I hate critics who don't make stuff. Talk about a lot of useless words, signifying:

Nothing.

ARF.

Quote from: RebeccaFog on June 20, 2007, 08:37:02 AM

    If you listen to poetry it is much much better than reading it.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading "A Coney Island of the Mind". 

    T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' sounds fab too.

Ginsberg reading HOWL, is rock and fricken ROLL

i make stuff, just most of my eggs are currently incubating

Didn't say you didn't. Yer still a critic, which is disgusting   

love
nota

---

s'ok, I became a pedant today, which may be as bad

oh god, you might be right. and all i ever thought i was being was a mate in a pub with an opinion.

Quote from: Pica Pica on June 20, 2007, 09:45:34 AM
I adore the English Language, I think it is wonderful and expressive, poetic techniques eke out the relationships between the signs and their signifiers, between the sounds and the meanings. I think the devices of poetry and the raw material of words are great things. But I think a poem is the worst example of those techniques in action. Because what I love about language, as well as it's sound is it's ability to communicate, and I don't think poems communicate in an atmosphere which lives and breathes.

They are fully formed and fully packed. There seems (for me) to be so little dialogue with the audience  in a poem. It's a little shining golden turd served proudly with garnish and a smug smile. If you want to enjoy language I think a good novel, play, joke or even conversation offers a much better chance to see language glisten and shine and communicate.

As for lyrics, they are part of the music, without the music most lyrics lose a lot of their life. Similarly a poem read becomes almost music. Poems are a pleasure of sounds and words for their own sake, to me anyway. No devils advocate, I don't like poems.

I can't say that I even understand most of what you said there, but what thinkest thee of this?

Quote
                             Rocketman





"I want to make love to it." – groans

             the scientist

                                who has just designed

               a new missile

and wants nothing less

than to marry it

and live with it forever

in one long euphoric orgasm

to remind him of his genius

(until he can build a better one)



"No artist exists

           whose work is half as great

          as mine is." –

                                             , he moans,

confident that his relationship with truth –

                                        is secure.

   I think it's by 'anomolous'

Quote from: Ell on June 20, 2007, 11:44:17 PM


Robert Wallace said that "poetry is feeling, the expression of feeling, and the exploration and discipline of feeling."

I've said it's not. And I've heard of me, so I think I win Actually I think poems are expressions of feelings, I agree with mister man Wallace. I just am very unsure that (for myself as an audience) a snapshot of feeling is enough, i want the space and freedom and depth of narrative to see that feeling tested, to see it tethered to the world, to see it live. Rather than presented for my delectation.

I read the poem, it's a man looking at the sea and being reminded of things he's heard of, and dropping the odd classical name in there for good measure and to make his musings seem less a meandering waste of words. The clash of pebbles reminds him of the clash of war, the ebbs of tides make him think of Sophocles talking about the ebb of fortunes.

However, there are some lovely phrases, thinking of the sea as a connection between a warring france and britain, of the pebbles sounding as the battle, it's all nice stuff. The first stanza is very involving, all the demands to look and listen, and the descriptions are beautifully done. Imagine if the first stanza, or even the poem was the start of a novel about the french/english wars? Imagine that it is an opening monologue in a play about a village where an old mine washes up and causes conflict and resurfaces old memories (you could also have sea/memory things as well).


Similarly Rebecca, your poem provides a nice picture. But I want to see more of the scientist. I want to see how he treats his wife, if he has one. I want it to be developed. I have numbers of ideas like that in my notebooks, little pictures which show something in a light and show a feeling. But I would feel lazy and shortchanging if I were to leave it like that and not develop it. For me creative writing is at it's most enjoyable when you go through the what ifs and the whys, to give me a starting place and nothing else feels like a cheat.

I think that many poems would work better being unravelled more, i spose that for the poem enthusiast it is the unravelling that provides the pleasure. It is a tight packed twine of a feeling, or feelings and the reader has to work out how it is arranged.  But that is often a way for a poet to be lazy, to put undigested thoughts on the table and pretend that those thoughts seem half-cooked because they are expressed obliquely, not because they are half cooked. (I myself am thinking on my feet, but you can see that - i am not trying to hide it.)

Basically I find poetry (often) used as a way to hide simple ideas or unthought ideas, or unexplored ideas in pretty words and is thus deceiving the reader that they are getting more than they are. In other words, it reminds me of philosophy. (Infact that might be it, I used to like a bit of poetry until I took philosophy).

My favorite poem would have to be the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Such an odd story with lots of memorable quotes

"As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."

"Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."

Quote from: Pica Pica on June 21, 2007, 12:38:26 PM

Basically I find poetry (often) used as a way to hide simple ideas or unthought ideas, or unexplored ideas in pretty words and is thus deceiving the reader that they are getting more than they are. In other words, it reminds me of philosophy. (Infact that might be it, I used to like a bit of poetry until I took philosophy).

The Illinois Enema Bandit
I heard he's on the loose
I heard he's on the loose
Lord, the pitiful screams
Of all them college-educated women. . .
He just be tyin' 'em up
(They be all bound down!)
Just be pumpin' every one of 'em up with all the bag fulla
The Illinois Enema Bandit Juice
He just be pumpin' every one of 'em up with all the bag fulla
The Illinois Enema Bandit Juice

And I think I needs to send him Pica's way pretty quick here, jeez.

"It must be just what they all needs . . ''


I was having a convo with an actual poet one day. We were talking about the 'difference' (VIVA LA!) between lyrics and poems. We agreed that one tends to mistrust music a whole lot less than words. I look at words on a page, or on a screen, with a jaded (or chicken-plucked blind-) eye, much of the time. [Oh No, I Don't Believe It]

Oh no. this is sounding so Plato-nic. "One of these days I'm gonna call myself onna phone and tell myself to shut up."

nota

Quote from: Pica Pica on June 21, 2007, 12:38:26 PM

Quote from: Ell on June 20, 2007, 11:44:17 PM


Robert Wallace said that "poetry is feeling, the expression of feeling, and the exploration and discipline of feeling."

Basically I find poetry (often) used as a way to hide simple ideas or unthought ideas, or unexplored ideas in pretty words and is thus deceiving the reader that they are getting more than they are. In other words, it reminds me of philosophy. (Infact that might be it, I used to like a bit of poetry until I took philosophy).

They say that when you read a poem, you're supposed to taste, smell, hear and feel the words.  Just let your mind go with each stanza, the rest is just like a gateway to undiscovered experiences.


What Is Poetry

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow
That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?


John Ashbery


tink

P.S.  Did you feel the coldness of the snow? did you see the beauty of the mistress?
Did you smell the freshness of the recent sharpened pencils in your old school? Did you hear the chirping of the birds in the vast greenness of the meadows? 

Quote from: Tink on June 21, 2007, 07:31:20 PM

Quote from: Pica Pica on June 21, 2007, 12:38:26 PM

Quote from: Ell on June 20, 2007, 11:44:17 PM


Robert Wallace said that "poetry is feeling, the expression of feeling, and the exploration and discipline of feeling."

Basically I find poetry (often) used as a way to hide simple ideas or unthought ideas, or unexplored ideas in pretty words and is thus deceiving the reader that they are getting more than they are. In other words, it reminds me of philosophy. (Infact that might be it, I used to like a bit of poetry until I took philosophy).

They say that when you read a poem, you're supposed to taste, smell, hear and feel the words.
...

P.S.  Did you feel the coldness of the snow? did you see the beauty of the mistress?
Did you smell the freshness of the recent sharpened pencils in your old school? Did you hear the chirping of the birds in the vast greenness of the meadows? 

I did not. I totally did not, and I don't necessarily think it's my failure of imagination. If I took some acid I might be able to smell a word. If it smelled real strong.

none

Quote from: None of the Above on June 21, 2007, 07:44:38 PM

I did not. I totally did not, and I don't necessarily think it's my failure of imagination. If I took some acid I might be able to smell a word. If it smelled real strong.

none

or, if the word was literally the word "smell" or "stink", or "poo".

Quote from: RebeccaFog on June 21, 2007, 08:02:13 PM

Quote from: None of the Above on June 21, 2007, 07:44:38 PM

I did not. I totally did not, and I don't necessarily think it's my failure of imagination. If I took some acid I might be able to smell a word. If it smelled real strong.

none

or, if the word was literally the word "smell" or "stink", or "poo".

On acid it'd be a moot point. "Literally smell", by means of words on a screen, I ain't feeling it today.

NB: We are now hip-deep waders in the field of aesthetic philosophy here. Pica has turned into a critic, and I'm about to lose my religion here, too, so I better be Bartleby and prefer not.

not a...

---

I just got the joke, Rebecca. [I think.] If *the word* was something I am not allowed to type here, even with a strike-thru, that word would figuratively sum up the whole question of this flowery poetry bidness. For me.

N.OT.A.

not
off-topic
am I?

Quote from: Ell on June 21, 2007, 09:07:50 PM

ok i'm not going to hit you with a steel pica ruler after all. you've made some real progress.

here's a slightly different take on Arnold's theme:

The Dover Bitch      

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ''Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.''
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

-Anthony Hecht.

Now this is much better, I got people, I got story - I got people who move and think like real people not aesthetic-bots. All it needs to do is learn proper sentences, instead of the poem broken up look and it would be eminently readable. It even talks about reading Sophocles as if it was something anyone can do, rather than the other poem dropping him in like an instant intelligence increaser.

yeah that one ain't half bad. Y'all kin have that John Ashberry dreck though. 

None of that aesthetic

The hand of the day unfolds
Three small clouds
And these few words.

Octavio Paz

Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

In these few words he had described many a morning that I stood speechless at the wonder of a new day.

Ok, since I have been such an ass thus far, might as well go for the gusto. Here's why the Ashberry don't work, for me:

Quote
The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

works quite well, rhythmically, until it subverts itself with this break in the line:

Quote
That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

STOP which becomes the rhythmic device of the piece:

Quote
Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

Here we go again, tighter. It doesn't work in the first place, for me. It's crap music.

Quote
The mistress we desire? Now they

then he does this (which I understand, according to his rhythm, he cadences well, I mean I am not saying he lacks craft, but, I would think from this work, that he lacks talent.):

Quote
Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

But, still: "--what?-- some flowers soon?" Is awkward in more ways that I even want to describe.

signed
my favorite critic

 To be honest there are so many repls here I have not read them all.
But my favorite poem is Robert Frost. He was at my high school ( which shows you how old I am).

"The Road less travelled" and it has made all the differance in my life.

  Bobbi

Quote from: TG-Bobbi on June 22, 2007, 03:48:45 PM
To be honest there are so many repls here I have not read them all.
But my favorite poem is Robert Frost. He was at my high school ( which shows you how old I am).

"The Road less travelled" and it has made all the differance in my life.

  Bobbi

No sweat, Bobbi, as long as you can't say you've met Stephen Crane.

Quote from: Pica Pica on June 22, 2007, 11:23:13 AM
All it needs to do is learn proper sentences, instead of the poem broken up look and it would be eminently readable.

I guess The Bandit got seriously delayed at the airport, Homeland Security and that

A good prose writer breaks the rules of syntax and all that. And has the freedom to choose to break the rules of syntax as opposed to poetry when it is a rule of itself.

The bandit is still trying to explain the length of rubber hose.