Bear Parade round two.

A poetry collection by Ellen Kennedy titled:

yesterday i was talking to myself and i told myself that i was going to write a book and give it to you so i put paper in my bag and put a pen in my bag and rode my bike to the river bank and then sat on the ground and thought ‘i will never write a book’ and watched ducks swim away from me

The title of her poetry collection is very long but it only takes ~5 min. to read the whole collection itself.

Everything on bearparade seems to have a sort of minimalist style.

Ellen Kennedy’s particular brand of bearparadian minimalism is something like ‘lots of declarative sentences and parallelism and some repetition.’ Or: ‘Anaphora‘ + a little ‘polysyndeton,’ + a lot of understatement + deadpan tone.

I think everything on bearparade employs a kind of minimalism because being online shortens your attention span automatically. Minimalist stuff ‘works’ online. Dense stuff doesn’t–you click away from it. Literary stuff is notoriously dense and boring, so bears who parade seem to try to not be dense and boring by using minimalism.

(I think I’m going to start trying to write shorter / more minimalist blog posts. Lots of people’s blog posts here on arts, ink seem ‘hella dense,’ and I’m skeptical people actually, like, read them, beginning to end.)

(For some reason I feel like writing < 600 words is not ‘legit,’ though, for an obliquely academic blog.)

Supposedly Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

But so Ellen Kennedy. Her internet poetry collection is good. It’s relateable and relevant if you’re ~20 and are an internet user, which you most likely are. Like, you’ve probably felt ambitionless and bored like this poem:

There’s something about spending a lot of time online that makes me feel ‘i have no ambitions’-y. There’s something about reading a poem online that’s about having no ambitions and which takes very little ambition to read because it’s minimalist and short that makes me feel very…something.

In another poem titled ‘i want to sleep,’ there’s this:

(…)i used schutzhund methods of training to teach the duck to attack on command. we went on a killing rampage that lasted three days. we killed many small children and received the nobel prize for our achievements.

the other day, as i was eating the leg of a small child like a popsicle, the duck turned to me with tears in its eyes and asked, ‘why do you make me kill things?’

Teaching ducks  to go on killing rampages via “schutzhund methods” seems very unserious and stupid. But then you’re hit with the teary eyed duck’s ‘why do you make me kill things?’ and you’re like, “wait…” And then your hit with i felt ashamed. i stared down at the ground and stood very still and very quietly.

Bears’ parading seems to have a sort of tears-of-a-clown quality to it. Like, ‘I’m full of funny non sequiturs and absurdisms, but I’m crying inside.’

And I thought these beautiful lines in the penultimate poem made the whole collection ‘worth it’:

‘i want to rub my face in my blueberries’

‘so do it’

‘okay’

i rubbed my face in my blueberries

i batted my eyelashes against your cheek and left blue streaks on your cheek

i thought about all the times i’ve almost been hit by a car for listening to loud music while walking and laughed.

I feel like if I could read this poetry collection on a computer in the fishbowl after a stressful exam or stressful text message from a girl, and it would make me feel calmer.

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@barkmuckner