Poems About Poetry
grooveamatic
Posts: 1,374
ever since reading Marianne Moore's Poetry, I've loved poems about poetry. It's so fun! I'll start off.
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Aloud, to yourself,
In the middle of the night
Is such a useless endeavor
You may as well
Spend your time
Burning your socks,
Or eating fingernails.
You may as well
Bundle yourself up
And wade onto your lawn
For a healthy
Midnight constitutional.
Have yourself a dose
Of real air
Without shadowed phrases
Or canned emotion.
The night sky being a picture
(and therefore worth
plenty of words)
A walk outside
Under it
Will be much better for you
Than stuffy verse
Read aloud by a fool like you
Could even pretend to be.
Have a keen listen
To the moderated way
The Dogwoods rustle
In that Northeast breeze,
The way the leaves only pretend
To touch each other.
All the sound,
It seems,
Comes from within
Each individual leaf;
The tree somehow a chorus
Of choruses
Singing not to be heard
But only to be worth hearing.
And keep alert for wildlife:
It's alive at night.
The hopping and scurrying
You'll hear all around you
Is Nature winding Her clock,
Pushing life forward
In all it's forms
While in the lightless houses
Men sleep oblivious.
It's all there,
In your backyard:
The birthings, homecomings
And inevitable finalities
Of so many
Valiant creations
Racing to-and-fro
In arcs of invisible light.
Soak it all up,
And when you feel
You can bear no more,
Go on back inside
(making sure you have
put your book away,
done the dishes,
drawn the drapes,
and fed the cats)
Slither out of your shoes
And coat,
Pull the blankets back,
Get cozy,
And drift into wistful,
Unsymbolic sleep.
Reading a poem
Aloud, to yourself,
In the middle of the night
Is such a useless endeavor
That I have heard of folks
Who, after having done it,
Set off fireworks,
Or have wept overtop
Their mother's urn
Until it held only mud.
and my crown almost leaves
the card
when I write I'm large
I'm an Amazon
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Great thread, grooveamatic.
Paddy Kavanagh, you were Behaned
I know, but laying down in the chest hospital
you heard the rustling leaves outside
tell you St Stephen's Green would teach you
not to care, not to fret about the poets' rows in McDaid's
on George Moore's use of the semi-colon,
and not to care about the men who would begin
their book tomorrow, better than your own four volumes.
Paddy, teach me to go out on the river bank,
where bridge shadows speak the mysteries of what
brought me first to love a word as a glimmer in a field,
a flashing fox eye, the streak of a tail,
the reedwhoosh of a now, and free me from all else
but to be romantically reborn in the freedom from contention.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Something about the simplicity of the line "when I write I'm large" strikes me as being truly great.
when running along the keyboard
of my creativity
Somewhere, along the neurological
pathways, between grey matter and
muscle
The poem becomes boxed
caged in expectations
The language screams for rules
Noun, simile, semi colon
The paper shies away from my emotions
The reader must understand
But they are my words
my words
my
words
"Cause I can't wait to figure out what's wrong with me
So I can say this is the way I use to be" -- John Mayer
Amateur Poets
I read all about us
In magazines
Or journals
All the time.
It seems
There are too many of us
And we depress those chosen few
Who have--
On occasion--
Recieved money
To do
What I do
In order to breathe;
These professionals
Horde more money yet
By churning out
Insightful
How-to
Articles and detailed
Diagrams on
How To Break Into The Biz.
Meanwhile, the rest of us
Keep grinding it out,
Pushing life through
A hole in a tomato.
Somewhere there is a
Probably small patch of
Imagined land,
Where
The poet who is paid in money
And the poet who is paid in toil
Can meet, if only
In ideals and dark dreams.
If all us classes of poets
Were to someday have a meeting there,
I think I'd raise my hand
And point out
The only professional poet
I've ever met
Is the tree which stands in my backyard,
And it hasn't written anything new
In ages.
haha! quite unique! refreshing
He Googles for some gruesome news: Oil slicks
in the Arctic, forest fires down
under. Then he chops up details, sticks
them here and there and in an overblown
tone of 'irony' begins to list
hypocrisies in govermental tears
for birds and trees that perish. He'll resist
all subtleties. A tone that overbears
to shout a coarse polemic is his norm.
Oh, sure, he'll catch an audience, he shall
please readers without subtlety or gorm
to know good poetry-political
from cheap and easy ditties for applause
that reword news, sans insight, thought or pause.
In my younger days I was surely guilty of this. And nowadays I still see these poems with alarming frequency. You call them out in grand fashion; it scathes. It's been a long time since I worked in form, but this looks like a sonnet to me. A scathing poetry-based sonnet! Now that's just cool!
Thanks.
I thought id just add to it for a little fun. Been out of the writing for a while, but i need a little pick me up.
How can I write a poem from my heart?
Where do I even start?
Shall I write about how we fell apart?
Or how we fought at Super Wal-Mart?
How you ran into me with the shopping cart?
No, I'm really not that smart
Oh forget it! I'm having a major Brain Fart.
(Angelina Jolie)
Ha! That's great! Any poem that can make me smile like that gets my vote...thanks!
Glad to put a smile on your face!
(Angelina Jolie)
July 19, 2001
The art of poetry is a simple one
Yet also most complex.
If it weren't for it's ungratifying nature
I might compare it to sex.
It pits you directly against yourself--
Much to your consternation--
And amid your thoughts of life and death
Poetry becomes masturbation.
It is an art that must leap from you,
As every poet knows;
And it hangs on your lips and cheeks:
Poetry, blowing it's nose.
I add dots....because punctuation is a whore
I object to all teh peots living now
I will pass teh test of time
I'm a peot
and I hope
that you can swing
on my rope
I have peotry at noon
and at 1 I have Brit Lit
I knew peots from the ages
who all wrote tomes and pages
but my peotry is short
it's embryonic (and aborted)
it's a mess
I confess
I am right
and I write right
peotry is teh thing
if you can bring a little luv
to peotry becoz
it's jan 05
let's all just jive
the wrold will end quite soon
I love peoms
they're so cool and
I learned while at school
that origin-ality
is ignore without the ie
that is....ignore me
doesn't matter
got a bib so I'll just splatter
drivel on it....bile and brimstone
i take an e and am happy
read my peom don't be crappy
even e m cummings knew it
can't go past
just go through it
I couldn't give a flying fuck
what you think about my work
I know that it will be remembered
whereas posthumously you'll just disappear
I hear you....
yes I do.....you don't like my grammar or my spelling
well, teh pudding is in the telling
I'm teh future
go get fukked.....
and don't forget to close the door
(disclaimer....I swore)
locked in these words
look i'm just what you imagine
feel
i am what you feel
tell me
i am what you think
let me know
maybe he is much better than me
i am a fragment
i am lost
but you found me
Jim Carrol
What an unpretentious little title
From a ninety-year old gentile,
Slinging us all instructions
On how to write infucktions.
Perhaps if we found "the way"
We could have something neat to say.
You keep telling us "don't do it".
Rest assured I see right through it.
You're just afraid you're going to die
Before anyone has read Ham on Rye.
How much cash did that smash fetch ya?
Can I be a literary asshole? You betchya!
*it should be noted that the venerable Mr. Bukowski is already quite dead.
Who is it that tells us what to say and how to say it?
I say up yours I do what I want.
Words arent to be written as one would tell us
Words are written from the heart, and experiences we have had.
Do words not describe emotion?
You could sit and ponder about what words to put down on paper
Why? Let it flow from your heart to your fingertips.
If I feel like being a bitch today,
than so be it,, it is my perogative to do so.
And today my friend is the day, Im bitchy so therefore a bitchy poem.
(Angelina Jolie)
and chips and betting shops and bad pub
grub and cloudy beer rule. I wish
poets could begin to bend and scrub
through all this crust of wordage to the real
stuff, the day to day, and make a plain
sound in speaking, free from pompous zeal,
and make the sound of rain than falls as rain.
Ah, poetry. Those sound effects that stir
the heart up in some hollow spot, and fill
it for a special moment. Listen, sir,
and lady poet. Don't you kill
the poetry with posturings en vogue.
Speak your mouth. Don't compromise your brogue.
This, sir, is the real deal. Not just a great poem about poetry, but a great poem and good advice that I'd do well to think about. The first stanza is magic; who hasn't felt that way and tried, with varying results? I must endeavor more often to speak my mouth; masks always look silly on me anyway.
I love it!!!!
it is a booootiful sonnet which undresses artists and leaves them naked. is truth to be found in peotry (in doggerel). is there truth in art. Bukowski himself fleshed out unpretentious peotry - I remember my young lover sitting in our pensione room in Gran Canaria, reading from his Bukowski book with a bottle of rum on teh table - it doesn't get any more real. Stripping off layers of society's little embellishments. Thanks FinsMcB!!!!! (and Grooveamatic and Sound? might have got your name wrong sorry). (ps really double-check your pieces before you press submit reply....no edit....eg.. e e cummings)
you must be talking about spell-checking all the instances of the words the and poetry we include in our posts...they are so often misspelled!
Glad you liked my poem. I think a poem, however written, should really be a simple question. And as Einstein once said, when the questions are simple, then you can hear God thinking.
haha! This is really neat!
settled in the words grew long
winded and I gasped for air
never succinct, all rescinded
my titles, my line, my fair and winding stair
those that began and ended in iron
poems oh such math and caterwaul
my feline screams and my cosine factored
sketched these words in rusted spackle
walking the midnight fence in prowl and under moon
art the mess, the dress and the hard-flung spoon
you missed me you missed me
now you gotta kiss me
WHAO now watch this tail make an exit
no poet in need of lessons HERE, I can tell you that
there are other allies for this particular cat, each of brick and scat,
and limestone fossils that remind me of home
ah but head held high with ne'er my silken fur disturbed,
nor my alertness prone...
I take the dew claw
and carve this pome.
"Jesus Christ."
"Seriously, man, don't be an asshole, who was he really?"
"Jesus Christ."
"No shit? What'd he want?"
"My apple pie and a cigarette."
by a science dictionary. Words
of unknown origin, engorged,
spew from his lips and penning fingers. Curds
of dribble in self-claim of genius
bleed from his swollen sensibilities.
They must be treated with a serious
hilarity. Note insecurities
abounding in such ramblings as this:
"I am a freeform poet, they are cold
and stilted". Use the bedpan for that dross.
You might be fooled that he's well. I'm old,
experienced and know the symptoms well.
Oh, one more thing. Protect against the smell.