dreamed of him last night i saw his face, i have a very specific appreciation of poetry that is grounded in a very particular time and place, lycidas, poems, poems should have rhymes in them that’s what i think, that’s it those are the only good things to write poems about, whimsically held positions
Lesser brigade = the Lite Brigade.
Har har.
Ugh.
Always start the day with puns.
Puns + the inevitable self loathing that comes of making them = Breakfast of Champions.
Any poem about barbarians is also acceptable.
Or waiting for barbarians, even if barbarians never show up.
“waiting for barbarians” would be a great band name
Also, flowers.
Only if the flowers are a metaphor for one or more of the above subjects.
Chicago the band = Acceptable topic
Chicago the city = Nope
So, the real question is…
If I wrote a poem about a heroically masculine, bee farming Londoner who, in thinking about what it might feel like to be hanged to death on one of the trees of his homeland, ponders his own mortality and imagines what his friends should say when looking at his urn someday, which subsequently makes him think of his friends from Oxford who died in the Great and Boer Wars, respectively (oh how he wished they could be there to look at said urn too), as well as his Chicagoan lover, who is dead, and how once he watched her take a bath- at that time she was young and beautiful but, were she alive today, she would most certainly be old and not beautiful at all…
Would you guys publish it?
dunno if they’d publish it, but I’d read it.
Needs 20% more vases
His Chicagoan lover was from his undergraduate days at Oxford, and she drowned in that bath. Before her untimely demise, she was a sculptor, whose mother was Greek and whose father was Turkish. She made vases that depicted her mother’s desire for Greek liberation from the Turks on one side, and her father’s desire for Turkish liberation from the Greeks on the other (these desires and their depictions were literal and had nothing to do with her parents’ feelings about their marriage, which was just fine thank you). She filled her vases with wildflowers from her meadow; lovestruck bees visited them, fruitlessly carrying pollen from stamen to lifeless pistil, like a lover who impregnates his beloved and does not know that she is dying.
Being locked in a prison cell
The ennui of cutlery
Battlefield funerals
lions/tigers/mice
Anthropomorphised seasons (with boobs)
“We know what art is! It’s paintings of horses!”
*makes notes*
Stand by your inboxes, Mallory and Nicole, for my epid poem ‘ The Urn from the Ancient Shipwreck of Heroic Men and Bathing Women, dedicated to the Friends At My Graveside Who Support Greek Independence from The Turks and Turkish Independence from The Greeks and also Mourn The Light Brigade’.
It’s 26,000 words long.
I never read a list so correct in all my life
One of my thesis poems was about listening to my neighbors fight while I showered. Not quite “A woman taking a bath” but I am still pleased and will take that as a miniscule crumb of approval.
Other things I wrote about in my MFA thesis poems:
-the taste of earwax
-fear of jiacama
-how i broke up with a guy because he wanted a standard poodle
-the smell of yellow
-watching L&O:SVU while drunk
What IS jiacama, and what are its intentions?
Who knows, man? Any food (especially a root vegetable!) bigger than my head is deeply suspicious.
I want to read your poetry
Oooh ooh here’s some of mine:
-how your boobs float in a hot springs
-amoebas swallowing each other
-black holes
-dogs with seasonal affective disorder
that amoeba thing sounds weirdly hot… (what has the internet done to me?)
NOT EVEN JOKING, THAT POEM IS ABOUT SEX
HOW DID YOU KNOW
I think I love you
I’m sad about these dogs and I don’t even really like dogs.
Poor Lenore!
She died in the Boer War.
It wasn’t a Great war –
there was plenty of gore, sure –
but otherwise quite a snore.
#wewenttoOxfordtogether
#poemsshouldhaverhymesinthemthatswhatIthink
Definitely needs more vases.
The tags. I am dying.
The Irma Luhrman-Merman murder
Turned the bird’s word lurid
The whir and the purr of a twirler girl
She would the world were demurer
The insurer’s allure
For valor were pure Kari Wuhrer
One fervid whirl over her turgid error
Rural juror
Rural juror
I will never forget you
Rural juror
I’ll always be glad I met you
Rural juror
I will never forget you
Rural juror
I’ll always be glad I met you
Rural juror (x2)
These were the best days of my flerm.
I hope the last stanza is supposed to be sung to the tune of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” THESE WERE THE BEST DAYS OF MY FLERM! *rocks out*
http://media.giphy.com/media/viMo3kA3fBIsw/giphy….
I had to memorize that fucking o tempora o mores bs, fuck you very much Cicero you suck.
PS what is that picture from, why does that man look like a young Stephen Fry
It’s from Wings! One of the best movies ever. (It’s about a guy whose best friend dies in the War.)
Beauty fades
Just like the less well-known brigades
We buzz and work
To free ourselves from Turks
I imagine it’s like choking
Stand over my grave, smoking
An ancient ship submerged
Their ardor surged
He’s like Adonis
Persephone was there too
Oh my darling, oh my darling
You are lost and gone forever
Just like Mrs O’Leary’s cow
He died too young
He died too young
He died too young
Now he’s a statue
Which category does “I Wonder Why Dad Is So Thoroughly Mad” fall under?
Noble horses and their nobler riders
Sam McGee and his questionable cremation
the wide open prairie and the ennui it inspires
I am fully in favor of this list. Definitely a step up from my undergrad poetry workshops where there was an unwritten rule that 80% of all poetry had to be about eating disorders, as allegorized through Greek myth, in meter.
Poems were considered much better by my poetry professor if they were about sex. He was kind of a creepy dude! But: I did learn a lot about writing.
EGGS AND BLOOD
POEMS SHOULD NEVER BE ABOUT MENSTRUATION
gonna mix it up and write about lizard blood and quail eggs as part of a witch spell
Vases! One of my favourites is “Ode to a Grecian Urn Summerized”:
Gods chase
Round vase
What say?
What play?
Dont’t know.
Nice, though.
Ah, I loves me some poetry. One of my favourite pastimes was dragging friends to poetry readings. Al Purdy was full on cranky pants (he totally badgered one of his opening acts) while Patrick Lane was absolutely charming (he complimented my girlfriend’s skirt in a totally non-skeevy way).
stillbirth
“Don’t you die in that war buddy” is one of the best tags ever on this site, thank you Mallory.
All poems alluded to above are actually about abortion.
Urn=womb
Ship=womb
Bathtub=obviously a womb
Vase=womb
Graves/tombs=wombs
etc
Pretty sure the flerm in Rural Juror = womb, too. Also, Kari Wuhrer had one, or so I’m told.
Things I genuinely wrote poems about in college, some of which were very good:
A fucking sestina about Richard Nixon
A tiny snail and vulnerability
trains as a metaphor for assholes who yell about politics
a villanelle about essentially nothing
fallen plates
Some of them were not. None of them were about blood or eggs though.
Oh my god this one poem is actually pretty decent and I kind of want to edit it and submit it somewhere.
“This one poem”=sestina about Richard Nixon, right? SEND IT NOW
The sestina about Richard Nixon is probably still too pretentious… I was actually looking at the one that has bits about fallen plates in it. It has an epigraph from Vonnegut in it and everything.
The sestina is literally entitled “The Sublunary Dreams of Richard Milhous Nixon” and I still love that title. I used to be super into reading about the Watergate scandal, in case you couldn’t guess…
a peanut sat on a railroad track
his heart was all aflutter
the 5:15 came rushing by
toot toot peanut butter
Reflections on ice breaking:
Candy
is dandy
but
liquor is quicker
pot is not.
on cows:
the cow is of the bovine ilk,
one end moo the other milk.
ogden nash.
LYCIDAS IS MY JAM
YOU FORGOT PLUMS
This list also needs:
– Swimming across the Hellespont (though if your Oxford friend drowned while doing that, then I suppose it’s already in there by implication)
– Anthropomorphized winds
– Death driving a carriage
– Mowers
– Tygers
– 12:20 in New York on a Friday
– Birch trees and/or apple trees, with or without ladders resting against them
Pretty sure the flerm in Rural Juror = womb, too. Also, Kari Wuhrer had one, or so I'm told.
Your friend from your undergraduate days whom you pushed out of a tree and who eventually died but not in a war
Your friend from your undergraduate days whom you pushed out of a tree and who eventually died but not in a war
Mallory, I love you almost as much as I love “Lycidas.”
I submit for your approval:
-The burning of our house
-red wheelbarrows
female vampires and fairies who seduce knights and innocent maidens.
seasons of the year. If a happy poem, it’s spring, if melancholy, write about autumn.
Mongolian dictators
Oh, and daffodils, of course.