The Owl

Signs of Obsession

The Uses of Obsession

Obsession: not just a fashion accessory.

Obsession is how you make art, poetry, music, progress. Love.

"Love: the cognitive-affective state characterised by intrusive and obsessive fantasising concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance."

(Definition of Love from a psychology textbook)

So get your obsessions to work for The Shit Creek Review, whose theme for Issue #8 is.... well, yes: Obsession.

If you don't do Obsession, try Compulsion. Write poetry compulsively instead. Set free your inner Nutter.

However you get there, write the blooming obsessive-compulsive poems, then, if you can bear ever to part with them, send them to The Shit Creek Review.

Here we are:

http://www.shitcreekreview.com/

Check the Submissions Guideline page for details.

But if Mars Sector 6 has commanded that you don't look at submissions gudelines on alternate Sundays, then send the poems direct to editor@shitcreekreview.com

Here's another definition of Love. Obsessive, or what?

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'r have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.

For Fate with jealous Eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrannick pow'r depose.

And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac'd,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac'd.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Planisphere.

As Lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet:
But ours so truly Parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debarrs,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.

— Andrew Marvell