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Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry

May 20, 2024

An old joke claims that thirty years of marriage is when she wonders what happened to the guy she married, while he wonders what happened to the girl he didn’t marry. There’s something special about young love, and poetry themed around this concept has certain unique features as well.

The most important element is of course relevant to rosy retrospection. Young love – our first romantic interactions in teenagehood and early adulthood – might be beautiful, meaningful, and exhilarating, but it’s also confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes dark and destructive.

No sane person would ever want to go through that more than once!

But that’s the beauty of art: It allows us to safely experience and reflect on feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that we wouldn’t want to experience in “reality”.

So I decided – on a whim, basically – to put together Old Memories Murmured in Dreams, a poetry collection focusing on young love. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure we can call it poetry – I tend to see it more like my Medēn art project; something between poetry and prose.

In any case, if we want to call it poetry for simplicity’s sake, it’s poetry from a naïve, young-adult perspective, but with intriguing darkness. Hey, it’s me; what did you expect!

young love poetry; cover art for Old Memories Murmured in Dreams
Cover art, made by yours truly
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Review of A Naked Woman in the Snow by Dariush Beritan

May 13, 2024

A Naked Woman in the Snow is a short-story collection by Dariush Beritan. Indeed, it’s a… short short-story collection, at about 80 pages and containing five stories. In other words, although (as you will see in this review) it’s not a collection for everyone, it also doesn’t require much of your time. That makes it a marvelous opportunity to try something you’re unfamiliar with.

Familiarity with the subject matter – or lack thereof – will be the key concept in this review, because at the same time it’s what assigns the collection much of its expressive power yet also what keeps it from being fully relatable. But this isn’t as much of a problem as you might think. Indeed, I’d even say it’s a literary device – it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

review of a naked woman in the snow; image of wheatfield
A good portion of A Naked Woman in the Snow is set in settings far outside what I’d term “the Anglophone experience”
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Let’s Make a JavaScript Poetry Assistant

May 6, 2024

I’ll be honest with you: This JavaScript poetry assistant began as something meant entirely for my own use. I’m in the middle of a creative project (sneak preview: it’s relevant to Medēn), and I wanted something that would produce rhymes in real time. Indeed, the first name of this program was “Real Time Rhymer”.

Somewhere along the way, other things found their way into the program, all because I needed them. So eventually I realized, if I found this JavaScript poetry assistant useful, others might too.

Of course, the fact that it began as something I didn’t intend to share makes it a little bit Frankenstein-like. It works, but it’s a bit sloppily coded (for instance, some stuff work with jQuery, others with plain vanilla JavaScript). Its aesthetics are also a bit all over the place. And because I’m not going to spend more time working on the program itself, since I’ve got the functionality I wanted, I decided to simply share it. You can use it on this page, and the source code is also available if you want to play with it yourself.

javascript poetry assistant. Program screenshot
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