I'm doodling around with fic tonight, but it's sort of hung up on technicalities (the technicalities being "I would much rather have a pretty picture in my brain than be arsed to write about it") at the moment, so I thought I would post this.
I've seen that meme going around for posting your favorite poem. Well, my favorite poem is 3,182 lines long, which I think is over LJ's per-post character limit, and most people look at me with incomprehension when I tell them Beowulf is my favorite poem. Instead, I went to my totally awesome Moleskine commonplace book and pulled out some of my favorite excerpts from poems I like a lot. These poems are poems I turn to when I need inspiration for writerly stuff, especially for description. I always reach for those minute details that bring a place, a moment, a body, to life, but even more, when reading (and trying to write) prose I love slightly poetic, idiosyncratic turns of phrase that, once you think about it, work.
( more: Anna Akhmatova, e.e. cummings, dead Anglo-Saxon person )
I've seen that meme going around for posting your favorite poem. Well, my favorite poem is 3,182 lines long, which I think is over LJ's per-post character limit, and most people look at me with incomprehension when I tell them Beowulf is my favorite poem. Instead, I went to my totally awesome Moleskine commonplace book and pulled out some of my favorite excerpts from poems I like a lot. These poems are poems I turn to when I need inspiration for writerly stuff, especially for description. I always reach for those minute details that bring a place, a moment, a body, to life, but even more, when reading (and trying to write) prose I love slightly poetic, idiosyncratic turns of phrase that, once you think about it, work.
As we leaned to kiss, my landlocked spirit sprouted wings
And hovered there in the fan feather of his breathing.
Poor airborne, half-celestial thing, it almost seemed
she'd wanted to abandon me and fly away with him.
-Plato, "As we leaned to kiss," translated by Sherod Santos, Greek Lyric Poetry (2005)
( more: Anna Akhmatova, e.e. cummings, dead Anglo-Saxon person )
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