Harvey loomed to give Mary a kiss.
She bobbed her head left so he’d miss.
He tried his advance yet again.
She hooked with a right to his chin,
then crossed his other cheek with her fist!
"Finally, the biography that Sylvia Plath deserves . . . A spectacular achievement." --Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s. Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.
Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.
I wish the indieweb had more content that wasn’t about the indieweb
— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020
The hard part of making cool websites isn’t the tech, it’s the content! Of course I fall into the trap of writing a new ssg every six months as well because it’s easier and safer than writing or drawing or playing music or something interesting and exciting
— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020
If possible, attempt to read the word “content” in these posts without the unsavory connotations with which the last couple of years have saddled that word
— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020
The point of having a website is putting something interesting on it right?
The IndieWeb wiki does tend toward the technical, but many of us are working toward remedying that. For those who haven’t found them yet, there are some pages around a variety of topics like poetry, crafts, hobbies, music, writing, journalism, education, and a variety of other businesses and use cases. How we don’t have one on art (yet) is beyond me… Hopefully these might help us begin to use our sites instead of incessantly building them, though this can be a happy hobby if you enjoy it.
I have come to suspect that slowly redesigning your website (forever) provides almost exactly the same kind of light absorption & calm satisfaction as knitting or embroidery
— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) December 13, 2020
If you’ve got an IndieWeb friendly site, why not use it to interact with others? Help aggregate people around other things in which you’re interested. One might interact with the micro.blog community around any of their tagmoji. (I’m personally hoping there will be one for the stationery, pen, and typewriter crowd.) One might also find some community on any of the various stubs (or by creating new stubs) on IndieWeb.xyz.
For more practical advice and to borrow a proverbial page from the movie Finding Forrester, perhaps reading others’ words and borrowing or replying to them may also help you along. I find that starting and ending everything from my own website means that I’m never at a loss for content to consume or create. Just start a conversation, even if it’s just with yourself. This started out as a short reply, but grew into a longer post aggregating various ideas I’ve had banging around my head this month.
Rachel Syme recently made me think about “old school blogs”, and as interesting as her question was, I would recommend against getting stuck in that framing which can be a trap that limits your creativity. It’s your site, do what you want with it. Don’t make it a single topic. That will make it feel like work to use it.
If you started a niche blog (and I mean old school geocities/Wordpress/blogger blog, not a newsletter) right now, what would it be about? Don’t overthink it.
— rachel syme (@rachsyme) December 8, 2020
The ever-wise Charlie Owen reminds of this and suggests a solution for others reading our content.
Having said that, I’m gonna update my website soon two that you can filter the RSS feed by tag, eliminating shit you don’t wanna see.
I can do that because I own my website, unlike on this hellhole where we’re beholden to twitters awfulness. #indieweb
— Charlie Don’t Surf (@sonniesedge) December 19, 2020
Of course if building websites is your passion and you want to make a new one on a new platform every week, that’s cool too. Perhaps you could document the continuing refreshing of the process each time and that could be your content?
"Star of the County Down" is an Irish ballad set near Banbridge in County Down, in Northern Ireland. The words are by Cathal MacGarvey (1866–1927) from Ramelton, County Donegal. The tune is traditional, and may be known as "Dives and Lazarus" or (as a hymn tune) "Kingsfold".
The melody was also used in an Irish folk song called "My Love Nell".[2] The lyrics of "My Love Nell" tell the story of a young man who courts a girl but loses her when she emigrates to America.[3] The only real similarity with "Star of the County Down" is that Nell too comes from County Down. This may have inspired MacGarvey to place the heroine of his new song in Down as well. MacGarvey was from Donegal.
"The Star of the County Down" uses a tight rhyme scheme. Each stanza is a double quatrain, and the first and third lines of each quatrain have an internal rhyme on the second and fourth feet: [aa]b[cc]b. The refrain is a single quatrain with the same rhyming pattern.
The song is sung from the point of view of a young man who chances to meet a charming lady by the name of Rose (or Rosie) McCann, referred to as the "star of the County Down". From a brief encounter the writer's infatuation grows until, by the end of the ballad, he imagines himself marrying the girl.
The song usually begins with the opening verse:
Near Banbridge town, in the County Down,
One morning last July
Down a boreen green came a sweet cailín,
And she smiled as she passed me by
Kevin Marks literally and figuratively highlighted a bit of interesting found poetry on Google’s Ten things we know to be true article. (Click the link to see the highlight poetry on Google’s page for yourself.)
A screenshot appears below:
Found poetry:
“Doing evil
is a business
take advantage of
all our users”
Here’s a shortened URL for it that you can share with others: bit.ly/D-ntB-Evil
It’s a creative inverse of blackout poetry where instead of blacking out extraneous words, one can just highlight them instead. This comes courtesy of some new browser based functionality that Google announced earlier this week relating to some of their search and page snippets functionality.
Give your time to people.
Give your talent to people.
Give your treasure to people.
Shield your taste from people.
Shield your tongue from people.
Shield your temper from people.
Commit yourself to trust in people.
Commit yourself to truth in people.
Commit yourself to teaching people.
Then, your life must be successful.
Then, your life journey would be smooth.
Then, your life would be without sorrow.
Podcasting or
bronze casting
crafting of your story
should be
rough draft of your glory
Yet the
paradox
of technology
lead to padlocks
on the soapbox
once artisic
holitstic
now undescriptive
and stripped of
synergistic differences
search of prescriptive
low friction
design instead of the
grind//...
Quite a nice little poem here. Almost rap-like with a soupcon of social media silo…
For this Connected Writing Activity — which is taking place rather randomly as a test of something new, so pardon the odd nature of the post — we are testing out Greg’s idea for IndieWeb syndication across blogs. He has a “sub” set up for poetry at IndieWeb, so let’s try that.
You’ve gotten soooo close, but missed by just a hair.
You’ve described the process properly, but in the link at the top of your site, you’ve written:
I think the other small portion you’re missing is that Indieweb.xyz works using the Webmention protocol. It doesn’t appear to me that your site is using the Webmention or the Semantic Linkbacks plugins to make that portion work. If you install and activate them, that will get you a bit further and your site will properly ping Indieweb.xyz when you publish your posts to it.
An alternate route, without those plugins, is to manually ping Indieweb.xyz directly. You can use this manual submission link which has instructions and the fields you’ll need to fill out to force a manual webmention.
P.S.: I’m also seeing <pre><a rel="webmention" href="https://brid.gy/webmention/wordpress">-</a></pre> appearing in a widget in your right hand sidebar. I take this to mean that you’re trying to accept webmentions and that you’re using WordPress.com to host your site. I suspect you may not be getting the results you’re looking for on that account because the code is wrapped in <pre></pre>. If you remove that pre tag, you’ll be closer to getting that piece working. If it’s done properly you should only see the dash “-” in that widget. If you prefer to not have a random dash in your sidebar and since that link is only used/read by Brid.gy’s code parser, you can also hide it on your site by using the following code instead <link rel="webmention" href="https://brid.gy/webmention/wordpress">.
This was also posted to /en/indiewebpoetry. For this Connected Writing Activity — which is taking place rather randomly as a test of something new, so pardon the odd nature of the post —…
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)