Category: Uncategorized

By Sydney Maria

People online can garner thousands—even millions (especially on TikTok)—of views for talking about books.

As someone who has spent years getting recommendations from other readers online, I understand the appeal of watching videos about books. It was one of the things that propelled my love of reading as a young teen, and sustained it into adulthood, even at times when I wasn’t an active reader.

I believe one of the reasons that bookstores aren’t obsolete (as so many people have postulated), is because of social media and how it has changed the landscape of book culture. People crave the tangible, especially in an increasingly digitalized world. While e-readers are still prominent because of subscriptions like Kindle Unlimited, a huge part of BookTube and BookTok centers around buying and collecting physical books.

In the early days of BookTube, bookshelf tours were extremely popular, and they still have an audience, but other types of videos have grown in popularity as well, like book unboxing hauls where viewers watch creators open boxes upon boxes of different books to sit on their shelves. The consumerist aspect of the book community is one that many people criticize, especially when purchasing from sites like Amazon rather than from independent bookstores. There is a very serious hivemind within the book community to emulate popular content creators: buying hundreds of books every year in order to keep pace turns reading into a competition. And when they fail to read the four or five books a week that content creators do, given that most people don’t make their living from being a content creator, they can end up feeling inadequate. This is a very real criticism of the way BookTube and BookTok commodify the reading experience. For most of us who grew up reading, it was never really about how many books we were reading. The stories were vastly more important than the quantity of books. What does it matter how many books you’ve read if they were all meaningless to you? Just to reach some arbitrary goal?

While there’s some substance to this criticism, there is also the flipside: some of this criticism feels rooted in misogyny since it pertains to the largely female audience of readers who enjoy fast-paced, light-hearted, and “easy” books. There is a common occurrence where things liked by a majority female demographic get criticized for being “bad,” “stupid,” or “mindless,” and it can be frustrating to see these same sentiments over and over again in the spaces I frequent and enjoy, especially when male content creators often garner ten times the views of their female counterparts. The women whose videos I’ve watched since I was a teenager, like PeruseProject, MelReads, and Jaime’s Library, were once young girls who found solace in discussing the YA, romance, and paranormal books that were seen as less than and they only have a fraction of the audience of their male counterparts. I don’t mean to discredit the content made by men in the book community, they have interesting and eye-catching video ideas, but it’s hard not to feel some disappointment seeing the different treatment a male creator gets in a female-led space. Still, these communities have encouraged more people to read. They have enticed people with thoughtful reviews and recommendations. Sure, many of the books recommended on these platforms, especially TikTok, are the same lists regurgitated over and over again, but sometimes it’s people’s first time hearing about these books. So, while these critiques can be made, as well as analyzed introspectively, I will always support exposing more people to reading.

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By Cydni Thompson

What defines the average life is a series of routines, mundanities, and commonplace objects. What life does not include a phone, a bed, a faucet, a blanket, a house; the filth that accumulates by the simple exertion of living, and then its cleaning? And while some may believe that poetry should eschew these most ordinary happenings, I, like many, argue that the commonplace aspects of our lives are significant, and fodder for poetry, whether the poem glamorizes these truths or lavishes in their plainness, it’s through the ordinary that the poem can transform. 

Gwendolyn Brooks produced a body of work focused on the sheer normality of Black life. In the poem “I love those little booths at Benvenuti’s,” Brooks assumes the perspective of a white group travelling to Bronzeville (a Black neighborhood) to observe Black people in a restaurant. They are expecting to see something animalistic; they are looking for a spectacle, an extraordinary sighting of those mythic Blacks in their famous ghetto. They are disappointed. Brooks ends the poem: 

The colored people arrive, sit firmly down,  

Eat their Express Spaghetti, their T-Bone steak,  

Handling their steel crockery with no clatter,  

Laugh punily, rise, go firmly out the door. 

Note the generic verbs: “arrive,” “sit,” “eat,” “laugh,” “rise,” “go,” and the specificity given to common food: “Express Spaghetti” and “T-Bone steak.” These words have no connotations, and are used to describe all groups of people. This explains in necessary detail the ordinariness of these Black people, which symbolizes their humanity. One function of using the commonplace in a poem is connection between humans on the basis of our shared banality; we sit, we eat, we leave. Strategically, Brooks uses these commonalities to shame the racist group whose spectatorship had dehumanized the Black patrons. 

Another poem which uses the ordinary to interrogate racism, specifically colonialism, is Lorna Goodison’s “Reporting Back to Queen Isabella”. This poem follows a colonizer reporting to his Queen the treasures he’s found in Jamaica: “high mountain ranges, expansive plains, deep valleys…” The vast extravagance of these natural wonders is juxtaposed at the end with the line: “and yes, your Majesty, there were some people.” In comparison to the beautiful landscape descriptions, this last line is unadorned and plain; the people are “some,” and unspecified. The ordinary language is used to expose the underlying sentiment carried by the colonizers–––that the land is gorgeous and valuable, and the people are of no consequence.  

The commonplace can also be used to embellish the lives of the working class. Philip Levine’s poem “An Ordinary Morning” begins, “A man is singing on the bus / coming in from Toledo.” Already the speaker is in an unadorned place, the bus, hearing something we’ve all heard before. Eventually, the passengers being to sing together, an unnamed song about love (“love that is true, of love / that endures a whole weekend,”) and hardship (“O heavy hangs the head,”). These abstract emotions occur to all humans, and so all the passengers can relate. This connection between people, this instance of singing, causes the speaker to look at his surroundings in a new light. By the end, they are not simply passengers, but “the living / newly arrived / in Detroit, city of dreams, / each on his own black throne.” They have been transformed into royalty; the seats are thrones, Detroit is full of dreams, and they’re only just arriving. Levine has not eliminated the normality of the bus in Detroit, but has chosen to frame it in a different light. The “ordinary morning” is made extraordinary through song.  

Rita Dove is another poet who sees possibility in the everyday. In “Dawn Revisited” Dove writes: 

Imagine you wake up 

with a second chance: The blue jay 

hawks his pretty wares 

and the oak still stands, spreading 

glorious shade. 

Here, the hawk of the blue jay and the shade of the oak tree constitute “a second chance,” though these are stimuli one experiences nearly every day without fail. Later, Dove ends the poem romanticizing a routine: “You’ll never know / who’s down there, frying those eggs, / if you don’t get up and see.” This poem situates the commonplace in the world of hope and wonder: how “glorious” the shade, how “pretty” the jay’s wares, how wonderful the mystery of the egg-frier. The implied notion is that these sensations are special because they belong to the living, a sentiment found a year earlier in Marie Howe’s famous poem “What the Living Do”. Addressed to the poet’s deceased brother, the poem opens: 

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell 

down there.  

And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled 

up 

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. 

There is a gratitude in this poem as there is in “Dawn Revisited”, although it is for the everyday inconveniences rather than the birds and trees. The fact that the poem opens with a name of the dead means that all following details exist in contrast to death; in this case, they are a celebration of life, the clogged sink and crusty dishes alike.  

There is value in the universality of these, as there is in the poem “I’m Not Faking My Astonishment, Honest” by Paige Lewis, in which the speaker says: “A woman huffing up the trail behind / us says to her hiking partner, It wasn’t my size, / but it was only 9 dollars. And now all I want / is to see what it is.” There is an emotional weight to the ubiquitous overheard conversation, to the mutual recognition of a good deal, even between strangers. It is in moments like these that we see the poetic value in every second of our lives. The strategic use of specific verbs, embellishment and stripping down, the inclusion of the gross and the arbitrary; all these make for an authentic poem, a poem that exists in real life, on the ground, everywhere you look. 

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By Kirry Kaufer

Many writers are daunted by poetry. I used to be one of these writers, too. I used to think poems had to be vulnerable and confessional. However, poetry is different from nonfiction. In a poem, writers can dramatize their memories while remaining true to the authenticity of their experiences. As the poet Billy Collins once said: A poem is a memory that never happened.

Memory shapes who we are. Memory is a multitude of stories which show where we come from and how we approach our current lives. It is more fleeting, but less flexible, than imagination. Each time we reflect on a memory, it changes. We reinterpret them, retell them, and reshape our past experiences to resemble our present more effectively. In writing, a poem should allow for a memory to be recast, reimagined, or to be told in fragments. We can be as vulnerable as we choose if we play with memory as we do in fiction. Memory is an introspective art. It is a tool that explores the human experience, and makes tangibility out of the ephemeral.

In poetry, writers sometimes explore their memories by recasting themselves as a “persona.” Persona poetry is a style of poems in which the writer speaks through an assumed voice to mask their truths. The assumed voice can belong to a character, a historical figure, or another person the writer knows. Using this identity, they relive memory through a new lens. Here is a writing prompt to help you get started, inspired by the writing exercises from Christopher Castellani.

The Prompt:

Make a list of four “firsts” in your life. Then skip to “thirds,” “sixths,” or “lasts,” in order to jump around through memories. Examples may include:

1. The first time you failed a test
2. The first time you got a pet
3. The first time you snuck out from home
4. The first time you attended a concert

1. The third time you went on vacation
2. The last time you hung out with a friend before the friendship ended
3. The last time you apologized to someone
4. The last day of your second year in high school

Let the moments marinate in your mind for a few days before writing them down. Try to remember all the details of the memories and recast the identities of all the people. Use a variety of these moments in your poem. Scatter the memories across different lines. See if the finished poem retains its truth, while also being a memory that never happened.

By Cephie Howell

It is somewhat well-known that the first modern record of ‘fanfiction’ can be traced back to the 1970’s, with the very active Star Trek fan community. This primitive form of fanfiction was published in fan-run magazines, quickly gaining so much popularity that the show’s creators were eventually compelled to acknowledge it. Now, fanfiction is a widely recognized part of fan culture, with even the most casual fans of shows, books, music, and movies participating in either the consumption or production of fanfiction.

            It is difficult to find exact statistics that detail the real number of people who consume fanfiction on a daily basis, but by examining specific websites and organizations we can see how widespread fanfiction really is. FanFiction.net, a very popular fanfiction website, has over 14 million new stories published each year, according to public statistics. Traffic metadata also shows that in December of 2021, the other popular website Archive of Our Own, had 1.7 billion page-views, a number that had been steadily rising throughout that year.

            With so much content, how does a fan find the stories that most interest them? The primary way to filter through these archives goes as follows; the reader goes on the website and selects which fandom, the book/franchise they want to read from, then by characters, and they can narrow it down even further by the scenario they want to imagine. For example, you want to read about Superman and Batman meeting in a coffee shop? There’s a tag for that. How about a raunchy dystopian buddy-cop adventure starring the cast of Hamlet? There are several tags for that. Want to see Jesus and Lucifer suddenly get the hots for each other? There’s definitely a tag for that. The system of tagging works with pertinent details about the plot, settling, characters, and the interactions that will ensue means that a reader can find exactly what it is they want to read. It completely cancels out the worst part about finding a book you enjoy— sifting through all of the books, and plots, and mediocre characters that don’t interest you. This likely reflects what the future of the creative market looks like, a completely customizable and personalized experience, something that will go a long way to aid in the exposure of all sorts of new writers and novels.

            But why is it that people write these strange niche stories? They aren’t getting paid for it, and most might even think them strange, so what compels a person to write a fanfiction? For many it boils down to a genuine passion for writing. Fanfiction can be a fun and engaging way for people to both expand on characters and worlds that they adore, while also sharpening their writing skills. One of the hardest parts of writing is creating a world and characters that suit that world, but writing fanfiction completely sidesteps those issues by using previously existing cannons as a writing prompt for new adventures. Another aspect of fanfiction that has historically brought in many new readers is that fanfiction has been a way for people to tell queer stories that the mainstream media have always avoided. Fanfiction and queerness have gone hand in hand in more ways than just sharing stories about queer relationships, it has also been a way to foster new and safe queer communities. It isn’t uncommon for a casual purveyor of fanfiction to have made friends in the comments of a favorite fic! What might begin as sharing common interests in a specific ship can bud and grow into large groups of interconnected individuals all creating a safe space for the creation of art, and that is a very beautiful thing.

            For many a love of fanfiction stems from a want to expand on worlds and ideas that have captivated you. Perhaps the ending of a series was disappointing, fanfiction can be a great outlet to practice one’s writing while also learning how to critique the media we absorb. It has historically been a way for queer individuals to find themselves in the characters that inspire them, and to use their voices and imaginations to shape media in a way that allows for a representation that isn’t often given by the major corporations creating the stories we consume. Fanfiction; whether a hobby or escape, a means of growth or of comfort, has something for everyone. As our culture continues to shift and change with the times, it will be interesting to see where this fanfiction phenomenon goes in the future.

By Natalie Çelebi

Photo : Blue Painting by Wassily Kandinsky​

To the poet, the line straddles a nexus of beginnings and ends– at once a breath drawn and a final exhale. Likewise, to the visual artist, the line deftly asserts and differentiates. Lately, I’ve wondered about the line, its sojourn into physical and conceptual space. There’s no denying–it gets around. But what does it do? What are its means as a constructive basis across these two disciplines?

Every poem leaves the trace of an invisible mover; under whose careful craft do these black strokes soar across the page, under whose charge do these ants march left to right?

Though lines are more often obscured in visual art, they serve as a similar constructive basis, leaving the scent of a not dissimilar mover. The intuitive drawing of the line is more divisive than we might initially think– an assertion, literally, against white space, an observation of illustration as opposed to blankness. This same tension, procured by the line, is readily observable in poetry. The white space of the page and the black text of the line exist simultaneously– the voice of the poem and the silence of the page are at once actualized. It is then the reader who traverses these silences and their acquittals.

The simultaneous assertion of these oppositions, this paradox, is in part the life of the poem, and the primary source of its constructive tensions. That a human scrawling can exist amongst an invisible order– or at the very least, a voice out of what might otherwise be deemed silence– asserts a tension around which art finds itself uncompromisingly gathered.

It is worth observing also that in the simplest visual terms, the line in poetry is a horizontal line. In his famous treatise Point and Line to Plane, Wassily Kandisnky writes that in the human imagination the horizontal line “corresponds to the line or plane upon which the human being stands or moves.” This perhaps is the most poetic basis on which to build our impressions of the poem’s structural nature and the purpose of the line; to stand, to move.

Though up from what does it stand? From what is it spurred into motion? It may suffice for now to say that poetry moves from and out of the invisible. The artist’s often indefinable inspiration, contextual mysteries within the writing, the mysterious arrival of a poem itself may all be things which signify and constitute these invisible points. Regardless, the line articulates these invisibilities and furthermore, it moves both at the joining and in the wake of their connection. It is the basis on which a poem is propelled logically and tonally, the poem’s vastness cocooned also in each line.

A line, in works of visual art, encompasses this same ethos of movement, a visible articulation of invisible points, toward which they are joined into critical parts of a whole. It is here in motion from the point to the line that Kandinsky notes, “the leap out of the static into the dynamic occurs.”

Some poets believe the line is breath; the syllabic spell of iambic pentameter was originally meant to encompass the measure of a single breath. Poets who write in projective verse–Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Ocean Vuong (to name a few contemporaries) – make white space an even more integral part of the line, so one measures the cosmos of the poem visually as well as linguistically, thematically, and the breath between each abstract term, each ‘line,’ becomes enveloped by this basis of survival: breath.

The lines of a painting or drawing may be more numerous than the lines of a poem, but each of them carry respectively the same necessity; each is air to their respective body. Both the poem and the drawing obscure the line, transform it, expound upon it, and when undressed, can also be brought to it, distilled in its brave and necessary insistence to move, to speak.

Temporalities should also be considered– the line as a unit of motion is also necessarily one of time. In Medieval times, before paper was easily procured, there existed a mode of recycling whereupon writing was scraped or washed off animal hides to be reused. These collective documents, called palimpsests, exemplify a unison among the disparate, containing not only the contents of a present document but traces and shades of previous writings.

It is through the destruction and transformation of the line that a painting contains and expounds upon its own past. Drawing then itself earns a kind of palimpsestic quality, past records of the line destroyed and transformed by the artist, quipped into form. It is called a pentimento in painting where earlier drafts haunt the final work and these spectral lines again reemerge.

Poetry, too, is a picture of palimpsests and pentimenti. When writing or reading a poem, there is a feeling one is impressing and being impressed upon by previous voices; who–yet again–are these invisible movers? Whether they be an engagement with the work’s previous selves, or with voices of the past at large—a work of art is always in conversation with its predecessors; an inky palimpsestic chorus, worn and feathered lines flanking each written word, each emerging shadow and shape. Between the two
disciplines lies yet another convergence; the past, and present, in all its looming candor, is on the line