A thread for anyone's poetry. Critique and discussion are welcome.
The Flavor Of Your Name
I spoke to you in whispers,
Gentle words against your ear.
It was clear you were still sleeping
I knew in your dreams you'd hear.
I ran a finger through the space
Beneath your chin, your satin neck
I am a wreck, reciting memories
I'm soaking in regret
I remember slipping notes into your purse,
Before the dawn.
And breathing in your subtle scent
So deeply, fully I was drawn.
My hands fit firmly to your waist
As if designed to be connected
I've collected and rejected every second.
I've deflected blame,
I feel ashamed of wasted chances
Just about the same
As I remember second glances and the flavor of your name.
The Gardener
I chose a rose of distant root
With petals pale and fair as snow
I did not look upon her shoot
whereon her thorns acute did grow
The rose I chose by sweetest scent
With emerald leaves at budding base
Did cause a blush to flush my face,
I bent to pluck, and I lament
I placed my rose within a vase;
A prison made of painted glass,
I watched her wilt as days did pass
As time ran out and I gave chase
CANARIAS
In these hepta-set islands
a pack of wild danes
hunt those tweety birdies
come just for the name
Chase them out, Chase them out
from cobble-veined valleys
where our tall leaning shoulders
cleave the day, quarry canaries
Drive them down, Drive them down
from volcano roostings
where our world-blood is boiling
with old self, buried canards
"For us, not for them, are these places named"
as out loped the canines,
chasing birds from their spain
"Caesura, Caesura in their high-throated natter"
as they slavered up scarps and behind pumice stones clattered
down steep teethings of basalt to the ocean below
Bawling, "no songs will be sung but Silbo Gomero"
So they bayed them from crags where birds coupled in shade
and they shook them from trees where azure eggs were lain
and devoured those chicks that fell flightless from branches
and called up to the mothers that shrieked shrill in their madness
"Shy seaward, you weepers,
we have taken your sons
give dirge to the breakers of brine and be done
Fly sunward, you biddies,
beat your wings with the waves
till at last life has flown you
Take to surf for your grave
You have stolen our name and the name of our home
you have warbled and shat white on
igneous stone
and the deep-rooted flora that has grown from your leavings
drains hollow our mountains
drinks up lava for leafing
You who tittered in treetops
you who brittled our bones
we'll sing gone from these islands
in Silbo Gomero"
>>7424054
>>7424067
>>7424330
>writing poetry after Auschwitz
Supermarket Galaxy
Taste starship, starship gravy
the homemade biscuits made o' glue
baked scarlet bacon so blue
Now that the time has come for me to say hello,
grant me a wish for snow on the barren Mars
scolding mothers floating round the Milky Way
storks holdin' packages nine months late
After all this I taste my
taste my starship, starship gravy, starship navy,
homemade biscuits made o' glue (made o' glue)
blackened scarlet bacon so blue like earth's atmosphere
Starship gravy, with meteor-like lumps through it
breakfast planet, tiger captains, and frogs that smack their food
come out and see the variety I am the manager of the
Tasty starship gravy (gravy with a "Q")
homemade biscuits made o' glue (factory, poor horsie)
broiled scarlet bacon so blue (pigs aren't around, let's use you!)
Shrimp fried behemoth, sautéed steamed broccoli
now serving whipped cream made from the clouds in your dream
out here, I put it on sale, my boat for you to scrutinize, not buy
not my precious supermarket merchandise, hey, you have enough trees so take some hospitality
tasteless starship, starship gravy (with meat-like chunks, though meat free)
homemade biscuits made o' glue (accept them, they might make you choke and turn blue)
seared scarlet bacon so blue (for use degreasing starship gravy)
So come on down, help clean (it's a mess)
and taste our starship gravy!
>>7424335
> engaging in symbolic communication after 9/11
my velvet green hearth
its droplets of pearl
tepid, but hurt
they won't say a word
damp to my bones
and tired and old
under these trees
I can just hear them breathe
from those gaps inbetween
where autumn sees spring
where something else crawls
through that green, fractured shore
when I'm damp to my bones
tired and old
when the rain has made me cold
I'll make my way home
Manifold o'er crust
Center eschew viscosity coat buttress
Fourth jut clasp. Fifth stick focus.
Bind print. Bind fulcrum.
Yeast fall supine
Peanut butter and jelly is messy.
>shoehorning toni morrison in there with everyone else
It's like one of those "which one doesn't belong" games from childhood.
>>7425289
That isn't Toni Morrison, silly faggot.
>>7425274
not even amusing
>>7425166
sounds like freshman creative writing class material
aka awful
>>7424337
you're trying to be clever without saying anything other than freshman poetry class drivel
>>7424330
you don't read poetry
>>7424067
you read poetry but not enough. It's poetry, sure, but there's really nothing there. You like poetry for the form but don't seem to read for the nuance or the yolk. You should start, at least you're on step 1 and not step 0 like the rest of these retards
>>7424054
"I spoke to you in whispers,"
do I even need to read further before calling this freshman poetry class material? because it is
>>7425344
i wrote Supermarket Galaxy when i was 11
>>7425348
forget everything i said, you're a genius
>>7424050
I was writing this for a song sequence, where the narrator is guided by a Virgil-sort of character to see the faults in his soul, the last of which is what the Virgil-character himself stands for. I just don't have the skill or reading base to do something so ambitious right now, all I can do is poorly imitate my idols like Sidney and Hart Crane. So I'll trash it here. Here's what would be the second song:
"Maloastre II"
Here to the stern, my Maloastre called for me;
The soul and body of wind as one
Bore supine spirit upon my knees--
And at our rail, he said to sea:
" Look, where empire wanes,
Her motions drunk and diving of it,
Motions pitching the leaves behind,
Motions to follow the leaves,
How mirror to cast her arms upon
The flame of her is gone:
But sing design to she and hear
How gone to sea is her desire:
Colors painted, eyes will shear to surf
And strokes but cause her seurats into lunacy:
Tarot of her foam will rush in buoyancy
A turn and step, a sail, to her design:
Hear, her want for want of hearth
And temper to her lambent width;
Bracelets balanced by Homeric breeze,
Sortie of thine empire's sweetly smoke,
Parley, apotheosis of our tick and tide,-- "
Here I knew my sacrament,
The alchemy of sin impugned;
Empire hung by her own color,
And said I to my Maloastre:
" Maloastre, see you she?
Her antichristian churches blaze,
Seabreak captures the blow between
The see and she, our thy and me?,-- "
Mortal, thereby, she sceptres trees
And fain for us, it cannot be our fall;
To leaves on shore, I leave my she
And sing a wisdom bound by majesty.
>>7425344
>not even amusing
;-;
Should have used fluff instead I guess.
>>7425360
don't worry, i got worse over time.
You have taken from me my empathy
and have replaced it with bitter indifference.
Stolen away my emotions and left cold disdain.
In an attempt to stifle the passion of my wrath
you have left me with nothing familiar.
I have lost love for my betrothed
I have lost love for my family
I renounce impulse
in favor of inhumanity
forgive me if I do not understand
the benefit of these events.
Obviously your superior thought processes
allow you to withstand
the trial that follows from turning
man into stone
from whence he came.
murder my personality,
leave me alive.
You succeed in the
crime that which you seem to tenderly
avoid at all costs.
If I am dead,
have I not been killed?
I only write as the eclipse of emotion
is incomplete
I still exist today.
Will I tomorrow?
>>7425344
>You don't read poetry
Yeah, you're right. Where exactly is that apparent though?
>>7425446
well, for starters, your entire poem
>>7425446
everywhere
>>7424054
The title and last line please the seeker of sensation other than by eye. The oral association to the beloved also is appreciated.
The unrhymed hinge couplet is sharp. That timbre is closer to the current epoch, in contrast not to the word choice, but the rest of the rhyme scheme, which evokes a 19th century melody, leaning ever so perilously to singsong. The harmony of church choir major keys subverts our empathic desire for the weeping minor; the piano of Chopin rather than the pipe organ of Dupre.
It has done well to have made its way through the world as far as it has, and if you are Mr. L. I'm sure you don't need a line by line, since it has been validated elsewhere.
One theme we never tire of is
the person talking of death, dead,
laughing in a swing just last week
about the skinny one in dark
hood tying our hands, now taking
a last ride out the gravelly
driveway, black everywhere, children
in little suits and short dresses;
or author or preacher, alive,
reminding us of its presence
never more than thoughtbeat away,
soon with dates in parentheses.
If we do not view the subject
with ourselves at the other end
of the joke, we continue, like them,
with sidelong looks at its shadow.
Just why it is we remain on
this side we know from having once
or twice ventured too close to the edge,
leaning toward the soft clouds calling
us to summer days before we
sailed out and looked down at fierce hands
spidering the far wall and woke as
if from nightmare, not to return,
or not quite anyway, except
in fantasy, dead but not dead,
delighted at remorse on faces
of the ones who took us lightly
and broke our hearts. Yet we never
tire, and listen, the way we watched
as a child the oak tree redden,
not guessing its leaves without fire.
>>7424067
The antique chords are even stronger here. There is nothing offensive about either piece and they are suited to their limited ambitions. I want to say something pithy and smart about the relationships between epochs of cultural stability and rigidity, as may have been found in the England of Pope, Wordsworth, or Tennyson; and the rigidity of formal expectations which established the quatrain, the couplet, and the count of syllables - all as opposed to the plate tectonic collision of cultural sharknado which we may say of our own moment, and the complete breakdown of any formal rules at all, despite the occasional innovation whose meek genius continues to carry verse prosody through the cyclone even if only by its fingernails.
You have the chops to see the thing and evolve through its evocation. the words "safe," "conventional," and "lapidary" are heard on the edges of my mind's associative clutches, but we will not reel them in any further than to say the most interesting things to happen to verse structure since the world as we know it was born after WWII, is when those pretty little curios of received form are defaced in the most intentional ways.
Mancrust cursing my lids on the daily
but I sublimate and forcibly forget blaming
anything on the other that doesnt exist
unless I'm affronted with a cocked fist.
The marionettes on empyrean high-wire
seduce and deduce I'm only part for hire.
The choir spontaneously combusts and church
and some girl's cannibalized by Big Lurch.
Poverty seeds away at the bridge tween worlds
and the river cuts the canyon, drain twirls.
A furious glance atop multi-looping coasters
now put your fucking glass on my coasters.
>>7425166
I require your rubric for punctuation. The deployment of two commas suggests there must be one, since if we were going all in on the impressionistic, even those would be omitted. There are two reasons I would like to hear reasons; one is that I always and perhaps foolishly hold out hope that they exist at all; and second, a desire to know what is gained at the expense of the ambiguity between whether it is the hearth, the droplet, the bones, or the trees, which breath from those gaps.
It is possible to assert, and has been, that a complete abandonment of punctuation marks (oppressors!) creates an accessionary effect the affect of which is to make all possibilities simultaneously available to the reader's choice, creating a kind of collaborative authorship, similar to the brushstroke techniques of the Impressionists, whose works change with the distance we choose to stand from them. Though personally I find these kinds of experiments tend toward lassitude of effort, yet they are in the wild and refuse to return to captivity.
something crawling /through/ a shore is slightly moire difficult than something crawling over, upon, or across a shore; and while I am a general supporter of innovation, I fail to grasp the payoff of this one.
Overall, you take us out and back, and suggest the finality of mortality in the swing. So, a poem, seeking the best outfit to wear to its debut.
I have also recently praised the value of titles, and would not mind the addition of one here either.
>>7425166
I liked this, I like the pleasant flow
Bathrobe, beauty in the
Soft white sterile sun she
Sets off with water and rye
Empty vessel foul earth
Behest under vain opulence
Tell the Jester
The Queen is dead
>>7425513
Thoughts on this?
>>7425513
>Dates in Parentheses
Why chop it off other than to hide its origin, I presume, not-the-poet?
I would tell Trent that it is professional work. Thoughtbeat is nice without intruding too far, though it would bear the weight as well being placed at the end of a line, where the eyes naturally pause for however a contemplative split second anyway, to absorb the down and left, just long enough to note the coinage and move on. As it stands, we see it but must propel to the word away, and then on, not pausing to integrate the complete implications of a new word without having to go back later.
The ending is an ending John Williams would approve, he of the pwoerful first and last note.
>>7425655
presuming you're the same anon doing most of the critiques. just wanted to say thanks for them. it's rare to get good critique here
I wish I had any idea where to start with poetry. Where to begin?
>>7425693
Some anthology I guess. Bloom made one a lot of people here recommend. Or read the poems of a prose writer you like.
First time posting in one of these, please be kind and post good criticism:
There was an Old Man in a boat,
Who said, "I'm afloat! I'm afloat!"
When they said, "No! you ain't!" he was ready to faint,
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.
>>7425693
Read 'An Ode Less Travelled' , or, 'Rhyme's Reason'
Then read 'The Best Poems of the English Language' by Bloom.
Then go where you like.
>>7425579
Paul would say this is something, if asked is this anythinggggggg, though Dave would be typically dismissive.
On the off chance, I will argue Paul's case. The school, or sect, I presume, is Confrontational, one small step from Slam, but we continue despite the unhappy association.
In 5 sentences, which hold together as sentences, we find some sense of relief. One thing >combusts /the/ church?
With the injection of some program of intent, some reason for the fist, the angels, the church, and the Adam's Family butler to be in the same room with the amusement park attraction and the thoughtless cocktail guest, you are within view of a poem, thought its final form remains just on the horizon.
>>7424335
BAD GOY!!!!!!!!! STOP HAVIN FUN
reMEMBA THE SIX ZIMBILLION!!!!
Spirits Of Radio
PanPan PanPan PanPan Coast Guard Station Calumet Harbor requests that all vessels monitor radios for distress calls from sailing vessel Lake Victress last heard at 10:42am local time in the vicinity of the R.
Securite Securite Securite Coast Guard Station Calumet Harbor requests that all vessels be on the lookout for wreckage in the vicinity of the R which could pose a threat to navigation.
All-hazards radio WXJ95 broadcasting on a frequency of one six two point four zero megahertz and covering the near shore waters of Key West and the Florida Bay.
Spotter activation may be necessary.
SKY KING SKY KING SKY KING DO NOT ANSWER
Mister and Missus America, coast to coast and all the ships at sea.
And all the ships at sea.
Coast to Coast.
East of the Rockies.
West of the Rockies.
United four seven seven confirm company traffic two miles at your 12 oclock. Turn left heading two three zero and climb to angels twenty.
Columbia, Houston you are looking a little hot and all your calls will be a little early. You are looking good going over the hill and we'll see you in Madrid.
CSQ CSQ, Houston. Did he say he has a stuck hand controller?
Negative, Houston, he said he's in an increasing left roll and he can't stop it. Coastal Sentry Quebec for Gemini seven.
Switching to 16 and standing by.
There are times when I believe
(not for the first time) that I have finally
figured it all out
and I turn to you to speak
the one Truth
but see out of the corner of my eye
a flicker
a light
a stirring
that reminds me
that I know nothing of Truth
and less still of lies.
Do you guys think maybe poetry or what has been termed poetry, the capacity for writing and understanding that material, is genetic?
If poetry is prophetic and shamanic,
and not everyone can be a shaman, perhaps certain people are genetically predisposed to have that sort of intelligence.
Because I have tried reading poems but they just don't move me that much at all, while it seems to move certain people very deeply. Could it be genetics
>>7424337
I love the way "baked scarlet bacon so blue" sound. And I'm imagining a baked sad bacon and I like it too.
>>7428018
>Do you guys think maybe poetry or what has been termed poetry, the capacity for writing and understanding that material, is genetic?
no.
genetics has literally devolved into the equivalent of 'fate' in current discourse desu it's pretty sad
I challenge you to not write "I" once in a poem...
>>7428051
ez:
writing tips
#1
suckle on a pen
like it's muse's tit
practice your technique
#2
kill your family
you need to be free
on Christmas eve(s)
#3
keep yourself
always about to die
#4
do things
reluctantly
#5
miss your shot
and lie
about what could have been
#6
when you do meet a muse
pretend you're only into her
for her tits
The Problems of Being A Wallflower
Your dim lit room,
Has never looked so appealing;
With my Taramaki smile, and my blur on the door,
And the tightness - on that tightness in your throat,
the kind you have after a hearty mayonaisse sandwich late at night,
Can you wonder why I didn't say anything;
But nod and podder on;
And head for my release.
And no matter how much I wanted,
It just wouldn't be worth it.
You and I were never meant to be,
Old sister; queen of the night,
Your roommate is too awake,
Adam is still here;
And I wasn't sure if your mind thought
What your eyes betrayed.
>>7425382
Too whiny
>>7428058
Thanks
The sidewalk artist sits street side
sketching silently
talking in a chalk dialect
A sweat-stained red bandanna
wrapped around his dreads,
as his head bobs to the beat
of his brother's drumsticks
on an empty bucket
His zip-lock bag of pens
all gifts from friendly strangers
His cardboard canvases
plucked from trashcans
and propped up
on makeshift stands
waiting for a gracious glance
or generous hand
to fill his rust covered can
with a few bills
The reggae band downtown
has the crowd in a trance
spellbound
by blackmagic melodies
and mellow vibrations
colliding with the herb smoke
that floats through the fall air,
as the poets and street preachers stare into the flowing sea of faces
and declare the empty spaces
between revelations
to be the genesis of true beauty
The whole scene is serene
and eclectic
Hip-hop heads
and bellbottom hippies
sharing the pavement
and trading electric phrases
with the funky fresh rockers
and pop-punk kids
The sound of respect echoes
and reverberates
off plate-glass windows
and the polished tiles
of the office building obelisks
We are a family of free spirits
related by the beat
A community, tuned-in
to a collective subconscious
our feet move in unison
Soulmates meet on street corners
as ideas are born in beer gardens
and divebar bathrooms
Wallflowers bloom
and assume new identities
with bodies of white-light
Illuminated by the music
of synchronized minds
and rooted in the eternal truth
of one love
>>7428070
Is this about incest?
The Death of Turnus
Your gods have fled the field.
The enemy approaches with spiteful Venus at the fore
wiping your mighty army from the plain
Like crumbs from a table.
Dutiful Aeneas marches at her heel
Bearing your destiny on his arm.
Shapes of Rome's inevitable glory
Inscribed in burnished brass
By the inalterable hand of fate
Gleam on his divine shield,
Incomprehensible to loyal Aeneas
And sharp with an awful clarity to you.
They mean:
You are already a corpse.
It is the Truth eternal.
And yet
You ready your sword.
>>7428250
*snaps* and simultaneous fedora tip
>>7425473
Thank you sir. I am indeed Mr. Lockwood, and your comments are greatly appreciated.
FUCK these shameful don’t-hurt-what-you-couldn’t-care-less-about conclusions, violence should never
be so frowned upon, but we’re all too PC
and a punch in the face just seems so… personal,
so intimate, too close for comfort when
the cold shoulder is a far more inviting turn on,
practical, convenient,
a no man’s land where witch hunts and death orgies divine their own myths as toilet reading material for constipated soothsayers.
pleasure ALWAYS fails to escape its orbits, eclipsing
what little love
was expressed at each diametrical moon,
unweighted into submission like a
bloodbath at a waterpark
but the slides are still open and the lifeguards are giving you the all clear saying its fine,
no need to worry about all the bullets, they’re rubber bullets see, but you look into the murk of the plastic pink gullet
and you KNOW the blood is gushing from the vents behind your heels because you can see it flooding
between your toes and before you can cry you’ve been shoved headfirst into a hilarious
grotesquerie, labyrinthine swing from side-to-side, a petticoat into which fat flesh is squeezed and stuffed into the malformed proportions of perfection
only to arrive, bloodily birthed and screaming, as defective and intolerable.
Self-pity only gets us so far. we must carry the burdens of our beginnings to the grave. Sharing the load is a hateful crime against personal space and you should be ashamed of yourself. Now wipe your mouth darling, you're dribbling again.
>>7428250
*black metal riffs*
>>7428375
Second stanza...ma /lit/ nigga. Free form is a tricky bitch.
Classified
I am a man of tanned hide
Who hides under his Wonderwoman blanket
And confides in blank pages
For ages men have slept
awaiting wisdom
and fishing for false revelations in their bottomless whisky bottles.
Opium dens like playpens and cradles
Enabling all closed minds to maintain fences.
HENCE FORTH;
All open minds will remain empty.
A Galleon of third-eye pirates,
with patches over their portals
and only this mortal illusion to keep them moving forward.
-That was the foreword-
-Make sure you stay in line and behave yourself-
"We" will educate and encourage you in regards to your cravings.
"We" have created a culture for you;
one of conformity by way of a convoluted illusion of choice.
"We" have left you with a voice
devoid of the critical and creative forces required for true speech.
"We" have limited your reach
to encompass only an approved area
of gimmicks created by us.
Placate
Indoctrinate
Pacify
All valuable information is hereby classified.
>>7428422
http://poetfreak.com/545987/classified-audio-clip.html
>>7424050
Crack, crack, crack
Crack, crack, crack
The bolt of the rifle goes forward and back
Another round chambered, menacing lead
Crack, crack it recoils again
and over the hill the soldier falls dead
the foolish man who shouted attack
an arc of gravity the hot bullet fled
Propelled by the fiery gases of hell
into some worried poor man’s head
crack, crack, forward and back
one after another the dead bodies fell
>>7428456
*poor man's worried head
Get your shit together
>>7428494
worried describes the man, not the head
thanks though
>>7428500
Kek...well played anon
This poison is a piece of mind,
a convoluted claim.
The dagger and the silver spoon
conspire by the flame.
The potion and the open wound
consume and soothe the pain.
The medicine is madness
and the method is insane.
>>7428018
A flyby-level sweep of the current and recent state of affairs in literary pedagogy concludes, without demure, that:
Poetry is presented to the tween as the stuff of cartoons. Every year that Dr, Seuss dominates the top ten b est sellers in the category is another year lost to the next generation. And I loved Dr. Seuss. I think what he did was valuable for what it is. But then
The schools present this jagged cliff dive into the Norton, and suddenly the musty, accented, alien dead rise zombie-like from overseas graves, mumbling in indecipherable shamble wearing powdered wigs and crush the will of the typical reader who expected something more like Practical Cats than Prufrock or angels and ministers of grace defend us - Wordsworth.
By the time the survivors reach Terminus, the two questions, how many poets have you killed, how many novelists have you killed, is rendered irrelevant in the captured English departments whose only interest now is force-multiplying their cacophony of retributional rhetoric against the canon, characterized mainly by Youtube pan-flashes who are practicing an art, though it is an older and much more vicious one than poetry.
So to sum up: Most poetry is obsolete to the working poet, valuable only as the story of how we got here. That study is necessary mainly in terms of collecting to one's own intentions what has already been done, ending with what is being done now, so that we may remain upright as we leap upon the rising escalator, in a desperate attempt to rise above the fray.
Most of it doesn't move me much either, and the phenomenon is not new. I'll post Ms. Moore on the topic next.
>>7428018
>>7428765
Poetry
Marianne Moore, 1887 - 1972
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
>>7428204
This came up recently, and I still can't find it. Previously I wanted it as an example, but now I will re-post it more in the vein of appreciation:
I can't remember enough of it to try to reconstruct it, but in schematic pseudocode, it went like this:
I am playing my harmonica on the porch. [steel mouth harp]
The Harmonica moves the air in waves [mouth harp, but also the emanations from it]
The Harmonica waves travel through the trees. [now not a steel mouth harp, but an expansionary effect of it]
The Harmonica vibrations expand beyond the range of hearing [now clearly a phenomenon of harmony]
Until everything becomes Harmonica, Harmonica, Harmonica [a noun referring to an evoked general condition of this poem's universe]
It was by a man who clearly owed a debt to Elisabeth Bishop, because the closing cadence intentionally echoed the rainbow, rainbow, rainbow ending of The Fish.
It is not worth a treasure hunt; the reason I thought of it was that other than pushing the word Harmonica sideways, it had little other structure than a four line stanza - no rhyme - and little in the way of flourish, other than a jeweler's attention to the detail of how the word was placed in grammatical context so that it could be increasingly detached from its original semantic charge to become a declaration of metaphysical well being.
....
>>7428204
...because this piece is working a very similar angle, though without the singular lexical focus shining a spotlight upon the intention.
Someone who knows more than me once observed that when assembling a sonorance, as opposed to a rhyme scheme, much of the art is tallied in the choice of vowel and consonant, such that the "notes" struck either point directly to our thematic, or at least support it by association of some kind.
That is probably muddled in abstraction, so concretely:
The /s/-/s/-/s/ of the artist, calling to mind the sound of brush strokes stands in accomplished contrast to the /b/-/b/-/b/ of the bucket drum. This is well.
My bone with /can/-/can/-/glance/-/hand/-/can/ is more of a peeve than a pick - this is a distinctly American vowel sound, many elsewhere English speakers can't even do it without practice. The most famous example of its pejorative association was when an especially insightful script writer had Hans emphasize this sound to John McClane as the most convincing evidence of his Burger-dom authenticity (combAAt rAAnch). That the stanza describes a state of wanting may be asserted to explain a wanting harmony, I suppose.
/ow/-/ow/-/ow-/oh/-/oh/-/oh/-/oh/-/ai/-/ai/ works for me right up to /beauty/ which, while not a clunker, still breaks the spell.
By now I am looking for the expanding scope, as similar to Harmonica, and it is there, and the windy tightrope between obscure and precious is negotiated successfully enough.
If it were mine, I would look twice at collective subconscious, and the eternal truth of one love, not with a disdainful eye, but with the hopes for an opportune inspiration which takes those phrases above re-use and into a new and expansive semantic voltage.
>>7428456
>>7428456
Whether you agree, as I do, with Lowell, that all poems are work in progress, then what we have here is a wip in search of the trail which leads it beyond Oliver Stone, and takes it up to Spielberg at least, if not to the lofty Malick, or beyond even there to Owen.
Spielberg, for example, greatly enlarged his jackpot with the *pang* of the eighth ejectionary shot of that particular model. Malick's poetry is a poetry of natural light and a contrast between innocent and corrupt so sharp as to call into question the foundations of aesthetic in the first place. Owen hoisted from the mud the ragged flag of his whole generation.
So you've killed a guy, on the battlefield of an unnamed war, and the noise is loud. Here is a simple technique, for exercise, before thinking about the big question - what does it smell like there? What does it look like? What does it feel, to the body, like? Of the five senses, what may be gained by appealing to more than one of them?
The big question, of course, is why do we care about this particular battle, of this particular war? Politics looms on the edge of our view, and the tradition of successful war poetry assiduously avoids it. There is what we may think of as a menu of broader human meanings here. Yearning for peace, evocation of a one-world state, an indictment of the value of what was gained, versus what was lost; etc.
The dead lie upon the field. Lincoln made the occasion into a noble sacrifice upon the altar of national preservation; a price he considered redeemable. What is the price here?
>>7428422
I am able to climb aboard the Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley, et. al., Snowpiercer Pullman car, but I am afraid there is something going on here that my berth may be too small to accommodate.
So let's try turning this around for a few posts. What is the modality of the different voices? "I" is everything prior to HENCE. From there down to -That was the foreword- is a second persona - who? "We" is of sinister intent, but are they closer to the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, or to the Jackboots upon human faces?
Tell us about this one. In dissent from the artificial notions of Roman caste, I do not consider discussion of the spaces between intent and result to be indicative of failure. Everybody stands to gain if a new stitch can be added to the tapestry of voices.
>>7428424
Ohhhhh I really liked that, the audio version was much better worded
>>7427968
truth is not desired
I'm the one posting single reviews. I was mistaken for not bill murray in a another thread a while ago, during this thread's down daytime hours and I was going back and looking at those again.
The archive says, "no." So I must ask you, /lit/ - Has anyone, to your knowledge positied that not bill murray was Junot Diaz?
Because I had the very strong impression that not Bill Murray might have been Junot Diaz.
>>7427272
"Found" poetry, maybe? Or if David Markson decided to try a poem. If Jodie Foster's aliens from Contact were randomly turning the dial of their own souped up version of the VLA.
>The USCG issues two messages, but between them the SAR has turned into a recovery, so the stakes are mortal.
>Another ominous warning.
>I presume many know about 8992 and 11175.
>Connecting Winchell to Art Bell. [keks internally]
>Aircraft-tower
>From a sunnier day for the space program, and a Rush song
>The moment Neil Armstrong saved the program, and de facto became the first man to land on the moon.
>The traditional sign off for marine VHF in the US.
Markson would know that it's all in the sequencing. Though the view does ascend, I suspect the relative obscurity will leave most wondering what this is. Much like Markson's novels. If there were a context, like a character who has a reason to be flipping through his WebSDR and something like this came through, there would be a compelling reason to wonder how he is hearing messages from different decades, and there might be something interesting to be mined from the explanation.
>>7425939
Thank you senor, your critiques never fail to help or entertain. In the meantime, I'll be fighting for Dave.
Mumbled words drip spilled paint
onto the canvassed nothing to taint,
the painter's wife asks about a snack
peering in the studio, the all almanac
Sure why not, as another stroke impedes
the sensational hole in the wall that bleeds
Shop's closed but the people wait in line
boot-shaking for that silhouetted divine.
The up-turned boot kicks another bucket
and the mess of color barely hears a 'fuck it'
Epilepsy, dementia, a schizoids old age
the banana peel crust trips him in rage
But deep breaths and deeper blinks
save the ship while it sinks.
And as days crawl with the impatient impasse
razor-wire lets the artist finally pass
into a realm of hopeful uncertainties
that make the blessed scream 'stop! you're hurtin' me.'
But ever after nary ends happy or ever
just ask your great-grand-pappy, Sargent Pepper.
Choral quietude:
a song sung to
an empty church —
the singer stands nude
proud
at the altar.
Licked lips look liquid
flowing free beneath
plastic wrap shimmering
in sunlight’s seat.
I can hear her voice
tickle her throat as it
leaps through her lips.
Hot breath blowing hair
from my forehead to the air
pushed towards the heaven
from which she summons her song.
Her stomping feet and
thunderclap hands
vibrate through pews.
Adam and Eve felt no
shame at their humanity
blowing in Eden’s breath
until they sunk teeth
into fruit flesh.
Bless them.
They were right
before they knew what
that meant (if it means anything).
This singer
(this girl)
her tones touch me.
They sink into my skin
choose to stay and
stick up all the hairs.
She gathers my
torn-up memories
sews them into a
Sunday Suit
and pulls me to
God in a trance.
I want to waltz
with her at the altar and
dip her into the song.
>>7430166
I remember an anecdote from real life, maybe it could be googled, but what fun is that:
Paul Westerberg once heard that Micheal Stipe carefully and artfully hand painted a pair of Chuck Taylors before a show, complete with prima donna "DONT BUMP ME IM MAKING AN OBJET DAR HERE" attidude and minute detail like anyone would see it from the removed arena front rows they were then playing.
So for his next show, Westerberg stole a bucket of optic orange reflective paint from a road construction crew they passed on the way to the gig, poured it into a tilted dustpan he found in the club's closet, then laced up his sneakers, and when the lights went up, jumped into the pan, then ran straight out and started playing, leaving optic orange footprints the whole way.
That's all I got. The kaleidoscope fascinates the child and the child prodigy alike, for different reasons. No longer either, I remain beyond this one's charm.
>>7428206
I dunno. For me, I thought it was about being gay. i suppose it could also mean something along the lines of not being loved but i'm not so sure about that....
>>7430482
So you were a child prodigy?
Anyway, you–peter piper of abstract rats, dancer of cubist swing, sultan of narrative bling–didn't like it? find it charming?
I know you probably think in the same way that you write, but a non-cryptic critique would be much appreciated. Not that your Oracle of Delphi musings aren't helpful.
>>7430767
Kaleidoscope, in the sense that what I think I read was a tumble of shiny images, governed by chaotic forces, like refraction and gravity, but absent malice of programmatic intent.
As with, >>7425579 there does not seem to be any reason why the metaphorical paint, the anthropomorphic almanac, the bleeding wall (Amityville: GET OUT | The walls of the 53rd precinct are bleeding| Millions of registered voters), the boots, bucket, and breaths, the razor wire, and Beatles record inhabit the same space. My gauges twitch over toward "random" in the absence of any identifiable connectives within the scope of my vocabulary of such.
Residing in a reductivist orthodoxy, in which I adhere to the expectation of being able to say to another, perhaps paying, customer, what the piece is about --- I just don't get it.
Now: I have said it is possible to write a poem based on the Fibonacci Sequence, which most people would not get. If explained, they would be able to count the words, or syllables, or whatever, and say, well, yeah, that is the Fibonacci Sequence. It is verifiable, and subject to consensus. Only then, they are armed to judge success, failure, and degree of each.
If there is a programme here I missed, it is not a failure to explain it, as it would not have been your failure that I flunked Math 544.
The 51, 51, the rotting 51,
eats desire, gives nothing back,
door to the left,
carpeted in Persian sand,
soft incense ash and sometimes
bloodied glass.
where primeval evils past
trapped themselves
beaten by the infinite length
of sixteen meters squared.
from boredom came the storm
books ripped, letters torn,
only halfway done
they bled ink all over the floor.
the rank couch
pushed onto the balcony
gettin’ bleached on rain and hail
like the discoloured shoe they turned
into a shatterproof ashtray.
no men or poets allowed
in that hexed room,
scented with sweat and ecstasy.
the residual white smoke
turned all words
into squirming worms .
by winter nights those
red hot stars dangling in the void
were the only source of light and warmth.
everything was
opiates and
silhouettes.
by the end,
no monsters were left
both exorcised by time
and rage
they left
the lone mirror on the wall
discarded cutlery in the trash
and a mason jar
filled with dope’d-up dreams
half-whispered at night..
Very and really, mutated and subservient,
are the successful heirs to
verity and reality, though their two
dispositions misalign as disobedient
twins of patently poor parents
and circumstance.
Now, the front-row children eagerly ask,
how can the baker bake when
his kitchen is made of tender ash?
The burnt tips of casseroles ignored
and crumbling morsels long engorged
by pig eating pigs plump with cash.
The same way the Gingerbread man does
who lives on dreary Drury lane.
By taking what is and turning to what was,
such that his hand and house unite,
so very plain and without pause.
Tintinnabulation:
that Gaussian salvation,
time for felicitous creation:
to avert learned devastation.
Pain and happiness will always still
be chasing one another's tails
like the beginnings and ends
of really very fairy-tales
that are as half-baked
as the ginger baker's nails.
>>7430883
Math abilities aside, you are one astute hombre. Both poems mentioned are in fact mine, and the 'programmatic intent' is not far from your assertion that it seems 'random.' Part of why I like to do poetry is because my mind's a bit like a maelstrom of discombobulated and reconstituted associations (a bit like Spam) and by sorting out my thoughts 'poetically,' if I'm allowed even to say that much, I can fine-tune what it is exactly in me that I want to share with others.
That being said, the poems are much more Frankensteinian in origin than they are intelligently designed, so your comments really help me to spark life into future creations, aspiring me to one day exclaim "IT'S ALIVE–!"
On my way to the library to read
I read black words on an empty box:
"What would you do if you were blind?"
Not this, I imagined with my mind’s eye
as I glanced down public alley 809
and saw a mess of a man openly peeing
a neon stream thick as unwashed dreads.
I noticed his leaning cane and resting shades
and in realizing he couldn't see me see him
I laughed, dropping a nickel into his box.
Walking on, I wondered if he was homeless,
and if so,
which went first:
his sight or his home?
A Laundry List
Parse the parsley from your soggy salad,
have the good chef bellow you a ballad.
Listen to sweet silence as numb stars burst.
Remember: hunger differs far from thirst.
Now, head home and imbibe quiet thunder
forged by floral static eyes asunder.
Bathe in sinusoidal breath mid wax rooms
and smile big, for fateful spinal pain looms.
Surf the wireless waves that splash all's skin;
search for your lost heart like the man of tin.
Embrace cliches (be)cause #YOLO:
ignore greener grass while eking solo.
Hear, here: succumb to Earthly pills and drop to bed;
forget-me-not, the pale voice inside your head.
>>7430898
Starts soft, continues strong, ends decently. Tie the imagery to the flow better, because the imagery is quite nice, but the flow is glacial and stuttered.
Also, what opiates do you fuck with?
A shell
waves swell
worn down
men drown
by time
bells chime
>>7431011
Thanks, I see what you mean. I think I might remove two stanzas.
>Also, what opiates do you fuck with?
Not much really, just tramadol, vicodin, and codeine when I can't find anything else.
Always love life
always love it
breathe in deeply
and enjoy the splendid
brushes with love and connection,
with people who appear to know you
better than you know yourself
love life as if it is gripping
your very soul and needs to
be captured in song. Grab
the moment and let its
fine associations pull at
every fiber of your being.
Take time as a necessary
evil and drink from the
same cup we all drink
of sadness and of splendor,
of everything you imagined
and want to be.
Love life because it is
fun, love it because it
tags on you until you
finally realize it is all
you ever really had
because it is all you ever really will have.
>>7431035
Cool. And yeah, I think that opiates mingle amazingly well with reading imo, but I try to implore everyone to avoid them because their call can come like the songs of the sirens and most people can't resist.
For instance, I tried oxymorphone recently, which is a thebaine derivative like oxycodone with several times the punch, and let me just say that you'll have as much luck reading on Ambien as you do that.
Anyway, I'm starting to appear like a sleazy, trashy drug addict, so I'll stop–but remember: drugs are a crutch, and I'm honestly just reminding myself this more than anything.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.
For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.
And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord.
Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice: have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.
Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.
When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.
Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies.
Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.
I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.
>>7431106
>Cool. And yeah, I think that opiates mingle amazingly well with reading
Tbqh I think they mingle well with most things. Oxymorphone sounds cool, but in my city I'm limited to what I can convince my doctors to prescribe so I can't really try everything I want, it's a shame.
Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.
O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me.
Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed: let them be ashamed which transgress without cause.
Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths.
Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.
Remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindnesses; for they have been ever of old.
Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness' sake, O Lord.
Good and upright is the Lord: therefore will he teach sinners in the way.
The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way.
All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies.
For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon mine iniquity; for it is great.
What man is he that feareth the Lord? him shall he teach in the way that he shall choose.
His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth.
The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.
Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord; for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.
Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted.
The troubles of my heart are enlarged: O bring thou me out of my distresses.
Look upon mine affliction and my pain; and forgive all my sins.
Consider mine enemies; for they are many; and they hate me with cruel hatred.
O keep my soul, and deliver me: let me not be ashamed; for I put my trust in thee.
Let integrity and uprightness preserve me; for I wait on thee.
Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles.
>>7430905
I will come back to this.
>>7424330
are you from canary islands?, wow, i never expect to see nothing canarian here.
>>7430923
One of /lit/'s best ironies is that its good advice for beginnings is as bad as its potato follow-through. It was a Greek who gave the world the famous advice to "beware the man of one book," yet it is also lost on our company that he meant not beware of ignorance of other books than the one, but rather be very afraid of excruciating, detailed fanaticism.
What better advice for the poet, who, in almost any epoch, will find himself, if committed, a disciple of a precious few messiahs. See Shelley's devastation, after a compressed devotion, to Byron's curse by forgiveness, to see a redemption of the warning to beware of one book. Did Shelley drown of a broken friendship's heart? Trelawney never asked his disembodied heart as much.
And Byron such an eating, shitting, fucking drinking Santa Clause. What a waste.
So yes, take Mary's zombie monster, and advance. the good doctor's detailed exertions, like Rocky's muscle and Mavrick's aeronautics, are only given in the text in montage; the whitewash of narrative. In fact the skills are hard won, and the 10,000 hours spare no one who wishes mastery.
bumping this because i want a critique of my poem but im too shy to say which one
All at once, we’re through the front door. Rain-cold, blood in the kettle.
Home now, yew wreath, gum branch potpourri, and apple cider begets an amorous look and a cracked open Royal Dansk tin
Holding the butter cookie between her thumb and forefinger, rolls it down the inside of her forearm like a St. Catherine's wheel, says "It's still early."
It sounds like everything else; it's an announcement. Inside my head I'm licking the crumbs off, and inside that head, I'm wondering if she meant something by ”it's still early”
The worlds diverge and she playfully puts her hoodie back on and I’m sure she loves me unconditionally even if she’s got a bit of a sharp tongue. The late months are narrow months (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere) What’s a narrow month? You’ve got the Thanksgiving party and the gift exchange and the sidelong sun. What else could you do, besides all this?
“If we get the tickets now, they’ll be cheaper,” she impels. If I’m annoyed by the tone, it’s unintentional. I’m looking for a fight where there is none, and why would I do that?
I take the white paper baking cups out of the tin and toss them in the garbage. The punch recipe’s the really well-kept secret. The worlds converge again, the if and the and. She takes a bite of the cookie; it's halved. She's got executioner’s teeth. No, that's not right. She's the incumbent sweetheart emphasis on the sweet.
Coitus brings out the best in people - I could spend many idyllic afternoons here, below the floating dust.
>>7425733
this
You made me grow old
i try to write but there are weeds between the letters.
I played for game but I lost to safety.
Spoke to soon, tried too hard
got too high and shot a wall.
living not in the memory,
not in a fold in my brain,
but through the whole body
stumps all over
sprouts and vines
thorns and roots
you spread on me like wheat on fields
I take from you and make my bread
I shake my head and stomp my feet
rattle my bones and rake my leaves
>>7429038
wow thanks, i did not expect such a good bit of advice
>>7432191
I like it, could use a little more structure. Second line needs reworked, third line needs completely changed. I think it works better if you remove or change the "you" from the "you and I" part. Something like
thorns and roots spread on me
like wheat on fields
I take from you and make my bread
I shake my head and stomp my feet
I rattle my bones and rake my leaves
>>7432405
Thank you.
English is not my first language, I get tangled somtimes, but what you said makes perfect sense. Thanks for the help
>>7430905
So we animate a pair of adjectives, and make them children of two related nouns, assert a parentage, and impugn the character of all four. So far so good.
So these two precocious little mischief makers appear to launch upon a series of unfortunate exercises of their power - ruining a bakery, then -
Ok right here - The same way the G[] man does.
Does which? engorge, ignore, eating, or ask?
The ambiguity leaves the Gingerbread man in a precarious position, since I don't know which column to put him in, and that because I don't know what he is doing.
The ringing bell is also liberated from context, and it is not clear how disaster is avoided by its presence.
The last two lines are in a conflict in my processing brain - the nails are a sharp observation since people who reach into ovens all day really do endure chronic minor burning of hands and arms. But then, I would feel less doubtful about half-baked if I were certain about the identity of the fairy tales under indictment. There are published fairy tales which I often rather like, and there are lies people tell themselves which are often called by that name. I don't want to think of myself as speaking ill of friends Red Riding, or Gretel.
On the whole, it is an accomplishment to manage a stanza-length sentence successfully and you have done so three out of four times.
Though we have ascended into the rareified air of high abstraction, and even the snow-line of reality itself, with the exception of the penultimate stanza, there are sufficient concretizations to keep the mind's eye focused on real scenery.
A few choices yet to be made.
draft poem/10
i know, i know, it's not worth a shit.
willows deep, widows weep, canvas rent for what mystique,
chambers bound in cloudy russet, dripping from the witch's teat,
call it down, this predator, bring it down, our creator.
slash and gash and lust for more,
save this earth from cerebral bore,
cast not sorrow shadow grave,
your purpose your right pervade
ghastly boilsglow fuck and foment
peace on earth, to save from torment.
>>7433300
Beautiful, if not for those pretentious words.
>>7433286
Thanks, friend.
What I wouldn’t give to
ride down a mountain path from an Andean peak,
manoeuvring around
the rocky inhabitants lying stone-dead for millennia,
the tremors of the handlebars intensifying with the seconds
until my fist starts to tingle
and a lone drop of sweat follows the curve of my cheek
to my chin, and drops off my face
as the thin tyres begin rolling upon frosty white sand.
Soap and Handlebars
I can hear them in the dead of night,
Dancing and sighing,
Singing and dying,
Bears in the woods,
Littered with want and shit,
Or wont and tradition,
Same and same make same for me,
Or naught or nihil,
With candles lighting up your face,
Spotted with pearl and streetlamps' light,
But the pilgrim's plight,
I shot him dead,
Shot him in the head,
In yours or mine,
It makes no difference,
To a manic depressive such as I,
To sleep or dream,
To lie and lie,
And want you all the more,
Sighing and crying and weeping,
Laughing,
You're dying, love,
You're dying,
Lying in clay or mud or blood,
And I die with you,
Laughing ecstatic.
Does not have a name yet, but I spent the last ~3 months writing this.
In Zeiten von ritalen Gargarellen
torniert der Stor vom Dammsee ganz kokett.
Die junxgenaue Katilei zu stellen
bestreubt der schnute Hungmann: "Oh wie nett!"
Die Füselei verbringt in Hinterzoten
Indes in allograder Feurio
sichselber, wo die schwarisaten Toten
entbrinken, und entfleustrn sowieso.
Gigantotrop, pulsant, und doch verdanzen,
vämant, gepriegen, übisant jedoch,
strunziert der Grasinimpus die Instanzen.
Und meine Güte gräbt ein tiefes Loch.
Der Mölafur begallt die ranten Schwefen,
die Schwefen bagallieren das Vernütz.
Dick-Annalie fretiert sichselbst mit Schläfen,
damit auch musikante Vielzahl tützt.
Ein Unheil dreut! Die Ranzokrasten ruchten
durch Strist und Grei, die Katilei appiert!
Soetwas lankes muss alsbald doch fruchtem.
Ja endlich! Sie sind art und furniviert.
Oh busenrunde, höllisch kartinente,
sei spilotram, verdick nicht deine Larten.
Seit wann sind Obelisten so resente?
Das Nabelfleisch ist gut, wie auch die Karken.
So entfüsiert es sich, dass die Begatten
kajütwärts und in graugen Firten frechten.
Der allgemeine Lutz sieht nach dem Rechten.
Der liebe Gott wirft einen lauten Schatten.
>>7434067
The broken bird sings with its fingers,
Feathers flustered,
Fluttered,
Burning on the wings of angels,
Their faces those of gods or dogs,
Barking howling laughing mad,
A mockery of life,
A bitch chained in gold and diamond,
A house on hill stretching empty,
With no princess or any substance,
Jacks of hearts or handsome faces,
A mask of clay or wanton lust,
Mine own never sated,
Nor with drink or romantic love,
Platonic fiends hovering over Tokyo,
A land of light and boyish love,
Lust and lust makes two of us,
Thirsting hungering,
Femished for one another,
But a price on blood and purity,
Who can place,
Not you nor I certainly,
And this has gotten all degraded,
Degenerated,
Much like life on either side of glass,
Seethrough but seamless,
And we are but lions,
Lting in wait for smoke or dust.
>>7433734
thanks, how bout this un
The yawn came, like an onion in the mouth, tears rise unbidden, broken only after it seems the jaw would dislocate. the void of playful tricksterism, pranks of all pranks and unheeded addictions, the void now filled from time to time,
but never truly full
the heart sinks
like a rock
a stone.
>>7434376
i know, i'm sorry. i'm sorry.
>>7433845
!Coherence! For that you get a treatment.
An initial note of yearning starts us with motivation and as soon as the second line we are back in our rubber boned youth. The evocation of antiquity works best with those familiar with the scene, but we forego objection, as we swiftly engage other senses than sight (+100), and we arrive at the beach---
unfulfilled. The ride is a top to bottom structure, but for all the promise there are several more lines which will complete the electrical circuit of this start.
Starting with the unpaid debt of what you would give. Notice the whole thing is a question, yet you end with a period. Make it count. Don't blow it on "my left arm" or something cliched. You have a well-ored mine here. Pay it off.
Second, what is the concluding evocation? At "sand" we are still rolling. Abandoned in mid-ride. Like when doddering grandma would wrap presents in the comics page from the newspaper with no bow because her fingers were too brittle for the detail.
And finally, whatever happens next, as Chandler said of the drawn gun in novels which now must fire somehow because it's been named, it is impossible to invoke " rocky inhabitants lying stone-dead for millennia," without returning to them somehow. They are left as wanting for their significance as we are left for the rest of this.
I don't usually write poetry. Thoughts?
A Species Gone Mad
Day by day we people walk
in disarray. For, you see,
momentarily, we are lost.
Footprints solidify in stone
atop the eons of which we roam.
Doppelgangers
amidst the barren tracks we follow.
'Dog eat dog' they say,
the rules by which our cousins play(ed).
Trudging through mud and soil,
they eschewed death and turmoil.
Survival, the dreamers future.
Life, a privilege.
Yet, monsters no longer ambush
from trees nor shrubs.
Fear, instead,
dwells in empty lies
and the back of minds.
A body built by ages of survival
withers away in a tidal age
of lonely stillness.
Absconder
I met the moon when I was very young;
She was the one that told me to run.
Streetlights pop
but make no sound.
Only bare footsteps trotting the ground—
and the clamor of cops—
and the firing of guns,
as they chase the last runner
back into the sun.
I don't write poetry, only critique my professor gave was make it more accessible which wasn't all that helpful.
>>7424054
I like the title.
>>7424050
What's a good "poetry book" to start with?
>>7434898
Used for one cent, you will not beat:
http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-American-Poets-editor-STRAND/dp/B000NWP708/ref=sr_1_2/181-9568310-6875804?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449530876&sr=1-2&refinements=p_27%3Aeditor+Mark+Strand
Leave the Norton and the Oxford for the pillow biters at Eaton. Get this one.
>>7434898
Green Eggs and Ham
>>7434920
...plus 4 dollars shipping and handling. Sometimes I wonder how people can be as dumb as the people that are like you are.
>>7424054
see, everyone critiquing this is taking the easy way out, because this is really easy to pick apart.
>>7424330
ok even though it's evident you don't know much about basic form. you've got a decent command of vocabulary.
>>7425579
this on the other is fucking great
I'll submit something, although I don't think it's all that great.
the beach boys
she blinked, sort of blank —
Exhaled fumes, that choked her.
Musty picture frames lay scattered across the white carpet.
They had, like the columnated ruins, dominoed.
she breathed electric lights, swung miles past shadowed cracks in the sidewalk,
each wanting her to die.
They didn’t stop shaking her,
and they got their wish.
she cried, and went to sleep —
a waterfall streamed down her flaky chest.
In a bathtub, warm, wet,
waves were parted by her husk, like Moses, with his staff
had impaled her.
Water damage, on the flooring;
the ceiling to her.
Poor ol' sick stan,
he's allergic to everythin,
always sneezin, hackin, coughin,
this terrible disease even icecream wont ease,
poor ol sick stan,
his iron lung moves faster than he can,
that feather could break through the man,
poor ol' sick stan,
cancer is his bed,
it seems to have spread,
IVs cascade like tubes of lightnin',
they put his meds in a tube to syphon,
poor ol' sick stan,
his iron lung moves faster than he can,
a hug will turn him into sand,
poor ol' sick stan,
poor ol stick man,
miracles do nothin,
for poor ol sick stan.
woah woah
gotta go!
in a flash
of a pan
my name is
stan
liar liar
high as the sky
her ass makes me drive
to the edge of a bridge
and pledge my allegiance
to the BRAGging states of america...
FuCk gOvErnMeNTt! lOnG LiVe anArCHy
sometimes i'm crazy
sometimes i'm nutty
sometimes i'm halfway to death
cause all my friends
oh yeah yeah yeah
sometimes i get drunk at night
>>7435116
Don't know what that means, but guess what? It doesn't matter.
>>7435050
Banzai? I thought you worked in graphics.
>>7435117
No meter, no structure, no prosody, no theme. Juvenalia/10.
>>7434951
24 words doing the work of 1.
logo-rhea/10
wut did peeps think of my sick stan poem thing? the posts that came after it werent part of it.
Jack Benny screams
"What in the hell has a palm tree got to do with anything!”
I wonder that also
As the sun sets on Berryessa,
And the acid starts to kill us
I was the first to go: tangled in lake kelp and swallowed whole
The moon’s light just a tea candle against the night;
Ought this dead limb bring me ashore?
Was my final contemplation
But the world answered me: no.
A long stagger to the cabin finds
the others, statues now,
prostrate on orange rugs
I sip from a large jug of wine (still full) and
listen to our synapses melt in symphonic unison-
all the while
A single song rotates from the stereo,
one play after the next
Lucien, Lucien, Lucien, Lucien
You should know.
Let's picnic under the cherry blossom
Bonsai tree up Trickling Creek.
I'll bring the red wine and cheese,
and you'll bring the pesticides.
We'll listen to 2Pac wax poetic on the boombox,
then Lacrimosa with sweet French kissing.
The sun will be sumptuous, the air fair;
our arms will be braided, our hair without care.
We'll sit and talk, or sit and not,
we'll sit and stare or throw stones
wrinkling cheeks on whitewashed bone.
Our spirits will effervesce with each caress
and our tongues will dance at each express
of our–oh, let's not place labels–
I just want to fuck you disabled:
make you moan, scream, epileptically seize,
all while I drink everything you breath,
worrying not of your disease.
And eventually a shadow will blanket us,
refrigerating our moment's sin
and we'll pack up and leave
but only after we finish each other's–
>>7435675
>The sun will be sumptuous, the air fair;
>our arms will be braided, our hair without care.
bad
breasts and thighs
within the oil do bubbles dance
with glee they greet four slabs of meat
as sizzling pops sauté the flesh
and crisping chicken turns to gold
she lays upon a plate to die, again.
>>7435720
Style, workshop, all words, right? Now let me tell you this: words don't mean a thing, kid. It's actions is where it's at. And you do NOT have them.
"Vanity of Vanities"
What’s a minute to the aged, an hour to the decrepit,
the spent years of a generation to the immortal earth?
What celestial chalice will the sweat of labour fill to brim,
drawn from the toiling backs of men and women under the sun?
Labours upon labours in sweat and blood shall run
through riparian troughs into the endless ocean;
and as every fresh draught of breath follows an exhalation,
so does a southbound wind follow each northern voyage on
the eternal ocean under the sun,
the sun that rises and sets and rises again over
every generation in its turn.
The first change sparked the universe: before there was
nothing could be measured by human instruments,
and after there was light, everything under the sun
began moving. The staggering first step was reinforced
by the second, and the third planted man and woman
fast upon the fertile earth to root and fruit and till the soil
under the sun. Man toiled and woman toiled, and their plentiful
progeny all toiled, and toil they to this day, without respite.
Nothing has changed under the sun, not least the circuits
of the human brain, or the rhythm of their hearts:
surely man and woman are their ancestors enfleshed again.
Ah! but remember: that sagacious English hermit
Charles Darwin hath proved that man and woman be
the latter-day legacy of the primordial monkey,
that dwelled in the depths of the lush primordial wood
where nature spread a verdant canopy over her
innocent young. Under the sun it swung from the trees to
generate the ape that upon succeeding generations
begot man and woman staggering naked on fertile earth.
Time has ripped the tail from our posteriors and the thumb from
our feet, but the circuits of the human brain are distinctly
simian; the most human passion and aggression be the
surest sign of our ancestry. The sun has warmed both
our cheeks and of our simian progenitors, and nothing new
has been done under the sun, and nothing ever shall.
Life indeed has a purpose: survive, be fruitful, multiply,
no more. This has been the way of life and the world
since the one decided that it wanted to be two.
>>7435768
Oo Loo papa moliki dingo. Have I proved my point yet? Tell me if I need to spell it out for you.
Let it be said
that Tim's year was divided
into two seasons: sneakers
and flip-flops. Let us
remember that Tim
would sometimes throw a football
with all the requisite grip, angle
and spiral-talk. Let us recall
that for the sake of what was left
of appearances, my mother
never once let him sleep
in her bed; he snored all over
our dog-chewed couch, and in
the mornings when I tip-toed
past him on my way
to school, his jowls
fat as a catcher's mitt, I never cracked
an empty bottle across that space
where his front teeth
rotted out. Nor did I touch
a struck match to that mole
by his lip, whiskery dot that—he
believed—made him irresistable
to all lovelorn women.
Still, let us remember
sweetness: Tim lying face down,
Mom popping the zits
that dotted his broad, sun-spotted back,
which, though obviously
gross, gets the January photo
in my personal wall calendar
of what love should be,
if such a calendar
could still exist above my kitchen table
junked up with the heretos and
therefores from my
last divorce.
Let us not forget
how my mother would slip
into her red cocktail dress
and Tim would say,
"Your mother is beautiful,"
before getting up
to go dance with someone else.
In fairness, let me
confess that I pedaled
my ten-speed
across the Leaf River bridge
all the way to Tim's
other woman's house
and lay with that woman's daughter
beside the moon-
cold weight
of the propane tank, dumb
with liquor, numb to
the fire ants that we spread
our blanket over until
I stopped for a second
and looked up
because I wondered if
her mother could hear us,
or if Tim might not
have stood in the kitchen,
maybe looked out
the window and saw
my white ass pumping
in the moonlight,
and whispered
to himself, "That's my boy."
It's all foreplay, really-this walk
through the French Quarter exploring souvenir shops,
each of them carefully deranged, as if dust were to settle
only at perfect intervals. Yes to the vetiver fan
that smells sweeter than sandalwood or cedar.
No to the mammy doll dinner bells.
No to the mammy dolls whose sewn smiles are as fixed
as the lives of too many poor Black women here:
motherhood at twelve, drugged, abandoned by fifteen,
dead by twenty (suicide, murder) so easily in Desire.
And yet, their voices sweeten the snaking air,
providing the transvestites their proper Muses,
all of whom have streets named for them in the Garden District.
A soft heat settles on Terpsichore,
just inside the gay bar where the owner's pink flamingos
complement silly songs on the rescued Rockola.
Who can dance to that Lorne Greene ballad, "Ringo"?
Dixie beer is the beer of choice; marijuana the cheapest drug.
Relaxation is key, since it's all a matter of waiting
for the right body to stumble toward you.
Lust perfumes parties in the projects, barstool chatter at the Hyatt,
lazy kissing on the median strip stretching down Tchoupitoulas.
If Professor Longhair were alive, he'd teach a lesson
in seamless motion: the perfect slide of a man's hand down a
woman's back;
a lesson you learned long ago before you met me. We are making love
as we did before in Austin and Manhattan.
But in this room on this costly bed our lovemaking
starts out the slowest grind, then, like this city's weather,
goes from hot to hotter, from moist to rainstorm wet.
You're tall, A., and where there should be tribal markings
there are scars-football, basketball, mid-sixties grind parties
where something always got out of hand. There's the perfect
amen. You're your own gospel.
And you bring good news to me-the way you enter me
Like grace, the way you say my name, a psalm.
No. That's not it. It's the engineer in you that
gets me. Your search for the secret line that goes
straight to the center of the earth. Deeper and deeper
you go until there's no earth left in me. And we
hum and moan a song as old as our selves gone back.
There are too many souvenirs in your eyes.
Gifts given too often, too hastily, never opened.
Outside a city sprawls its heat, seeks out every pore,
licks every moment of sweat as we shiver in this chilly room
taking each other's measure. We say good-bye again and again.
As if every kiss, every touch we make will shadow
All our celebrations.
And they do.
I am not saying “mark my words,”
as the thief says early each winter.
He leaves nothing of value. He too wants.
A brute with language, he has a fondness
for preaching. I am bathed to luster.
Memories move musically through my bones.
He sings above, vaults off a horse with feigned
kindness, lands so fancy. Letting go of this,
sitting with tropical leaves the size of men
in a terrarium, I am beautiful. He means well,
admonishing women. He is lucky
with the show of crankiness.
What does it mean to let go the envy?
I sometimes hope stars don’t spread themselves
over New York’s lights. Performing for himself,
glasses glittering, he reads stories of poverty,
claims them all as his own.
Here in Colorado irises of all colors unfold
outwards to the half-hidden sun. On the cracked
cement, chilly before rain, I see perpetual
beginnings. I’m going to forget him:
lock him in a box in my head,
lock him in the haunt of violins, let go
what’s his in the hurl of breath of my groans.
>>7435795
You're butthurt I identified you as Junot Diaz?
Indigenous Elvis works security:
Chief Joseph hair, blue-black and pomped,
turquoise and shell dangling from one ear,
silver chunks of rings on every bronze knuckle.
Indigenous Elvis works security:
X-ray glances at your backpacks,
laptops, empty still-moist shoes.
Indigenous Elvis waves me to his line.
A perfect gentlemen at all times,
gingerly lifting my naked phone,
holding the line as I return my computer
and extra undies to my briefcase.
Next line, next flight, Indigenous Elvis eases in
too close, asks, "Where you headed
this time?"
Subtle tango, I lean away, wondering what it is
he saw first gave me away—
My beaded barrettes in their travel case?
A slight turn to my eyes?
Oh, mortification when I get him!
Indigenous Elvis, at security, a third time.
He lifts my carry-on,
maneuvers my hand, gestures me close to ask,
"How is my sweetheart?"
Then against my neck, so my hairs rise
with his sight, "How’s my sweetheart doing …
your sister … ?
... the one that got away."
Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,
How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,
But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.
>>7435826
You can spout as much stupid, pigfucking, pretentious bullshit as you want. But mark my words: don't, DON'T call me that name. How's that for a "speech act"?
>>7435613
>logo-rhea
logorrhea doesn't have a hyphen you pleb
>>7435711
"will the oil do" sounds like you're writing in that Yoda speech people get into to get their poems to rhyme in iambic pentameter. You've got a decent rhythm, but this shit doesn't rhyme and that word order is unacceptable when you have so few restrictions.
Also, it was fine at four lines long. REEEALLY common problem with poets is writing "punchlines" for their poems. Try not to do that.
>>7435675
Holy shit how much anime hrs/day?
>>7435653
I'm 90% sure you're just describing something while using line breaks. Also Wallace Stevens could barely get away with dramatic ending like that, I don't think you're ready for that shit.
>>7435055
like a cheap >pic related
>>7434826
It's like you're getting the hang of rhythm, but ain't there yet. Also young and run don't rhyme, and it's jarring. Neither does cops and pop.
"More accessible" means nobody has any idea what you're talking about, which is a rude way to treat your reader.
>>7434756
Sounds like "POETRY (TM)". With some careful consideration and introspection, I think you could write something honest. Doppelgangers sounds like a DnD reference. In the future, please use your own reference points. It'll make for better poems.
>>7434068
>Spends 90 days writing poem
>posts it to 4chan board that is auto archivered forever
>>7433300
You control the sounds decently. Just actually write about something in the future, and you'll be alright.
>>7431397
What you're talking about sounds interesting but I don't get it without references. please elaborate.
>>7431077
A shitty Leaves of Grass
>>7428765
Good post, but in this sentence...
>The schools present this jagged cliff dive into the Norton
...would the Norton presumably be at the top of the cliff? I mean, i get why you did it (because there's no phrase as dramatic as "cliff dive" going the other way) but it's still sloppy.
>>7428514
Heroin isn't conspiring with your zippo and spoon, it's your chump ass that keeps buying it. Jesus christ, take some responsibility
>>7425344
>you read poetry but not enough. It's poetry, sure, but there's really nothing there. You like poetry for the form but don't seem to read for the nuance or the yolk. You should start, at least you're on step 1 and not step 0 like the rest of these retards
>best crit in the thread
I was working on this today
Plain as what is! I saw what is not!
A rapturous better of facts we endure,
Things not as they are, but as they ought,
If unbridled by order's unfounded allure
Hidden are moments not on the calendar,
Spontaneous shrines to destiny's clan
Where consequence is let out to meander
And where oft we cannot, there's some place they can.
Yet they're pictures in glass, unhinged from the end
Lesser predictors, though to real life preferred
A breath against hurricanes, cahnce against trends,
Where agency's lost and action differred
>>7435841
>next post is randomly line-broken navy seals pasta
>changes last line to walk the dinosaur
>declares victory
>masterpiece!
It could have been Jonathan Safran Foer, but I don't think he's nearly as well read as Junot.
>>7435872
>>7435653
If you're still in the thread, lemme elaborate
>"What in the hell has a palm tree got to do with anything!”
Is this a movie line? It sorta threw me off
>And the acid starts to kill us
Is kill us a made up word for "kick in?"
So, we're one verse in, and all I know is that you and Jack Benny are taking acid in Berryessa, which I had to google. When I glibly accused you simply describing something relatively ordinary with line breaks, it was places like this that were frustrating me. If there's a subtext there, it's gone over my head.
Second verse, I'm still confused. Is you on a boat, or is the whole story how you took acid?
>A long stagger to the cabin finds
Again, why the long stagger?
You're sorta on the right track if you wanna keep doing this, but you gotta start asking these questions of yourself more often. That's the only way you improve, or even create good stuff in the first place.
But anyway, who am I but some dude on the 'net?
I'm reading your lips
and they tell a beautiful story
something about damages
and lost morning glory
seeds in the garden?
over your buried brother?
whom you bludgeoned to death
with a frozen turkey?
on Thanksgiving?
two years ago?
and you faked his running away letter?
mentioning the burdensome family reputation?
that he felt he couldn't uphold?
Oh, sorry, never mind.
It's just a herpes sore.
>>7435932
It seemed like a nice time you had, but this reads more like a diary entry in verse than a regular poem
>>7435897
>>7435907
>>7435947
>and lost morning glory
Morning glory is a flower. Maybe "and quick fading glory."
>over your buried brother?
Your meter was so on deck until this line.
>bludgeoned
Same probably, hits the meter odd
>herpes sore
Cool it with the BIG ENDINGS
>>7435948
Yeah, I only wish I'd found someone who can put up with my shit by now. Alas, I'm reserved to writing bad poetry on a board full of–well, I'm here anyway.
>>7435961
I once went to Senegal and found myself drumming on a pair of Congo drums alongside our taxi driver Mori. I was sad to discover that I have absolutely no rhythm whatsoever. I'm like an autistic savant when it comes to anything rhythmic, just without all the advantages that come with being a savant.
>>7435841
>pigfucking
This was a recent scandal involving some kind of secret society misbehavior by the English Prime Minister, yeah?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/opinion/david-cameron-the-prime-minister-did-what-with-a-pigs-head.html?_r=0
What a curious choice of portmanteau. Not at all the sort of thing a blue blooded us east coaster with a Mayflower ballast stone at the head of the parking lot driveway would choose at all.
"You know how this works. You say Rumpelstiltskin and I disappear."
>Will Self
>>24826157
>>/r9k/24826157
I licked her raw and bleeding wounds and she returned in kind
the saltwater from inside us was all I could smell
I felt my bones turning to lead
There was a masseuse behind my eyes, wiping my face with a warm towel and pressing her hands behind my face
I used my hips to get myself outside and onto my side
She clinged to me
There were wounds she couldn't lick
>>7434955
>>>7436193
>pick apart
OCD has gained effective treatments in the last 20 years. You still haven't named your pain, Junot.
>>7436111
THESE WOUNDS, THEY WILL NOT HEAAAAAL!
>>7424067
Please don't preface words with "did" to make the meter work. It sounds terrible. You should rewrite the entire line, or even the entire poem, before you do that.
>>7424054
>>7424337
>>7425513
>>7428070
>>7428456
>>7430905
>>7432191
>>7434971
>>7435812
>>7435816
I copy and pasted a bunch of lines from the thread and patched them together to make them rhyme. Apart from punctuation, I haven't changed a thing, or added a single letter of my own. It's pure plagiarism, and I call it:
Freud Writes Frankenstein
Let it be said
the time has come for me to say hello:
The Queen is dead
by blackmagic melodies and mellow
Platonic fiends hovering over Tokyo
made from the clouds in your dream
atop the eons of which we roam
broken only after it seems
their faces, those of gods or dogs,
sailed out and looked down at fierce hands,
tiger captains, and frogs,
and propped up on makeshift stands
where our world-blood is boiling,
which we may say of our own moment,
to brim drawn from the toiling.
Ghastly boilsglow fuck and foment
murder my personality
without all the advantages,
so take some hospitality:
a tumble of shiny images
or not quite anyway, except,
that isn't Toni Morrison, silly–
for the sake of what was left
we shiver in this chilly
room with the amusement park attraction.
As days crawl with the impatient impasse
that is probably muddled in abstraction,
I watched her wilt as days did pass
like the columnated ruins, dominoed,
for the nuance or the yolk
but in schematic pseudocode
colliding with the herb smoke
reminding us of its presence
Güte gräbt ein tiefes Loch,
it makes no difference.
Set me up upon a rock
with ourselves at the other end
to say something pithy and smart,
though the view does ascend,
this is really easy to pick apart.
>>7424054
First stanza blows, rest is a little boring but has a nice ring to it at least
>>7436232
nice!
(i'm the one who wrote supermarket galaxy, sick stan, the untitled boilsglow, and the untitled emo one "eclipse of emotion")
anyway, sick poem amalgam, bro
>>7436259
As author of this piece, I must say it's pretty fucking cool. So po-mo.
Adam stands on docetic mountain
The woman's face is full of stars
In the words of the book
And with the lips of the book
And the trumpet and the seal
And the candlestick that lights
Up your bed with seeds and flowers
And the lion on your rug
That's roaring like a lamb
On the rack and on its back
I call the martyrs on wheels
To this piss-poor mess
And the blood spreading like flies
Under the table and the gable
Breathing curtains of eyes
That shift uneasily
And sniff like foxes at count
With feathers following the mind
That stitches quilts
And pours cats into comets
Oh microwave oh galaxy kill
All the night and its names
On docetic drawn mountain
My dragon arises
Scaling plastic Christs
With no back and no face
He has stolen space
And has solemn to spare
And kisses mountains
Covered with useless snow
For Paise and for Thekla
Under low volcanoes
Fearful wails to fall
Under his brothers
And Bloodface kills again
And smothers the wheels
Drawing in the dirt
There is Ashkai
Under psychic attack since eight
I saw the bells by the jar
I saw the teeth in the jaw
And saw the pale drains
Mind sinking empty wine
Useless in the heathen Eden
How great was the jungle
Dogs clutch heads and
Catch and call fall bulls
Murmuring like lovely streams
That pulse and hurtle
My clock shot shut
>>7436304
I didn't read it, but I really like the way the lines looked on my screen. Very long and sinewy. Definitely a good start.
One time I opened a can of sprite and got a bubble in my eye.
It wasn't a very good day after that.
It's nice how it's safe and cool to call everyone a person
Chicken noodle soup with added leeks
Is still some pain with English pronunciation
How education is always subversion
Whether it's something's or someone's
There was a time before us
Put simply, it can be called the pre-disease
Nothing was owned, just mostly seen, by the native pre-diseased
Was this guy bothering you?
Because I'm about to
Thinking about painting something unoriginal for Christmas
At least doing nothing still wastes time
I remember Karl Boldenbrow
Telling my dad he was a chevette
That my mom might trade in for a Porsche
She loves Viggro Mortenson
I would've scraped my knuckle on his tooth
Because I'm like him in ways
And having nothing to say is the worst
Don't tell me something I don't know
Make America deaf again
We can all get fluent in sign language
We'll all cut our thumbs on cans of soup
And point westward, the course of empire
Until plastic desolation is the lumbar support for our backs
Until we found out the mesosphere was an inside job
Golgotha
Golgotha
This pain is ours to keep
Crack, crack, crack
Crack, crack, crack
I earn my rock laid on my back
on all fours, on knees giving head
Crack, crack always the same
the foolish pigs around are lead
try to catch me, they just wack
write up they charges, I'm at home in bed
stewing in my own smell
ain't no way to live my momma said
crack, crack breathe in and back
i'll be smoking crack in hell
Hume says poets are the experts
regarding divine nature
but also that
we can't rightly say anything about it
so I'm going to just point out
that all we can do
is hint at the blurry outlines
of the silhouette
that is empyrean grace
(whatever the fuck that is)
and ask that
you fill in the gaps yourself
which means
that the quality of this poem
depends on the quality
of your own imagination
(say it like Spongebob).
>>>/f/2972026
I thought I might as well post this here.
Oh to what a terrible wretched wreck I would become,
optimizing my time before I die;
always squeezing every second of every day, so that I never succumb
to the sin of sloth. I
will maximize the months and change my behavior
to their fullest potential
until I realize that life is existential,
sitting here a Stranger
I finally comprehend:
I, myself, am the creator.
The end.
>>7436252
It's not THAT bad is it?
Sleep's my mother's bitch
and darkness her hand-maiden.
From whence came the tapping?
Still tap-tap-tapping away at the sill.
Forsooth–! The dust-mites revolt
and climb into bed with me to wane
along with Luna and her crescent rainbow,
which sneaks into our purview
like a scalpel into the eye.
While my lullabies galavant with the Pheonix
the flock baahs uncounted,
and still I tire in circles
waxing lime rinds just to stay awake.
And he coughs.
>>7436667
sir prized Lee brill eh UNT
>>7436790
think he was just pointing out the similar wording
I HAVE SO MUCH CREATIVE ENERGY
I DON'T THINK THIS IS THE MEDIUM
IN WHICH I SHOULD BE EXPRESSING MYSELF,
FOR I WANT TO SADDLE A SHERPA–
NOT HIS NEPALESE MOUNTAIN GOAT–
AND SCREAM WITH BURSTING LUNGS AT EVEREST'S PEAK:
Come see Kung Fu Panda 3 in theatres
August 7th.
>>7436664
>>7436962
Crack, crack, crack
I earn my rock laid on my back
on all fours, giving head
Crack, crack this my game
stupid pigs around are led
try to catch me, they be wack
write up they charges, I'm home in bed
the warm den where I dwell
ain't no way to live my momma said
crack, crack breathe in and back
i'll be smoking crack in hell
Come winter, time to hop the pond
With stuffed bags and resigned nerves.
If you saw us, you might smile
Or say something like why?
My family, I mean, when we fly.
One Christmas Day I got my sister socks,
She wept for a moment and then forgot
Until the following year
And the year after that.
You say you smell sulfur?
I wonder what it could be.
At what others reflexively recoil,
I often pause, gulp, and plea
for one more Christmas
just without a tree.
"Vanity of Vanities"
What’s a minute to the aged, an hour to the decrepit,
the spent years of a generation to the immortal earth?
What celestial chalice will the sweat of labour fill to brim,
drawn from the toiling backs of men and women under the sun?
Labours upon labours in sweat and blood shall run
through riparian troughs into the endless ocean;
and as every fresh draught of breath follows an exhalation,
so does a southbound wind follow each northern voyage on
the eternal ocean under the sun,
the sun that rises and sets and rises again over
every generation in its turn.
The first change sparked the universe: before there was
nothing could be measured by human instruments,
and after there was light, everything under the sun
began moving. The staggering first step was reinforced
by the second, and the third planted man and woman
fast upon the fertile earth to root and fruit and till the soil
under the sun. Man toiled and woman toiled, and their plentiful
progeny all toiled, and toil they to this day, without respite.
Nothing has changed under the sun, not least the circuits
of the human brain, or the rhythm of their hearts:
surely man and woman are their ancestors enfleshed again.
Ah! but remember: that sagacious English hermit
Charles Darwin hath proved that man and woman be
the latter-day legacy of the primordial monkey,
that dwelled in the depths of the lush primordial wood
where nature spread a verdant canopy over her
innocent young. Under the sun it swung from the trees to
generate the ape that upon succeeding generations
begot man and woman staggering naked on fertile earth.
Time has ripped the tail from our posteriors and the thumb from
our feet, but the circuits of the human brain are distinctly
simian; the most human passion and aggression be the
surest sign of our ancestry. The sun has warmed both
our cheeks and of our simian progenitors, and nothing new
has been done under the sun, and nothing ever shall.
Life indeed has a purpose: survive, be fruitful, multiply,
no more. This has been the way of life and the world
since the one decided that it wanted to be two.
>>7435846
>>Spends 90 days writing poem
>>posts it to 4chan board that is auto archivered forever
You do realize that stuff is just gibberish?
>>7437153
Anon, that is german.
![dada1[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ZOGSPKo.jpg "dada1[1].jpg")
>>7434068
Dasz kombt ayn Yaarhundert dsu spaedt.
>>7437178
That poem is not dadaism though. How about some actual criticism?
>>7437218
Ist das wirklich Deutsch? Mir scheint es fast komplett Kauderwelsch.
>>7437165
Anon, that isn't.
>>7437267
Is german your native language?
>>7437269
... no. I'm not very good at it either.
>>7437272
It shows.
>>7437274
Of course it does. I'm not very good at it, I told you.
How would you improve that sentence?
>>7437276
Kauderwelsch is not an adjective. "Mir scheint es fast komplettes Kauderwelsch zu sein." would be better, or "Mir scheint es fast komplett unverständlich."
But I was not talking about that sentence being awkward, but rather about its content.
An italian teacher I once had, who studied deeply Dante and thus respected his Comedy told me that for how great his writing his, nowadays to be like him you would not write in his way, that is outdated.
So, how would one write?
>>7437284
Whatever fits best for what you want to write? Stop trying to create a formula.
>>7434068
Can we get a translation?
>>7437318
I think a quick google translation would suffice.
>>7437336
No, no it does not. Google barely recognizes any of those words.
>>7437371
Which is why I thought it was complete gibberish. For Gott's sake, ritalen, Gargarellen, junxgenaue (wie würde man das aussprechen?) übisant: this are not real German words.
Full disclosure: I'm sorry for fucking up the German language in my post above. I'm still cringing. Brain fart got me.
>>7437425
They are obviously changed a little, but if your german is good enough you should atleast recognize their roots.
>>7437425
these*
The prophet glows indignant,
Wearied and wan from fasted folly.
Stagnant water flows over brinks
From higher planes sensed but unseen.
With careful blade he digs inward
Observer and self find sunsent beams
Reflections of illuminated scrawls
Hopefully.
The patient swallows, soaring downcast,
Capsules sent from creaking docks.
The words of Bo, peeping,
To my head to my head,
Rock & roll nurse, tired and leathered,
Rigors morose and unending,
Pillage and pestle coursing vainly.
The sucker seared with subtle fire,
Gasoline dreams through wafted haze,
Seeing double scoops and conic sections,
Childlike claws of memory burning
Decrepit theater screens from black to white.
Preying upon altars, starved and lingering.
I purchased some love with cash
All I wanted was to tap some ass
No words of kindness or affection
Just uncensored lustful actions
Precious money wasted, seed spent
Bed full of shame and regret.
I look out the window at 2AM
And question myself as a man.
>>7424050
I sit around
Watch things wither
Retrace my steps like the laziest river
Going over what the world has done
>>7437062
Here is one. The wry little ditty is a favorite of the moment, it's contemporary brevity, snark, and pronouncement supposedly related in some way to our similarly divided and slapdash attention spans.
I like the indignation of socks, and the long grudge. I read something recently, "ifit is hysterical then it is historical" referring to small things which drive family members to drink too much and scream Satan's own curses at each other.
And it is the very brevity of the flash cut to Hell that makes it so astonishing that I doubt anyone here will have seen it except in arrears. I wonder one thing though, in such a high-pressure condensation, I suspect you wanted me to get - what is the significance of the final tree's absence? Why does he wish specifically for a treeless Christmas?
>>7437062
>>7438874
OK, on second reflection - is it that he wants a Christmas to himself, without the f@m? Because if somehow without adding more than one more line, or even a word or two, driving that nail into my ankles would really make this a hit - hell is so bad that I would rather be alive on Christmas day with no presents, and no tree, and alone.
It's just barely in there. It could be really in there.
Dealer's choice.
How is paradise lost Iambic Pentameter?
Doesn't fruit make it one syllable too many?
"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit"
>>7438957
The starting and ending syllable can be excluded from the type of meter.
Honestly though, iamb, dactylus, all that jazz is pretty pointless. There are other ways to acurately describe a meter, but it's more long-winded than just putting one of four names to it and call it a day. Entire poems rarely fit one of those types entirely, only parts of lines do.
>>7438957
The vowel -ie- in disobedience was likely glided.
>of MANS first DIS o BEE dyence AND the FRUIT
Am I a pleb for thinking most poetry is BS? I'm talking Yeats in particular. and most poets from that sort of era.
Shakespeare seems alright though.
>>7439033
Yes. No one forces you to read poetry though.
>>7439043
I know, and I'm not going to harass anyone for liking poetry.
I can also admit that my lack of appreciation probably makes me a pleb, because I understand that a massive appreciation for it exists.
Was just wondering what /lit/ had to say.
>>7439043
Actually though, you are kind of forced to read poetry in school.
>>7439066
Okay I will explain myself, but I'd like to say again that I'm not looking to argue with anybody.
First of all, I'll talk about Yeats as a person. I understand that who he is personally shouldn't affect my opinion on what he writes, but it does, and again I understand why that might make me a pleb.
I can't stand his snobbery and his belief in the aristocracy. In September 1913, from what I understand, he's mocking the typical Irish rebel, calling them full of shit basically. Then in Easter 1916, after the rising, he basically turns around and says hey yeah I was wrong they actually went out and died but I'm still better than them.
Some context here. I'm Irish myself. Hence, I'm very much inspired by the 'Romantic Ireland' and the heroes of the rising. Whatever about how wrong I am to be captivated by those men of the rising. But Yeats didn't fight in the Rising. I'm not sure on his view on violence or war to be honest, but that doesn't sit well with me.
After that, there's the whole Maud Gonne obsession and you can see it in most of his poetry, and I'm just thinking Jesus get a life.
As for the poetry, I feel like when I'm reading it that I often see this sort of almost rhyme where like maybe the spelling is the same but the pronunciation isn't, and I know poems don't have to rhyme to be good, but like it seems like some sort of lazy rhyming approach where he uses a word that you have to manipulate to make rhyme. On a related note, I feel like you have to insert the punctuation in a lot of his lines yourself while reading. I've often noticed how some lines, in their written form, make no sense unless you read it out loud and punctuate it yourself. Which strikes me as lazy writing again. Anyways I know he had chronic dyslexia so maybe that excuses it. Another related note, his overusing of a lot of words, sometimes in the same damn stanza. The word gyre is a prime example.
In 'The Second Coming' he writes about how awful the world is and stuff, and I can appreciate some good imagery there, but it seems to me like he's exaggerating the shit out of the situation just to make a good poem.Maybe he just felt like writing about the apocalypse, in which case I don't appreciate his sever pessimism.
In, 'An Irish Airman foresees His Death', all I can think of while reading it is how the fuck do you know what goes through the mind of a war pilot. It's easy for him to write about how awful the world is, like in 'The Second Coming', or how it feels to know you're going to die, but the truth is he doesn't have a clue because he didn't even fight in the Rising. I can't help but becoming infuriated at this cowardly attitude.
Same problem with Sailing to Byzantium. Nice imagery and all, but I just can't deal with Yeats' miserable attitude. And ironically, that immortal art he loves so much only exists thanks to those mortal men he hates so much.
I also feel like his name is letting him away with a lot.
>>7439066
Ran out of words.
As a final note, I can't stress enough how I'm not talking about this to challenge anybody or persuade anyone that I'm right. I'm very aware of the general consensus on Yeats, and I'm not convinced I'm smarter than everyone else (like Yeats lol)
Any ways I guess I'm trying to say that I'm very welcome to having my mind changed about Yeats, so feel free to enlighten me if you want to. Or if I'm able to be enlightened
shit?
fingers to my mouth i like the feeling sometimes. when the world feels small and around me i like them on my mouth like a lover touching me. i like to put them to my mouth and it feels like someone is in love with me. i love how it feels to be touched even if it's by my self sometimes because i want someone to touch me like they love me. to have someone touch you like that i want to be touched like you love touching me don't you i want to feel my fingers on my mouth and my hands on my mouth i want to be touched it feels like love doesn't it. it's so nice to be touched by someone i love you love isn't it.
Can someone please give me feedback?
At dawn when the birds begin their routine and the sun pinches my skin,
I wake by fear of seeming without virtue.
I manage my way down the rugged slope to my virgin cove and sit in solitude.
My eyes and ears to the horizon - I yearn.
I talk to myself and ponder if I will ever set foot on my home once more.
I contemplate plans to leave this land.
I close my eyes and for a moment the crashing waves blend with my breath.
I seem to stand immobile, hovering an inch off the ground.
The city I once delighted in moves around me, swallowing my senses.
Children playing, tagging each other, some skim my robe as they weave through the crowd.
The smell of garlic bread in the market air- it tickles my tongue and causes me to salivate.
A lush garden drunkens me with nostalgia - the many different flowers, their form, color, significance, all remind me of my commutes in spring.
I eavesdrop on a young couple - the love they share, their ignorance, or perhaps their fearlessness pours into my heart, making it sag - bringing me down to earth.
I am reminiscing,
I am running away from my reality to what is now a good dream at best.
And as I sit there studying the the vague dark forms across the infinite,
I realize that my eyes can only see so far,
and like the little shell homes that wash up on shore,
my hope too is swept into the vastness of the sea.
Until tomorrow, my dear Rome.
Yeats, as a guy, was richer than average, flightier than average, and more naive than average. All those strictures about virginity nay unto marriage, and so on. Still taken seriously.
Given his attachment to mysticism for so long, how can we say - confused? Deluded? Willfully uninvolved? Think of him as a cross between a /c/lit/, and /x/phile, and a /robot/ and you have it.
And yet, a genius of deforming forms, some time before it became fashionable to do so.
The Easter rising saw him a 51 year old man. Should he have picked up his great grandfather's flintlock?
But also an Irish Nationalist, once and always. If he was a coward, was he also a turncoat to Ireland's cause? His Nobel prize drew much of the world's attention to the issues, and in the ages before hash tags, that still meant something.
I don't pick up my old copies of him, much (ever) either, but I think as I said above, liking it in our modern sense is not the point. Place him in his context - a painfully awkward rich, non-aristocrat of merchant birth and flighty disposition who managed to herald many modern notions about Irish independence and national pride into the 20th century as shiny new objects on the world's stage. And as for the lines, they did something different than before such that even Pound went over and spent a year clerking for him.
By the time of Airman, besides, he was becoming a politician and it was in his interest to place himself in terms of who his freinds were. Gregory was a war Hero and his family old allies of his. Dad's salons would make mot of us drool to sit in for the length of one cocktail. If you had a geeky but loyal friend, and you were killed in battle - looking down from high on high, would you begrudge him memorializing your death in a famous volume?
For what it's worth, I still hate Ginsberg, but I don;t let it worry me much. There is so much else to be outraged about.
>>7439328
I see. I did not know he was 51, I can understand why he didn't fight in the Rising.
Reading why he got a nobel peace prize, they say "gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Surely this must be referring to his plays? I can't see how his poetry achieves this, as I've said they all seem to paint Ireland to be so miserable.
I must educate myself more on his political career.
>>7424054
Nice but too much soul on that Title.
#justpoetrythings
>>7439285
Very good.
The first four lines were hard to get through.
>>7439363
The Nobel was for literature. The peace prize in 1923 was vacated. Nobody won.
And isn't perseverance in the face of misery an element of Irish spirit?
The stars don't shine anymore.
Our cities,
United States electricity whores.
Natural beauty
Never shown
In these places
Wherein miles of cement
The grass has never grown.
Pollution it is.
I miss the stars.
No more wonder.
No more beauty.
My curiosity dead.
No more feet against pavement,
These scabs which I dread.
The End.
>>7439382
Thanks!
Hard how though?
>>7439397
Just fucking around. ^o^
>>7439363
In case my point was too delicate, Airman was part of a cycle of four poems about his friend Robert Gregory. Gregory was the son of the rich co-investor on Yeats' theater company. They were very involved, and no valor was trying to be stolen there. Robert's dad hosted every name worshipped in the archives of /lit/ then alive at one time or another.
It's an important nexus of who was influencing whom at the time. At least as interesting as all the incest that would go on at the Dial, just across the Pond.
>>7439397
Natural beauty
Never shown
In these places
Wherein miles of cement
The grass has never grown
Excellent
>>7425605
The flow in the very beginning reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqpnW0M4Wc
Sadly the only comment I have to make of it.
Roses are red,
violets are blue.
I'm actually Indian,
can't poo in the loo.
Alright mark?
Scab black face eyes tweak
Jaunt your limbs out boy
Quick is the pace faster the step
Hush hush with lips red
pursed with willing hum move air
slate tongue scrawled
“here lie the never once said"
Good shit guys, A for effort to everyone
>>7424050
the man full of sorrow
wondered why and if
he should live till tomorrow
the question is rather stiff
i admit
but not as stiff
as an unloose noose
or a gauging gauge
to end weary days
or limbs skewed
not with steel bayonets honed true
but haphazard cuts and white pills, how crude;
the man filled with sorrow
(now thinking he may not live till tomorrow)
he wished he could borrow
some hope, it was so far away though
and the blood from invisible wounds flowed
and he knows the days and ends of all the plastered ways
and he knows the sinking feeling of being thrown into the fray
and he knows
he knows
the man full of sorrow
did not live till tomorrow
his funeral was short, acute
his attire stately, astute
for it would wear on him the thought of tomorrow
the man full of sorrow
I spent my life behind a screen
Because to feel it all was all too scary
To go out there in the midnight air
Was so, so hair raising
The- the main thing
Was how tiring it felt
The chatters the clankers the answers with no questions
The matters the fretters the stutters with no use
Oh, all these thoughts could make me melt!
Did you know?
That Faulkner said that-
He said-
Something about feeling
So then, for talking, we're all better off dead?
Which is the easier poem for beginners Leaves of Grass or Paradise Lost?
>>7439255
You know the answer to that.
These words paint a picture
made only of contentless
words like: brushstroke,
colored canvasses,
and a bowl of rotten fruit.
Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.
I'm so late but if someone could read mine I'd be so grateful.
I'll be here in Waterloo
looking at the nightwatchmen crew
and Daniela
oh yes
she'll be here too
dressed in but
banana leaves and silk
with skin that tastes
of cocoa butter milk. she sings so soft
her irony along the wall poor Midas weeps.
he lost his soul to that old bull
who stands in Crete
a breast and against his ten walled streets
about the man I can't say much
he walls all day with just one crutch
since he awoke he's lost his touch; sings
gold chords of such and such
but nowadays for whom I grieve is that sly dog
st Augustine
he keeps with him his holy nuns who bore him each but twenty sons.
and when he died his twenty sons will bury him each with twenty guns.
about St Paul's I cannot say
but Augustine will have his way
that's the way it's always been
in Waterloo the things I've seen.
Archimedes, the gree, oh my so clever!
his toys, his pulleys: he invented the lever
he always does good and never says never
he loves his Lucy and hangs with heather
he craves Colette but has never met her
queen Mary was twice his one time lover
till he bid her adieu for Ben her brother
oh Ben I've known him too but I think I'll just stick with celexa
and you?
but that;s the way it's always been
in Waterloo the things I've seen
feel my ghost and call me Ishmael
the stars 'neath your brow is where i'd sail
but please my love dont send me no mail
the nightwatchmen knows my entire tale
the women I've known and your love I've failed
but like the moon tonight I'm pale
and when it's dark they come to seal
the pain of things we cannot feel
the wounded in love just cannot heal
these words are true I promise you this
the men are real but just the gist: If I told you more he'd cut my wrists
but that's the way it's always been
in Waterloo the things I've seen.
