too cryptic?

xmascleanlove

i think i'm gonna turn this one in for class but i'm worried they'll say it's too cryptic...what do you think?



Ashes

vanilla sunday lips
melting on a tongue
in kalifornia sun

you took in a breath and proved that you exist
eyes that never opened
to see all the closed doors

eraser pink whines
rival loud whispers drown out by sighs

blinded by truth mommy tripped over youth
waters with love
her permanent bruise

(sentenced by fate)
world turned and skipped a precious turn
(still looking great)
what desire earned, she teaches with love
(life only gets short)
won't get rich robbing graves
(don't gain any weight)

candycane fingernails rot honest teeth

skin tanned thrice a week
curtains zebra-stripe her thighs
aided by sunlight

this picture worth framing
begging for moonlight
(she burns so easily)

ashley is turning to ashes

FinsburyParkCarrots

Well, there was a theorist called Roman Jakobson who argued that poetry communicated on a different "axis" to prose. If you think about the way words in a sentence make sense (because they are put in a particular order, with the noun and the verb in the right place in the most basic of constructions), you understand that they rely on syntactical placing: along a "syntagmatic" or horizontal axis. Now, I know that sounds like pretentious bollocks but it works on the level that "meaning" is facilitated if not generated by the way the words go together.
But with poetry, attempts at significations of meanings of things go selectively and "vertically", through little equivalences between alliterations, assonances, repetitions....and....and...to forget Jakobson and to talk Carrotspeak a second (Camberwell carrot), in the associations the reader makes between the sounds in a poem and their own experiences....the auditory imagination if you like....echoes echoes....we are a river flowing.....

Ed's right. Nobody hears echoes of noise, but little sounds and cryptic codes/no-codes of poetry echo through everybody's soul.

TS Eliot said

"Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood".

Write the language of of pre-language. Carry on, xmascleanlove.

Similing emoticon here

EvilToasterElf

This is why nobody talk to grad students...