Epithalamia: A Retrospective in Three Parts · 9:02am Oct 8th, 2017
(Alternative title: In Which Quill Rambles At Great Length Without Very Much Editing About How They Wrote Two Mediocre Poems And One Excellent One.
Also There Are Pretentious Headings.)
i: the conception
Okay, so, full disclosure: I freaking love trawling pages on Wikipedia about obscure Ancient Greek poetry. I also cannot read Ancient Greek, but I find the discussion of their forms incredibly inspiring as a poet. For those who don't know, Ancient Greek doesn't use syllables in the same way that English does: it has long, short, and anceps ("free", or sometimes "irrational") syllables. This doesn't make the forms impossible, because long syllables can be substituted for stressed ones and short syllables for un-stressed ones, and they generally tend to sound quite pleasant—it's the anceps that give us trouble, but it's not too hard to pick whichever syllable sounds best for the line, and they're rare enough that you don't have to worry about them all that much.
It's while trawling through Wikipedia, looking for patterns I could use in some undoubtedly pretentious poem, that I discovered the word epithalamium.
An epithalamium, according to Wikipedia, is a poem written for the bride on her way to the marital chamber. It celebrates love, and sex, and the couple in question. It has been used in a variety of ways over the years (sometimes literally read/sung to a couple on their wedding night, which sounds really freakin creepy) and has been adopted by a small number of modern(ish) writers. And if you ask me, it was exactly what I was looking for as a response to this prompt.
I decided I would write a collection of poems on a theme, discussing totally different approaches to sex & sexuality from the perspective of people about to have their first sexual encounter with a partner (for each poem is that last minute before consummation). And I figured that I might as well write about LGBT+ couples because... well, representation is cool, and epithalamia as a medium seem to have been pretty firmly about straight, cis folks over the years (which is in no way meant to be a bad thing about the poets who have written them—merely an explanation for my choice of subject matter).
The first question you might think I'd ask is "how many poems should I write?" The first question I actually asked was "I wonder what forms these poems should be in?"
I knew two that I wanted to use for sure: free verse, because I felt inspired by the discussion of Luna Upon Sulva in the past round and wanted to practice my line-ends, and because free verse is something I generally need to practice using more; and a sonnet, because I am a hack poet sonnets have a long-standing place in the tradition of love poetry, and I wanted to make sure I had the opportunity to use that. I also knew that two poems was hardly a collection, so I figured I'd either try one of the asclepiads, dactylic hexameter, or just fall back on sapphics to make up to three or more poems. Regardless of what I went with, I wanted something that would really contrast the iambic pentameter of the sonnet—a huge part of this collection was proving to myself, more than anything, that I'm competent enough with various different forms.
And so, about eight hours after the prompt had dropped, I had an idea. And by god, I was going to write it.
ii: the gestation
[This bit of the retrospective is based on HoofBitingActionOverload's blog post Writing Is Dumb. This post fascinated me, and I think I learned an awful lot from reading it—I realised part way through this contest that doing something similar with this entry could be an awesome learning experience for me (and, hopefully, for anyone who reads it). I'm not going to take you through every single draft in my gdocs version history, because many of them are incredibly boring, but I thought it could be interesting to take a peek at the way in which this entry was composed. Timestamps are given in BST, where the deadline for submission was 1pm on the second day.]
9:15pm—After fifteen minutes of double-checking the Wikipedia entry for epithalamia, I decide to start writing the first poem. Small Roman numeric titles are my jam, and I figure they'd be good here—the blend between modernity in the lowercase and antiquity in the numerals was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to do with this piece, anyway.
9:19pm—I figure that three is a good placeholder number for the collection (it is, after all, the bare minimum I need to do to make it structurally worth doing a collection), so I stick titles in for them all. And I figure that opening the sonnet with a bit of exposition will be...
9:20pm—... a terrible idea. Seriously, though: sonnets are a bloody tricky form to write. I was chatting with Lise about this earlier in discord, and it'll probably come up over the course of this post, but the difficulty with sonnets is that their tight form means that if you meander even a little from your focus, you've lost a huge percentage of space on a tangent. Something horizon mentioned elsewhere in the discussion on poetry this round is that if you want to learn how to write tight prose, you should write poetry, and my experience with sonnets has me entirely in agreement on this point.
9:30pm—It takes me ten minutes to figure out how I want this sonnet to start. In that time I do very little except mess with formatting to space out the titles a little more nicely. But this? This is where the writing proper begins.
From here on in, I'm probably going to be cropping out bits of the page that aren't relevant to each update. I think it'll be less jarring to make this change now rather than later, when it starts getting big.
9:31pm—You might think it's odd that I've swapped out "along" for "beside" here. After all, "along a lonely" has a delightfully alliterative quality to it. At this point, I went with "beside" because... well, I think "along" had too many connotations of movement, and that seemed like a weird way to describe a parked car. But I also knew that neither really fitted iambic pentameter, so I figured it might be fun to make the second line of the poem match the first by not-quite-fitting the metre in exactly the same way. This is a decision I later regretted, and still do.
I should point out that, at this point, I already know what rhyme scheme I'm going for with this sonnet. I first wrote sonnets years ago, while studying them for english lit classes, and at the time I learned about three particularly common rhyme schemes: Shakespearean, Petrarchan, and Spenserian. I... kinda didn't like any of them, so I made my own that borrowed a little bit from all three. It is as follows: ABBA BCCB CAAC DD. As far as I know, I am the only person who uses this rhyme scheme. There's a good reason for this: it's bloody difficult in English.
9:34pm—I was sad because I'd dropped some alliteration in the last edit, so I put some other alliteration back in. This remains a bad idea, but I can understand why I went with it.
9:36pm—I am not the kind of person who writes poetry in order. I skip around. I think of parts of lines in advance, write them down, and try to fill in the gaps. Some of these ideas (like this one) I end up scrapping pretty quickly, but I've included this draft because I thought it was something that would be interesting to comment on. As we work through this, I'm going to be jumping around a lot.
I'm going to skip a few drafts because not much interesting happens—I drop that suggested line, tidy up the end of the second one, and start moving onwards:
9:39pm—I hate dialogue in sonnets.
See, a sonnet is a form that is meant to do a very particular thing—in the words of Rossetti, it is "a moment's monument". As far as I'm concerned, it is the poetic equivalent of an emotional photograph: capturing just a snapshot of feeling. Dialogue, by contrast, implicitly alludes to the passage of time, and it always makes me uncomfortable to try to include it.
But here? I consider it. And I consider it for quite a number of drafts. The reason is, of course, that an epithalamium should focus on the couple, and how better to do that than to allow them to interact through dialogue? Ultimately, I ended up scrapping this idea because it really didn't sit well with me, but I bring it up now partly to document it, and partly to encourage people to think about how they might be able to use things like dialogue in a timeless medium such as this.
Eventually, I scrap the dialogue, and at 9:49pm I call it a night. I set my alarm clock for first thing in the morning, and get ready for an early night's sleep.
08:05am—This swap is entirely because of metre. I love toying with metre in sonnets, using enjambment and the like to disguise the metre as strongly as I can, but there are times when it just feels wrong to start a new sentence in a sonnet halfway through a foot. There's disguising the metre, and practically ignoring it.
8:07am—It's interesting that I dislike dialogue in sonnets because of the implicit time-passage, but am more than happy to include little moments of motion like this. Hell, looking back at it, "parks" in the present tense even implies motion, though I do like that it implies motion coming to a rest right at the start of the sonnet. On reflection, I think that this sonnet is a snapshot of a very stretched-out moment: a time in which little changes, but time certainly passes. Perhaps I was wrong to exclude dialogue. Who knows? All I know is that writing poetry with lowercase starts to lines is not easy in gdocs.
8:11am—"assassinates" is my favourite word of this early draft. I'm legitimately sad that I had to cut it for metre reasons, because I remember being super excited to include it when I wrote this bit.
8:13am—Goodbye, pretty words. I miss you still.
In all seriousness, the reason for this change was purely to fit the form: I spent most of the two minutes between those two versions wracking my head for a way to end the line in just two syllables and rhyme it with "track", and in the end decided it would just be better to give myself more space. Besides, no matter how much I like "assassinates", I think this version of the line is legitimately better. It has a delightful cadence to it, and maps really nicely to iambic pentameter.
8:18am—Oh man, I love this bit. Remember what I said about disguising metre earlier? I think this is one of the bits that best does this. As a sentence, it makes for an almost perfect line of iambic tetrameter, and by stretching it across a line break we can lose track of where we are in the poem. This is something I try to do with sonnets a lot, because I think it makes them a lot more pleasant to read and listen to when the form is there, but hidden.
08:21am—This, on the other hand? This I like less. It's partly because it is a sentence in pentameter, which rather messes with the whole point of using enjambment here, but mostly because I feel that this sentence does very little. I wrote it rather quickly, because it was an obvious set of words for the rhyme scheme, but looking back, I'm not a fan of this construction—the changes I made by the final draft go some way to addressing the issue, but I'm still not pleased with it.
By 8:24am, I've realised that "my hour of need" sound terrible and scrapped it. I've also gotten extremely bored with sonnet-writing. I need a break.
8:24am—I didn't edit iii very much at all for this entry, mostly because, of the poems here, it's the only one that even remotely relates to my own experiences, and as such hits very close to home. Actually, this is why I've picked free verse for it—I've always found that free verse is an excellent way to try and explore ideas that are raw and personal, and I can let myself write mostly unedited and trust my instincts with the words I come up with. That said, I did spend the time writing iii thinking very hard about the discussion on line-ends from last round, and I'll probably comment on those whenever they come up in this post.
In this case, the opening stanza of iii was very deliberately written to isolate the phrases "she is beautiful" and "i am flawed", to directly compare and contrast them. I really like how that turned out!
8:31am—Several versions happen between this and the last, but no exciting changes (save the decision to move the parenthetical remark over to the right, which is a thing I do a lot in free verse). In this time, I’m mostly just pushing forward, getting words that I like onto the page. I love a lot of what I did in this passage: the triplet of despites is a lot of fun, and I just really enjoy how I built “i am frozen” off the line about physical cold. This is stuff I really don’t want to change!
Very quickly, though, it’s worth noting that I make a very important decision in this section—to try and ground iii in very real, physical imagery. It’s something I still wish this poem did more of, but that was the thinking behind the radiator comment and it’s something we’ll see more of as this progresses.
Twenty minutes of fussing with the placement of “and jealousy” later, and I eventually settle on writing “and love.” for the following line. And then I figure I’ve been distracted long enough, and it’s time to head back to the sonnet.
8:49am—Oh man, “consummation” is also an excellent word. It’s so good in the context of an epithalamium and I’m super happy that it worked here. I remember grinning a lot about this one, and in all honesty?, I’m still smiling about it now.
8:49am—So here I am, end of a line and free to pick whatever new rhyming syllable I like. And for some reason, the first choice of word I go with is “craved”? I realised pretty quickly that finding three other words that rhymed with that would be ridiculous, so I switched it out.
9:01am—Everything is made better by religious imagery oh no wait that's terrible I'm gonna cut it.
9:09am—Here I spend ten minutes on a roll, pushing out iambic pentameter fairly quickly with only the tiniest of breaks to check rhyming websites and pick a word for the end of the eighth line that isn't "crown". "Lown" is a very obscure, Scottish-specific word, but after thinking on it for a while I decided it was exactly the right word to use here. I would never try something like that in prose, because there are better words that say the same thing in a way everyone will understand... but in poetry, you can get away with excessive synonyms. Plus it was a cool word to add to my vocabulary!
9:11am—I still hate this passage. See, the problem with writing a sonnet the way I have here, with no real direction, is that you inevitably end up taking too much time to get to the important bits. Like, we're at the start of the third quatrain, and we're only now introducing the major conflict?
It's particularly frustrating because sonnets have something called a volta. An Italian word meaning "turn", a volta is the moment in a sonnet that the argument turns around. I'll talk about it more when we get to it, but the volta in this sonnet is terrible, and a great part of that is how long it took us to get to this argument. Looking back, I'd much rather introduce the whole religion idea at least two lines earlier (easiest place to bring it in, if you ask me—shouldn't be too hard to find a way to re-use "creed" as a line-end there to fit the rhyme scheme.) I think that'll make the final couplet stronger.
Also worth noting that the placement of the volta generally varies with rhyme scheme! Petrarchan sonnets are formatted as an octave and a sestet, and have their volta between those two sections—my own sonnets share Shakespeare's three quatrains and a couplet, and both place the volta at the couplet.
9:19am—And time to get back to the free verse. Here I decide to extend that already-extended section. A few moments later, I'll finish it off with "hate".
I'm not sure I like the effect that this version has—one horizontal triplet and one vertical one seems just like overload, and six words in a list ends up being nothing short of frustrating to read. When writing it, I liked how it dragged things out, but looking back? I'm glad I changed it.
9:21am—Mise en page is cool. I stand by this decision. This is good.
9:24am—And so I realise that there is absolutely no way I'm gonna learn how to write either of the asclepiads in time to submit this, and fall back on my favourite aeolic form: the sapphic stanza. Around this point, I also decided it would be hilarious to write this particular poem about a lesbian couple, because that's an excellent joke.
Sapphic verse is... not easy, apparently. I don't know why, but it has this reputation for being the hardest kind of verse to write in English—probably for all those reasons I mentioned above about how Ancient Greek syllables and poems are so very different from English verse. But I personally think they're the most natural form of poetry I know. I've never read any other structured stanza that reads quite so much like plain speech. They're a lot of fun to write, and I can wholeheartedly recommend them.
Incidentally, I wrote that one line of sapphic stanza at 9:24am. For the next ten minutes, I contemplate whether or not this collection needs a fourth poem, and stick a placeholder title in for that, just in case. For now, the sapphic will remain abandoned.
9:35am—Back to free verse! I've added a line at the bottom, but I think it's far more interesting that I chose to come back and change this parenthetical. I love how the mise en page now plays in with the phrase "imperfect mirror", and the triplet here (my god there are a lot of triplets in this poem) reinforces that down-to-earth, practical imagery I was trying to create.
This is where progress starts to slow down—mostly because I'm really struggling with that sonnet. I know that the idea of a creed has been introduced to late, and I'm struggling to find ways to not waste the precious few lines I have left before the volta to establish it as strongly as I can. I still think that not scrapping a bunch of lines and moving back was a mistake here. Eventually, having gotten nowhere, I move back to the free verse again:
10:04am—Sometimes an idea just doesn't work, and this swaying hips image is one of them. I scrapped this partly because I couldn't think of where to go with the image, but mostly because it was a terrible line ending and I knew I could do better. Like I said, I was trying to focus on how line endings played into this piece. I think I did okay, given the time constraints.
10:06am—See! Told you I could do it better.
The reason I went with this choice was mostly to get that gorgeous "with her gaze. she shows me love" line, hinting at a sentence that isn't quite there. That's something I learned from Dubs last round, and though I don't think this is the strongest possible example of the technique, I was just really excited to give it a go. It's definitely something I'll be trying again in future poems.
Let's skip forward a few versions with only minor alterations, and talk about the most interesting thing I scrapped from this entry:
10:20am—The opening of the unused fourth poem actually went through a number of drafts in the fifteen minutes I actually worked on it. I played around with a couple of different images, and I think there was even a third line at one point that I deleted to quickly for gdocs' versioning system to pick up. I liked the idea of writing something tight and small with an intensely-woven rhyme scheme, and three rhyming lines of iambic tetrameter and one refrain of iambic trimeter sounded like a really fun form to play around with! Alas, I decided that this would be too difficult to write anything substantial with in the time I had, and I decided instead to incorporate the ideas that I had wanted to use (the refrain I was hoping to use would have been "I give myself to you") into the sapphic.
10:24am—Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the stanza I'm midway through writing here appears in the final entry, but not quite like this! I'll talk about it more at the time, but I eventually decide to cut up this stanza, because while I loved both of the sentences in it I wasn't convinced they worked as well together as they could have.
10:42am—The first stanza of the sapphic is coming along nicely, now, but I'm having trouble with the third line. I really want to work in this idea of "All I ask from you is __", but not only can I not think of anything particularly interesting to say to complete that, it also ends up having really weird stresses that don't quite fit the metre. Unsurprisingly, I end up scrapping this, but I do keep trying to rework this idea back several times. The final form of this line is, I think, spot on in terms of how to phrase this for a sapphic, but I'm still a little upset that I had to cut the "all".
Here's an example (10:46am) of another attempt at trying to include that, a little closer to the final product.
10:55am—A bit of a timeskip here, but there wasn't all that much interesting between this and the last screenshot. The first stanza of ii is looking almost exactly as it will in the final draft, now, and I've moved back up to i to try and finish this blasted sonnet. I have an excellent idea of repeating line-ends, and using a mid-line rhyme to make a triplet—based loosely of some commentary by horizon last round on Luna Upon Sulva. Ultimately I scrapped this idea, but I had an awful lot of fun toying with it and I thought it was something that could definitely be reused in future. If anyone wants to steal that one, be my guest—it's a pretty cool technique that I think can definitely be improved upon.
11:07am—Just a little while later, and a first draft of one of the poems is complete! That said, at the time I'm not even sure this is a milestone—though I've left a gap between the two stanzas of ii, it's mostly a formality and, at the time, I thought I was just about done with that poem: I'd only add to it if I found myself struggling for word-count. After all, I still hadn't completely ditched the idea of a fourth poem, and the placeholder header was still dangling off the bottom of the document.
The sonnet remains my least favourite part of Epithalamia, but I am glad to see how much I managed to improve on it from this first draft. There might only have been a few small changes, but ultimately I think the final version is a better poem. I do want to improve it further, though.
For the next five minutes I fiddle with that final couplet, which I was really unhappy with. At the time, I should have realised it was because of how sharp a turn I had to make in such a small space, but instead I figured that if I kept messing with the phrasing the final lines might come out just right. And then:
11:22am—Things slow down, and a whole lot of nothing happens. I try out a few new lines on the end of iii, some of which I keep, and I mess a little with the couplet in i some more. I do love the phrase "painfully bare chest", here, and think it does an excellent amount of work signposting the gender dysphoria that is at the heart of this final poem whilst also being a delightful play on the cold of the scene. I also forgot to end a sentence with a full stop.
That mistake made it into the final draft, and wasn't intentional.
This is particularly jarring because ending stanzas/paragraphs without full stops is my jam. I love that abruptness and I love that it achieves it in a way that no obvious punctuation choice possibly could. What makes it even worse is that it almost works, here (at least, in the final draft). It's not a decision I would consciously make, but it's one I'm seriously considering either keeping or building off from.
11:25am—After a few minutes of toying around with different ways to move forward with this stanza, I ultimately decide to scrap it. It's clunky and obtuse and I just really, really didn't like it. As I've said above, iii is a very personal poem for me, and though it didn't go through a great deal of editing, I was more than happy to scrap things that just didn't do the work I needed them to.
11:26am—I'm not sure what it is that I like about this stanza. It reminds me a lot of the Peridot chapter in horizon's The Last Dreams of Pony Island—it's distant and muted and strangely optimistic amid a sea of pain and pessimism. I'm not super sure the line-ends are as effective as they could be, but I think they do a good job of building the hesitation that fuels that tone, so I think I'm on board with it.
11:27am—Recontextualising Lady Macbeth with gender dysphoria? I had wanted to do this for so long and I'm super pleased with how it turned out, even if nobody actually seemed to notice.
11:29am—This part of writing moved very fast, and I got a lot done in not very long. And yet... I'm really pleased with the results. This is the key moment for the whole "line-ends" practice, for what it's worth: yes, "that I may forget manhood" was very deliberately kept on its own line to be a gender dysphoria thing, even though that's not really what the sentence as a whole is saying. Imo? That's the best I managed to achieve with that effect in this poem, and I'm really pleased with the results.
11:30am—Ugh, I am so glad I changed this. The cadence of that final line is perfect, but the line before feels abrupt and unfinished. It takes me far, far too long to notice this, but I'm really glad I do.
11:31am—This, on the other hand, is one of the best decisions I make in the entire process. Cutting out that line not only fixes the completely overbearing feeling of having two triplets back-to-back, it also makes that final "and hate." incredibly uncomfortable to read, isolated in its own stanza. That was exactly the effect I was hoping for, because it's meant to be the kind of hate that is shameful to feel, and I think this passage ends up working perfectly for me.
We are now into the home stretch—two poems practically finished, and only the most difficult form of poetry in the English language the sapphic left to go! (The floating header for the never-written fourth poem disappeared about half an hour ago, with no fanfare.) Shortly after this, I fix the penultimate line of iii into the form it takes in the final draft.
11:48am—Over the next twenty minutes, with only a few small alterations (like this one, usually made to better fit the metre or to make the path forward clearer), the second stanza of ii takes form. For the next stanza, I make the decision I mentioned a way back to split up the current final stanza and use its first line, trying to build up to the end of the poem in a more gentle curve than the current choice would have allowed. This stanza follows quickly, along with a new first line for the final stanza (11:58am).
12:02pm—The biggest mistake I made in writing this sapphic, and one I'm really glad I fixed. The second line of this stanza in its first draft was abominable, not even close to fitting the metre. And yet... I loved the word "caresses". It was exactly the kind of word that this poem could have benefited from, and I'm super sad to see that I couldn't make it fit into the final draft. I did try quite a few things (12:13pm).
12:22pm—It took me almost ten minutes of messing about with the words "urgent" and "clothing", but I finally got that line to exactly where it needed to be. The spondee line-end here still frustrates me a tiny bit (even though that final syllable is an anceps, and so a spondee is just as fair a choice as a trochee!) All in all, though, I'm happy with ii
—a few final tweaks around the places where I surgically inserted a stanza and a half to hide the seams, and it ends up being the poem in this collection that I'm most proud of.
12:37pm—Hey, remember that alliteration I worked back in yesterday? Yeah. That can go. And with that, a few tweaks to the second line to make it better fit the metre ("Hey, remember when I deliberately broke the metre yesterday..."), and a rewrite of the final couplet, I decide that I've done all the editing on Epithalamia that I can, and submit the piece at 12:51pm.
I've written this out in this much depth because it's been really fascinating for me to look back on these drafts and to rethink how I wrote this entry. I hope my narration has been up to scratch for explaining my choices, but there's obviously a lot of choices here that I could talk about and a lot that I've had to skim over. If nothing else, I hope this section of the retrospective has given anyone who made it through it a brief glimpse into what writing poetry of various different forms is like, and I genuinely believe that examining the process of writing can make us all better writers, not just better poets. I know that writing poetry helps me a lot with my prose—in poetry, as I hope the above has shown, you have to carefully consider and then reconsider every word you write in a much deeper way than you might with prose, but that doesn't mean that prose can't benefit from similar examination!
And so, at long, long last, we move onto the final section of this retrospective:
iii: the puerperium
I've had a lot of time to reflect on Epithalamia—not just while writing this (though that has been a very long time. Have you seen the length of this post?), but over the course of the usual anonymity-silence week. And I think it's unfortunate that I've spent so much of that time fretting over writeoff drama—over whether or not poetry belongs in a contest that has a long-standing tradition of accepting it—and not so much time thinking about the writing itself. So I thought it might be nice to take some time this morning, as I'm finishing off this blog, to really reflect on what I achieved with Epithalamia, and what I could do better. Let's start with the worst and work our way up, hmm?
i is a flawed, flawed sonnet. I approached it in much the same way that I approach all sonnets (linearly, and blindly), and I think that I really need to learn how not to do that. The problem, I think, is that my love of disguising metre makes it very hard to jump back and forth in the poem—in ii I was able to cut the poem up and insert lines because I tended to avoid enjambment, which often feels out of place in a sapphic stanza, but I embrace enjambment so much in my sonnets that it makes editing them that much harder. It's particularly frustrating, as I've noticed, because I tend to enter a sonnet with only a vague idea of what the volta is going to be. In future, I think, I'd much prefer to decide upon the volta first—perhaps even write the final couplet before I write the rest of the sonnet! That'll give me a lot more space to explore ideas without getting sidetracked, which is undoubtedly i's greatest flaw.
I'm still not pleased with the metre in the first two lines. You'd think that after discussing metre as much as I have, not just in this blog post but over in my review of Last Minutes this round, that I'd have a better grasp of it... but the truth is that I find it very easy to slip into reading poetry unnaturally in a way that forces the metre, and use that convince myself that what I've written works. As it turns out, I've ended up particularly unhappy with the words "beside" and "cliff-face" (a pyrrhic and a spondee, respectively, in a form that should avoid those feet).
Don't get me wrong—breaking metre is an important technique, and one that can really enhance a poem when done with reason. Breaking metre draws attention to words, after all, so it can be an excellent tool for emphasis—so long as you find a way round the inevitably jarring quality a metre-break will have. They're often uncomfortable unless used with caution and care and delicacy, and they're something I would love to get better at.
Let's talk about iii next: the free verse poem that lays one of my own fears out for the world to see. That kind of thing is obviously difficult to talk about without severe biases, but I'll do my best!
In all honesty, I really like iii. There's some really cool techniques and tricks in here, and I think I talked about most of them during the analysis above. I'm so proud of some of the stuff I managed to pull off in this poem. But there are several things that I think are holding it back: length, superfluity, and something I can't quite put my finger on.
iii is too short. I try in the first sections to build this very practical voice that's always drawing comparisons between the ideal/emotional and the real, and I love this effect. But it dies away pretty quickly to make room for a more introspective voice that's so focused on the internal it hardly notices the world around it, and I think this is a symptom of the poem being too short. The introspection is, of course, necessary—it is by nature a very introspective poem, and the subject it discusses requires that—but I'd love to see it fleshed out with more of those down-to-earth moments from the first section. They gave the start a delightfully human touch, and I wish I'd used more of it.
And yet, iii is way too wordy, especially in its later sections. There are just a handful of places where I feel I've included words that just don't need to be there, that serve no real purpose other than to bluntly hammer home a message ("but would she still if i were more like her?" stands out as a particular offender, here). I need to be able to cut passages like that more easily. In general, I need to learn to edit free verse better. Don't get me wrong, being raw and from the heart is good, but there's no reason that I can't decide to use fewer or different raw words in places where I think they might be better.
I can't quite put my finger on what it is about iii that I really dislike. Perhaps it's because I'm too close to the issue in question, but I found it extremely bland to re-read. It's emotionally grey and murky where it should be painful. For me, that's it's biggest sin—it fails, so far as I can see, to portray the actual emotions of dysphoria, and fear of rejection, and self-loathing, and all the other things that come with the territory. It's understated, and I don't think that's good.
ii, on the other hand, is a masterpiece. Like, seriously, I adore this poem. Sapphic stanzas, as I've said before (and will probably say a million times), are widely regarded as one of the most challenging forms for English poets, and I think I've absolutely pulled them off here. It's passionate, it's warm, it builds from hesitation to insatiable desire in exactly the way I had hoped it would—ii might very well be the best poem I've ever written. I'm not even going to try and sound modest about it, because in all honesty? I am incredibly proud of how it turned out.
If I had to name a weakest part? Second stanza. It's a little too distant and impersonal, though I do love the final line. And I know I talk about not using enjambment in sapphics, but in this case I think the first two lines are too distinct, and hardly flow into each other at all. But that's me being hyper-critical, and I don't think it makes the poem significantly worse.
All in all? I'm proud of Epithalamia. I think it ultimately succeeds in its goal of exploring human sexuality from three very different perspectives, and does so with a deeply personal, human touch. I like it a lot! It's still not quite the kind of quality I'd hope for in something to consider sending it for actual publishing, but it's certainly the closest I think I've ever come. I'm excited to have written it, and I'm excited to see where I can go from here.
Writing this retrospective has been crazy. I wrote the first two sections in a single, five-hour sitting (I haven't written that much since my charity challenge!) and this final section was written the next morning. I really don't feel like going back and editing this 7,500-word monstrosity, so I'd like to apologise if it's a little rambly in places. I don't think this kind of in-depth analysis of my writing process is something I'm going to do again—it was incredibly valuable to me, and I learned an awful lot, but I don't think the time sink is justified. After all, this is all discussion of a single piece that's just 423 words long! I do hope that it hasn't been boring to read, and that everyone has a chance to take something away from that—even if that something is just "Oh, hey, Quill has really dumb ideas about the kind of things they expect people to pick up on in their writing."
In other news, since I figure it ought to be explained: hi yes I'm nonbinary. Specifically, I'm genderless. I don't really give a damn about pronouns (most people use "he" for me, and that's what I use most of the time myself, but I figured that I should start using "they" occasionally for clarity? I don't know. It's all weird. Feel free to use he, she, or they to describe me unless I suddenly start to care or something?) Despite the fact that I have no gender identity, for some reason I started to get bouts of dysphoria about half a year ago. I'm as confused about that as you are. iii was very much an exploration of a topic that terrifies me—how dysphoria ties into my anxieties about sex and sexuality. I figured that should be cleared up, just so people know where I'm coming from in this post when I talk about dysphoria.
If you've stuck with me this far, thank you so much for reading. Till next time!
~Quill Scratch
Impressive writeup. Um, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, buuuuut....
None of your image links work.
Imgur, for whatever reason, doesn't play nice with Fimfic. It's possible to see the pictures by right-clicking, going 'copy link location', and then pasting that into the address bar, but clicking through normally gives an error saying 'image cannot be displayed because it contains errors' which is basically imgur's way of saying 'we don't want to host images for Fimfic' as far as I can tell.
Anyways, it's interesting to take a peek into someone else's work process. I still don't appreciate poetry the way you do, but I appreciate that you appreciate it so much. :P
4691393
Workin' on making link-viewing easier. Thanks for the heads up
Edit: Have confirmed with !Hat, links now fixed. If anyone's having difficulty looking at any links, drop me a message/reply to this and I'll be happy to help when I can.
So am I. Thank you for sharing. It's always good to know you're not alone.
4691548
yay genderless buddies
Thank you for writing this! I'm reading through it and might have commentary to add, piece by piece, but if nothing else it's a fascinating look inside someone else's head as they make writing decisions. I can't imagine the amount of work it took to be snapshotting as you wrote and reconstructing this afterward.
Also, Epithalamia was absolutely underrated and I'm sorry it didn't make finals.
> 9:39
Dialogue in sonnets: One classic to examine might be Milton's On His Blindness; it's an internal dialogue rather than a real discussion, but it's a great proof-of-concept.