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bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat
tati
@tati asked:

are the queens in chess sapphic?

Excellent question, Tati. Let me tell you a story.

Here is the start of a game between Petkov and Nikolov, a common position reached after 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 d5 3.e3 c5 4.c3 Nc6 5.Nd2 Bf5 6.Ngf3 Qb6:

The queen tentatively dips her toe into the game. What's important about this particular move is that the queen can't be easily be counterattacked by a knight or a rook. Since any other piece would love to trade itself for the queen, the queen must step where the only piece that can easily attack it is another queen. This caution is a kind of sapphic identity. (I'm reminded of a lesbian I knew who said it was easier to develop a resting bitch face than develop the ability to defuse horny men.)

A pawn is attacked, and white should defend it. The black queen has bared her throat. To a knight or rook, this merely means weakness-- but the other queen understands a bared throat as something to gaze at, an invitation. So she follows her into the fray:

The subject of the game is now the tension between the queens. If black's queen simply captures the white's queen, dissolving the tension, then white will recapture with the pawn-- and with a newly-free rook and a pawn ready to fling itself at the opponent, white will have the advantage. The same is true with colors reversed. This means that the queens should not be traded-- they must stay on the board, continuing to stare at one another. The tension is unbearable. Black tries to break it apart.

Two women meet in a forest and, under cover of thicket, discover the sensation of fingertips on palms. A voice calls for one of them. What happens next? In many games, white's best move is Qc2. The girl should say goodbye, if only to promise another rendezvous tomorrow. The tension will survive the broken eye contact. But here, the bishop is eyeing the c2 square. The white queen is running out of spaces to go that don't give up the pawn.

White played Qxb6, capturing the queen. A kiss, but an ending, and therefore a concession. Black would go on to win this game elegantly.

For a moment, that opening revolves around the brisk eye contact between two queens, forbidden to resolve that tension. This, too, is yuri.



endlessforms
@endlessforms

its such a shame that the good word of "stop using 5-7-5" has not been spread to most of the haiku posters of cohost.

See https://www.nahaiwrimo.com/why-no-5-7-5 for information about why your 5-7-5 haikus are actually too long for a haiku (and also it may be impeding your creativity)



thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

It's a strong case.

A minor cavil: English limericks typically count beats but not, within certain tolerances, syllables. Wikipedia says they do, but you can 80%+ assume anything Wikipedia tells you about prosody is wrong. In this case the various examples on the page itself show variation in offbeats; the very first example has six syllables in its third line and five in its fourth line ('But the good ones I've seen | So seldom are clean'), even though the two lines are metrically equivalent.

As for things to do instead, this is my approach, trying to find something equivalent to some aspects of Japanese form in its constraints and its reliance on perceptible features of the language in question (here: English). I'm sure there are many other things we could be doing too.


calliope
@calliope

I spent a few years writing a "haiku" daily and with a handful of serendipitous exceptions, never followed the 5 7 5 rule.

As the image above points out, to me, the most important part of a haiku is the seasonal image. Another extremely important part is the cutting word, which is of course much more difficult in English so I didn't always try that.

If you really want to explore haiku, the best resource I can think of is Kodansha's edition of Bashō's haiku (yes that Kodansha). I've taught from it before. The book includes lovely translations and then all the poems again in kanji, romanji, and literal translation. You can see what's actually going on in the original even if you aren't exceptional at Japanese (I am certainly not).

To end, regarding what @thaliarchus said about English language features, I largely have ended up using head rhyme in all my poems based on these years of writing haiku, as that's one of the more "natural" (a loaded description) features of the language.


 
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