Arospec poetry zine!

[Dodecahedron314]

"Love poetry" is, probably, one of the least relevant things to anyone on this site. It also, unfortunately, makes up the vast majority of poetry in general. However, there's a great group of people working to change that, the Arospec Poetry Network, and I just found their zine! The first issue is all about people expressing their experiences with being on the aro spectrum through poetry, and it's got some great stuff in it. I highly recommend it...and I seem to recall there being a few poetically inclined people hanging around here (@omitef? @Hey you in the corner? Anyone else?), so maybe that might be something to look into submitting work to if you want? But regardless of whether you write/actively seek out poetry or not, it's a great read.

[Hey you in the corner]

@Dodecahedron314 I'll have to check that out. I have some other work submitted so I need to see if any of my poem get selected before I can submit them to someplace else. This seems like the type of place I'd want to get published. 

[NullVector]

@Dodecahedron314 Cool, I like this idea, thanks for sharing  

 

You could argue that Leonard Cohen wrote arospec poetry. Well, I have 

 

[omitef]

Confession: I started venting about how I couldn't do this because I felt like I didn't have any powerful/unique stories to tell about being aro, and in the middle of venting I found a story to tell

I will be checking this out

 

ALSO I"M READING THE ZINE AND SHOUTOUT TO MEENI ON THEIR POEM "AMATONORMATIVITY"
 

If y'all wanna read my vent/ramble I collapsed it here for our paposterity

Spoiler

 

Ughhh yeah so speaking of arospec poetry, I discovered that I actually am not at the point where I can write the kind of poetry I want about being aro. Even when I'm writing poetry about my queerplatonic friends, it's not written specifically to fit the context of aromanticism. I deleted my poem about my queerplatonic friend because I felt like too much was lost in translation, both from my heart to the paper, and from the paper to the audience (whether the audience is primarily aro or romo). I feel like my poems about my aro experiences, could just as easily be applied to romantic experiences, and that bothers me a lot from an artivist perspective, because I feel like I'm communicating the wrong message. I don't want aro people to be accepted under the pretense of "being just like romantic people" because I think there's something distinctly unique about the aro experience. I just can't figure out what it is yet...or maybe I just don't feel strongly enough about the distinction to write about it. 

 

Now, on the other hand, I've written poems about being trans because...being trans is just so political in a way that being aro isn't. I mean people don't go out of the way to deny aro people basic human rights, like going to the bathroom. I mean people don't go out of their way to make laws that prevent aro people from being themselves--as far as I know, there aren't any laws that force you to get married, though I know that there are some laws preventing unrelated people from living together. In any case, being trans is so much more of a violent, dramatic story for me than being aro is...and it's almost like, when it comes to being aro, I have an absence of stories to tell. My experiences of being aro are just so divorced from my identity as an aro person, and I think that's what sets aromanticism apart from many other orientations...I don't feel like I experience aromantic connections. I experience friendships of a wide variety, just like...anyone does. Of any orientation. Am I making a statement with some of my friendships? Yeah, with my queerplatonic friends, but even then it's just brushed into the background because we, as a society, take friendship so lightly. We don't see friendship as something special in and of itself and that needs to change.

 

 

[NullVector]

21 hours ago, omitef said:

ALSO I"M READING THE ZINE AND SHOUTOUT TO MEENI ON THEIR POEM "AMATONORMATIVITY"

 

Ooh, yeah, I liked that one. Especially these lines:

Quote

This "burning passion" feels a lot

Like holding a match to my hair

  And already I cannot breathe 

          For lack of oxygen:

              I do not want

        To change my lungs;

            I like their slow

         And bumpy rhythm

 

 

 

 

[SoulWolf]

Oooh, nice find! I found an interesting person to internet-stalk! ... that probably sounds weird but whatever.

[Dodecahedron314]

Interesting thoughts, @omitef. Responding in a spoiler so as not to derail the thread (...all right, I'm not actually sure what that will do to avoid that, but anyway):

Spoiler

On 3/23/2017 at 4:44 PM, omitef said:

Now, on the other hand, I've written poems about being trans because...being trans is just so political in a way that being aro isn't. I mean people don't go out of the way to deny aro people basic human rights, like going to the bathroom. I mean people don't go out of their way to make laws that prevent aro people from being themselves--as far as I know, there aren't any laws that force you to get married, though I know that there are some laws preventing unrelated people from living together. In any case, being trans is so much more of a violent, dramatic story for me than being aro is...and it's almost like, when it comes to being aro, I have an absence of stories to tell. My experiences of being aro are just so divorced from my identity as an aro person, and I think that's what sets aromanticism apart from many other orientations...I don't feel like I experience aromantic connections. I experience friendships of a wide variety, just like...anyone does. Of any orientation. Am I making a statement with some of my friendships? Yeah, with my queerplatonic friends, but even then it's just brushed into the background because we, as a society, take friendship so lightly. We don't see friendship as something special in and of itself and that needs to change.

I definitely see where you're coming from, but I think I kind of tend to take the opposite approach--the way I see it, the discounting of nonromantic forms of connection with others is precisely what politicizes being aro, in its own way--not in the same way as being trans, because all of the ossified structures working against us in that area are a whole 'nother (though not entirely unrelated) can of status quo worms, but in what I guess is a more socioeconomic sense rather than a sociopolitical sense. The traditional hetero monogamous romantic/sexual relationship is ingrained in society to such an extent that removing oneself from that system subverts so many other power structures that are tied into that One Family Unit To Rule Them All ideal. That's part of the reason friendship is devalued in comparison to "traditional" relationships--because to a certain extent, anything to the contrary is a threat to the established frameworks on a level that's so fundamental precisely because the presence of the drive toward that sort of configuration (due both to innate alloromanticism in some, and internalized amatonormativity in others) is just taken for granted in such a huge percentage of the population. Breaking that mold by valuing nonromantic connections and not romantic ones becomes an act of courage, in a sense--many things are stacked against such a situation, but depending on the implementation, these sorts of relationships have the potential, on some level (however small), to bring the whole Jenga tower down.

 

Of course, that's only one way of looking at it. The identity and the experience are both only as political or apolitical as you make them. I guess I kind of wound up rambling too.

 

[Apathetic Echidna]

Issue 2 is out! 

https://issuu.com/arospecpoetrynetwork/docs/dttmol2