If you want to love your brother
You've got to listen to yourself
Listen to yourself
That's all, just listen to yourself
If you want to love your brother
Only listen to yourself now
Change
begins
within
There's killers playing shepherds
Better listen to yourself
Listen to yourself
That's all, just listen to yourself
There's killers playing shepherds
You've got to save yourself
Change begins within
There's something silence tells you
Better pick it up yourself
Listen to yourself
I said Listen to yourself!
It says, that's shit that they've been talking
You've got to trust yourself
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots You're not unusual flowers,
sophisticated flora,
The one coiling spring of adversity,
The bloom of the slightly ugly exceptional
marking you out for the beauty of singularity.
You haven't grown upwards and outwards
out of a vulnerable quirkiness.
Your heads aren't bowed with the weight of what you claim
to be the burden of life in your sinewy shoots.
indeed
otherwise
being
beautiful
trellissessss
and
lean to's
upon
which
to
gain
purchase
tendrils
supporting
stalk
(nothing quite so disturbing
to see your children ignored
because they're good
enough
but not quite perfect)
to new flowers
to old weeds
nature glory in the seed
(shizzbang, mr.carrots, you're like a flower in quicktime, blossoming profusely! and the blooms are fucking gorgeous... you write so well... i daresay the thing on Of The Girl's thread... WOW... I'm too dumb to know what every word was, but I got the jist... I get smarter, wordier maybe, everytime I read you or setaside2.... On the liner notes in one of Joni Mitchell's albums, she thanks some dude for instilling in her the love of words... I suppose I offer up the same here... glad you're better)
He has watched the fat light, chimmony,
flop into black through his pane. And it
was noon, acid green treed, when he started,
writing for the day, August 7th 1887,
here at the bug eaten desk bought in a warehouse
when he and his wife were newlywed
for a new start. He's been here hunched
over the foolscap, still blank. The third novel.
The make or break. And all he has seen today
has been swathes of dust from peoples' editions
on the shelves in the recess to his left,
and faces in the windows of buildings opposite:
the retired, the leisurely, the mad.
He buries his face in his arms, and feels his wife's
touch on his shoulder.
"Another day of nothing, love?"
Jay told the courts he killed the horse
Because Dan walked his road.
The Judge roared, "That's the worst excuse
I think I've ever heard."
The pressmen in the gallery
let loud laughs fill the hall
And the way Jay flashed his hunter's eye
was noted down by all.
Dan took the stand, held out his hand
and swore he couldn't lie
The Brief asked, "Did Jay use the knife
because you'd come his way?"
"That horse was MINE!", Dan said in time:
"That's MY horse that he STOLE!
He led it out from my front gate
and dyed its patch with coal."
"So had you come back to reclaim
the horse that was your own?",
The Brief asked, through his
handkerchief
of sweat mopped from Jake's crown.
Dan said "No way. I'd come to say
My horse was cursed from birth:
The fields that creature rode all failed:
Now, I've increased my worth."
Leaning over the rails, peaceably
watching the Cam pass by, greeny,
Beautifully,
I see, I feel, it's all simple, really.
Love and the roll of a river, clearly
reflecting the sun: it's all we need
to feel, to see. Deliciously.
She makes a garden dance in colour,
Bluebell blazing, oxlip, eglantine
She makes a garden dance in colour,
Bluebell blazing, oxlip, eglantine
She takes the petals of each flower
and with a whisper calls them into shine
She dances with her daughter
Round the living room and kitchen bend
She dances with her daughter
Round the living room and kitchen bend
Her girl lives freely with the laughter
of a child who loves her mother without end
Her hair is golden like the sungull
and soft as oceans curling into sound
Her hair is golden like the sungull
and soft as oceans curling into sound
Her lips are honey-sweet and brimful
Like waves of histories of loves unbound.
Saturday Rawk Night at Newcastle Mayfair,
October 1993. I nearly didn't go.
I was dragged into it by people I didn't really know.
There were five of us, heading in from Sunderland:
Spacey, stoned, rolling skunky doobies for us for the train,
Hippie Tom, calling the train guard "Man",
getting beautiful with the tunnel pigeons and saying how he loved everybody,
some girl called Helen who never stopped moaning
about her jeans going up her arse
and her friend whom she should have been looking after,
who'd all but passed out already on 20/20...
and then there was me. Taking the train in from Sunderland,
in a grotty plastic carriage with "Fuck the Mackams" scratches
in the windows and empty packets of Regals on the floor,
we passed all the little stops with unexotic names,
"Seaburn", "Brockley Whins", "Heworth",
before we pulled in at Newcastle station.
Walking down Grainger Street, this pre-club Saturday night on the Toon,
I was left to half-carry Helen's friend
while Helen moaned about the cold, or about when Spacey was going to hurry up
with the doobie she was only going to bogart anyway.
Hippie Tom kept saying "Everywhere's the same, maaan, I love everybody."
We passed two town girls in orange fake tanned skin and mini skirts
tripping past us in stillettos. Hippie Tom smiled at one, looking all Zen.
She said to him, "'Ave oi gorra fookin' clock on me 'ead?", loudly
enough to alert the big wide fellas behind,
and moved on.
The lads passed in shortsleeved white shirts, bald heads, fat necks, earrings,
singing "Fog on the Tyne"; one mentioned, "Amma gaggin' forra fight! Owra bout that
stupid hippy lookin' bastard? Arra fook it, he's not worth it.
He hasnae enough blood in him to be worth the fookin' mess."
We entered the club, and this is where I deliberately lost everyone,
hoping to head down into the Saturday Rawk Night pit to mosh around
and as I headed to the floor, hearing the new Pearl Jam song "Animal" crashing through the PA
and my heart pumping for some serious moshing
in my plaid shirt,"Vs." sheep tee shirt, jeans and Doc Martins
I thought for a moment I would forget the craziness of the night.
But there on the floor
Were these guys in eighties leathers
and huge permed extensions
and Twisted Sister makeup -
no irony -
doing fingertapping air guitar to McCready
and crotch thrusting and tongue flicking to Vedder.
Saturday Rawk Night, October 1993. "Animal."
If I hadn't gone, I wouldn't ever have known.
My head's under the quilt with my radio:
Short wave at night, turning the dial.
Static and wow; oh, that signal might go!
In and out, peaking awhile.
Here's Bratislava, here's Bucharest!
Here's rebel news, live from Harare!
Adiss Ababban broadcasts, which attest
to a government's crimes! Never weary,
I turn the dial, hearing from Rio
a feint Freedom network that tickles
the VOA signal. Radio:
On SW, it's where knowledge trickles
out. Tonight while they're Sky-ing and Foxing,
For TV grins Rummy-smug smiling,
I'm surfing for truth with this box in
Under my quilt. I'll keep dialling...
Big white furry long limbed thing on my lawn,
with all the neighbourhood cats about him,
Just sitting there not even blinking,
Nodding deep telepathic truths to the others
as the nine in the evening May light declines
and the orange lamplights come on one by one:
You're some kind of buddha, I suppose:
You've got this haughty turn up on your nose
but the closedness of your eyes, your lockjaw smile
Tells me you're contented. You've certainly
sway on Scamp from Number One,
Cucumber and Carrots from Number Two
and that funny tortoise-shell one eyed thing from around the corner,
But these guys just hang out with you.
You don't go off looking for lurve,
You don't fight,
You don't even play cards.
What is your message to the cat masses,
Big white furry long limbed thing on my lawn?
Is you the Jim Jones of cats,
or is you just totally cat-cool, cool cat?
Perhaps it's early in your thirties,
When you balk from writing dirges
and find pleasure, penning ditties
born of happy, easy urges.
I was Socrates at seventeen.
Now I'm just a bloke, who's nothing seen.
And writing's much more fun when life's inane.
All those with epic lives are just a pain!
In the morning of the greyest Cromwell hat:
Laugh loudest, with the freest roar you've got.
Laugh out so looming riverbarges hear,
Full of massing puritans come near.
Laugh loud when that grey throng arrives ashore.
When someone asks "What's wrong?", just laugh some more.
Laugh until they realise hard that you're
a poet without God's disguise, true, pure.
I keep thinking about this notion of Seta's, regarding poets bleeding, perhaps partly because of my contrary nature, but also maybe because I get uncomfortable with ideas that the poet is some seer or visionary rather than a jobbing craftsperson (but that's the Marxist coming out in me). So bear with me for voicing a different, pleasantly oppositional view on the matter.
I would look to the work and the character of the narrative persona in a poem, rather than the biography of the poet, to see bleeding in evidence, and I don't really think that in the history of poetry it happens until Schlegel first coined the term romantisch in the literary world.
If I might try to define Romanticism by its main traits, I would note
(a) a preoccupation with prelapsarian nature and society;
(b) a sanguine expression of the interrelationship between the subjective psyche and the external "moods" of nature;
(c) a thematic foregrounding of both expressions and self-analyses of the extreme feelings of the narrator;
(d) an obsession with the idea of individual creativity and genius as tortured yet spiritually transcendent expression.
There wasn't much of this bleeding going on, a couple of centuries earlier, in the courtly sonnets of Sidney, Wyatt or Spenser. A lot of the time these writers were inserting in-jokes and classical rhetorical tropes and references to each other, slap bang in the middle of "heartfelt love poems", as some kind of Elizabethan Cambridge-mens' contest in literary virtuosity. Even the non-Cambridge Shakespeare's sonnets tend to be re-read in the romantic light when a lot of Sonnets 1-126 could well have been, in their time, cleverly disguised treatises on the politics of poetic patronage, dressed up as love poetry for the (male) patron. (Sonnet 29 has been argued by Professor John Barrell - on the evidence of the lexis and syntax of the 1609 Quarto edition of the poem - to be about court patronage and its vicissitudes, rather than about romantic love; remember also the "rival poet" sonnets in the sequence.) I even suspect that this kind of extremity of feeling, this absence of what Eliot called "an Objective Correlative" - an expression of an extreme state of feeling disproportionate "to the facts as they appear" - is being sent up by Shakespeare in "Hamlet"(c.1601); it would be a further two centuries before this kind of Byronic poet-as-St-Sebastian culture became 'cool'.
Romanticism in England petered out by about 1830, and by 1922 the primary tendency in Modernist writing was towards an anti-romantic depersonalisation of the text; the occlusion of narrative agency; the use of defamiliarisation and verfremdungseffekts to shatter the notion of the poet, the seer, the centralised perspective. Postwar British poetry such as that by Philip Larkin restores the notion of the centralised narrator but the tone is one of wry detachment and supreme irony, a persistent self-assertion of self-effacement. If he's bleeding, it's slow and imperceptible.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Just some thoughts. Don't hit me!
First off, I could never hit anyone!
I believe in freedom of speech!!!! I could never hit anyone just because they voice a thought or an opinion, even if it differs from my own.
My goodness, you are so educated and intelligent and creative!
I'm just glad you share your thoughts and creativity here and that I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to better my understanding of poetry because of people like you!
Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen
Originally posted by coleen *lays pen and paper at finsbury's feet*
Holy shit. That's the last thing I'd ever want. Eddie Vedder said in an interview that "Music should be faceless, really." Well, I agree to an extent with Ed's idea, and might even transpose it onto the question of literature. Still, I argue with everyone, and I'd even argue with myself and with Ed (if he'd let me!) here, against my own point, that literature, faceless or not, and even if written about another historical period or geographical locale, can never be TOO anonymous because it can't help but betray the ideological conflicts of its precise moment of production, even as unwitting gaps and silences in the world-view of the narrative.
Oh, as an aside: What do I mean by gaps and silences? How does one read for ideological (rather than narrative) fissures? Well, a Marxist critic called Pierre Macherey coined this idea. You can study a book that purports to offer one world view and start picking it apart for the hidden ideological assumptions - its social unconscious, if you like - that actually show an opposite view. I love taking supposedly liberal texts and finding hidden conservative discourses in them that have somehow been naturalised in the background of a text. Take Forster's "A Passage To India." An articulate and compassionate indictment via the novel form of British colonial brutality and corruption, in the depiction of the fictive Chandrapore Raj, with its old-boys' network of complicity in setting up Dr Aziz on a charge of raping Adela Quested purely on the basis of prejudice? A liberal Englishman's call for reform of colonial administrative communities in India? That's the novel on the surface. But what about the Orientalist significance of the symbolism of the Marabar caves with their amorphous echo and their maddening occult powers? What about all that heat that sets demonstrating "natives" off like "savages"? And Professor Godbole? Nahh. Look hard enough and the racist structures are not merely intact but implicitly promoted.
Er, what were my points? Yes. I remember. I'd like to write anonymously but some critic will be able to pinpoint my ideological and historical moment, in time. All our writings are inevitably prone to the kind of scrutiny that presents oppositional readings to those which we intended. A Republicans' statement on A Moving Train may read in a few years time as fascinating for its self-interrogating anxieties about nationalist self-definition (thus, 'liberal' contexts intervene); a self proclaimed communist might say something that in hindsight reads like the ideological product of the Bush years.
On a completely unrelated note, I was in the bath today, thinking about tropes. Doubletalk, especially. The type I read not just on message boards but hear presenters like Conan O'Brien or that Tom Green attempt.
I was thinking how redundant and counter-productive it can become when it gets over-allusive, a bit too haughty and wears a big badge saying "This is an ironic comment." I think that on this side of the pond we have the monopoly on irony - sorry, I do (well, we had Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen) - we've developed a kind of doubletalk that reads like singletalk: clean, straightforward, and apparently sincere. The sheer skill in registering irony here is in knowing how to manipulate lexis and sytnax ever so slightly so as to splinter meaning into the possibility of a subversive reading. The most ironic speeches have been delivered as addresses to monarchs and leaders, and rewarded with golden chattels and flash titles!
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots ...I think that on this side of the pond we have the monopoly on irony - sorry, I do (well, we had Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen) - we've developed a kind of doubletalk that reads like singletalk: clean, straightforward, and apparently sincere.
das some evil shit, man
certainly ego bolstering
and no doubt i've preyed on the linguistically challenged WAY back in the day
and more recently, to walk away snickering when some asswipe corrects me incorrectly
(i've actually been chastised for using the word "rich" to describe an experience instead of someone's wallet or financial accomplishment... bizzzzzarrre!)
still... the impression might be gathered that brits are a rather cold lot... maybe cold, maybe scared to show weakness?
still... the impression might be gathered that brits are a rather cold lot... maybe cold, maybe scared to show weakness?
not YOU of course
everybody loves mr.carrots
Well, I'm Irish really, as was Sterne, and Jane Austen was suitably near to the British aristocracy not to be caught up by puritanism's coldness. I think irony comes from a generous spirit, and it means something very different over here, born of the Enlightenment era and perpetuated through Austen's work: the wish to instruct morally into the shared vulnerability of us all by deflating via subtle mockery preposterous affectation and inflated romantic "sensibility". (See "Northanger Abbey", which mocks the cult of sensibility and the Gothic tradition not coldly but affectionately.) It certainly has nothing to do with ego bolstering. Just the opposite. This is why it doesn't work Stateside. (jk)
Irony's moral purpose is to elevate the humble firstly by identifying the supercilious or overdramatic aspect of our nature and secondly by interrogating vaingloriousness as self-contradictory and defeating. Perhaps you might say the treatment of Malvolio by Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Feste wasn't cool: he was imprisoned as a madman and his vulnerability was exposed. Well, this is Shakespeare's dramatic rendition of such ploys taken to extremes; he says "this is how to take your schemes to send someone up too far". But there is a message to be noted: the fake and the self-serving deserve taking down a peg or two and ironised ... the greatest literature has its Oswalds, Clotens or, in Dickens, Uriah Heep ... but the MEANS of attack should be ultimately humane and to the benefit of the characters as represented and to the people reading (that is, if irony has a morally prescriptive purpose at all, which, traditionally, it has).
Irony has nothing to do with poking fun with people with vulnerabilities. Oh, I forgot. That was Denis Leary's excuse when confronted over disablist remarks. He was being "Ironic." He has no notion of the concept.
Irony has nothing to do with breaking taboos in a laconic manner, to be sophisticated. I've seen this tendency. That's not irony at all. That's something else entirely. I don't know what. it's probably just a case of being offensive and trying to get away with it by being clever and aloof: pretending to test moral conventions but really doing the shock jock routine. That's a convention that's about twenty five years old. Nothing to do with my point. I'm talking about a fully fledged literary, linguistic and philosophical concept of hundreds of years' standing, which has professors chewing their pencils because of its astonishing untranslatability into any other cultures except those of the former Soviet Union.
If they ask me in customs
If I have anything to declare,
I'll tell them yes,
I am in love with a woman
who lives near the Puget Sound.
I'm sure they'll let me through
With such a happy parcel.
Comments
You've got to listen to yourself
Listen to yourself
That's all, just listen to yourself
If you want to love your brother
Only listen to yourself now
Change
begins
within
There's killers playing shepherds
Better listen to yourself
Listen to yourself
That's all, just listen to yourself
There's killers playing shepherds
You've got to save yourself
Change begins within
There's something silence tells you
Better pick it up yourself
Listen to yourself
I said Listen to yourself!
It says, that's shit that they've been talking
You've got to trust yourself
Change begins within
Change begins within
indeed
otherwise
being
beautiful
trellissessss
and
lean to's
upon
which
to
gain
purchase
tendrils
supporting
stalk
(nothing quite so disturbing
to see your children ignored
because they're good
enough
but not quite perfect)
to new flowers
to old weeds
nature glory in the seed
(shizzbang, mr.carrots, you're like a flower in quicktime, blossoming profusely! and the blooms are fucking gorgeous... you write so well... i daresay the thing on Of The Girl's thread... WOW... I'm too dumb to know what every word was, but I got the jist... I get smarter, wordier maybe, everytime I read you or setaside2.... On the liner notes in one of Joni Mitchell's albums, she thanks some dude for instilling in her the love of words... I suppose I offer up the same here... glad you're better)
Finsbury.
LOL...
now hurry along with better sense of the universe...
LOL
flop into black through his pane. And it
was noon, acid green treed, when he started,
writing for the day, August 7th 1887,
here at the bug eaten desk bought in a warehouse
when he and his wife were newlywed
for a new start. He's been here hunched
over the foolscap, still blank. The third novel.
The make or break. And all he has seen today
has been swathes of dust from peoples' editions
on the shelves in the recess to his left,
and faces in the windows of buildings opposite:
the retired, the leisurely, the mad.
He buries his face in his arms, and feels his wife's
touch on his shoulder.
"Another day of nothing, love?"
Because Dan walked his road.
The Judge roared, "That's the worst excuse
I think I've ever heard."
The pressmen in the gallery
let loud laughs fill the hall
And the way Jay flashed his hunter's eye
was noted down by all.
Dan took the stand, held out his hand
and swore he couldn't lie
The Brief asked, "Did Jay use the knife
because you'd come his way?"
"That horse was MINE!", Dan said in time:
"That's MY horse that he STOLE!
He led it out from my front gate
and dyed its patch with coal."
"So had you come back to reclaim
the horse that was your own?",
The Brief asked, through his
handkerchief
of sweat mopped from Jake's crown.
Dan said "No way. I'd come to say
My horse was cursed from birth:
The fields that creature rode all failed:
Now, I've increased my worth."
1999
watching the Cam pass by, greeny,
Beautifully,
I see, I feel, it's all simple, really.
Love and the roll of a river, clearly
reflecting the sun: it's all we need
to feel, to see. Deliciously.
Bluebell blazing, oxlip, eglantine
She makes a garden dance in colour,
Bluebell blazing, oxlip, eglantine
She takes the petals of each flower
and with a whisper calls them into shine
She dances with her daughter
Round the living room and kitchen bend
She dances with her daughter
Round the living room and kitchen bend
Her girl lives freely with the laughter
of a child who loves her mother without end
Her hair is golden like the sungull
and soft as oceans curling into sound
Her hair is golden like the sungull
and soft as oceans curling into sound
Her lips are honey-sweet and brimful
Like waves of histories of loves unbound.
October 1993. I nearly didn't go.
I was dragged into it by people I didn't really know.
There were five of us, heading in from Sunderland:
Spacey, stoned, rolling skunky doobies for us for the train,
Hippie Tom, calling the train guard "Man",
getting beautiful with the tunnel pigeons and saying how he loved everybody,
some girl called Helen who never stopped moaning
about her jeans going up her arse
and her friend whom she should have been looking after,
who'd all but passed out already on 20/20...
and then there was me. Taking the train in from Sunderland,
in a grotty plastic carriage with "Fuck the Mackams" scratches
in the windows and empty packets of Regals on the floor,
we passed all the little stops with unexotic names,
"Seaburn", "Brockley Whins", "Heworth",
before we pulled in at Newcastle station.
Walking down Grainger Street, this pre-club Saturday night on the Toon,
I was left to half-carry Helen's friend
while Helen moaned about the cold, or about when Spacey was going to hurry up
with the doobie she was only going to bogart anyway.
Hippie Tom kept saying "Everywhere's the same, maaan, I love everybody."
We passed two town girls in orange fake tanned skin and mini skirts
tripping past us in stillettos. Hippie Tom smiled at one, looking all Zen.
She said to him, "'Ave oi gorra fookin' clock on me 'ead?", loudly
enough to alert the big wide fellas behind,
and moved on.
The lads passed in shortsleeved white shirts, bald heads, fat necks, earrings,
singing "Fog on the Tyne"; one mentioned, "Amma gaggin' forra fight! Owra bout that
stupid hippy lookin' bastard? Arra fook it, he's not worth it.
He hasnae enough blood in him to be worth the fookin' mess."
We entered the club, and this is where I deliberately lost everyone,
hoping to head down into the Saturday Rawk Night pit to mosh around
and as I headed to the floor, hearing the new Pearl Jam song "Animal" crashing through the PA
and my heart pumping for some serious moshing
in my plaid shirt,"Vs." sheep tee shirt, jeans and Doc Martins
I thought for a moment I would forget the craziness of the night.
But there on the floor
Were these guys in eighties leathers
and huge permed extensions
and Twisted Sister makeup -
no irony -
doing fingertapping air guitar to McCready
and crotch thrusting and tongue flicking to Vedder.
Saturday Rawk Night, October 1993. "Animal."
If I hadn't gone, I wouldn't ever have known.
Short wave at night, turning the dial.
Static and wow; oh, that signal might go!
In and out, peaking awhile.
Here's Bratislava, here's Bucharest!
Here's rebel news, live from Harare!
Adiss Ababban broadcasts, which attest
to a government's crimes! Never weary,
I turn the dial, hearing from Rio
a feint Freedom network that tickles
the VOA signal. Radio:
On SW, it's where knowledge trickles
out. Tonight while they're Sky-ing and Foxing,
For TV grins Rummy-smug smiling,
I'm surfing for truth with this box in
Under my quilt. I'll keep dialling...
with all the neighbourhood cats about him,
Just sitting there not even blinking,
Nodding deep telepathic truths to the others
as the nine in the evening May light declines
and the orange lamplights come on one by one:
You're some kind of buddha, I suppose:
You've got this haughty turn up on your nose
but the closedness of your eyes, your lockjaw smile
Tells me you're contented. You've certainly
sway on Scamp from Number One,
Cucumber and Carrots from Number Two
and that funny tortoise-shell one eyed thing from around the corner,
But these guys just hang out with you.
You don't go off looking for lurve,
You don't fight,
You don't even play cards.
What is your message to the cat masses,
Big white furry long limbed thing on my lawn?
Is you the Jim Jones of cats,
or is you just totally cat-cool, cool cat?
Cool for cats.
When you balk from writing dirges
and find pleasure, penning ditties
born of happy, easy urges.
I was Socrates at seventeen.
Now I'm just a bloke, who's nothing seen.
And writing's much more fun when life's inane.
All those with epic lives are just a pain!
Just sit awhile and see.
Your poems will grow nicely, there.
Just watch, and let them be.
Laugh loudest, with the freest roar you've got.
Laugh out so looming riverbarges hear,
Full of massing puritans come near.
Laugh loud when that grey throng arrives ashore.
When someone asks "What's wrong?", just laugh some more.
Laugh until they realise hard that you're
a poet without God's disguise, true, pure.
Your poems never cease to make me
Thanks for just being you!
I would look to the work and the character of the narrative persona in a poem, rather than the biography of the poet, to see bleeding in evidence, and I don't really think that in the history of poetry it happens until Schlegel first coined the term romantisch in the literary world.
If I might try to define Romanticism by its main traits, I would note
(a) a preoccupation with prelapsarian nature and society;
(b) a sanguine expression of the interrelationship between the subjective psyche and the external "moods" of nature;
(c) a thematic foregrounding of both expressions and self-analyses of the extreme feelings of the narrator;
(d) an obsession with the idea of individual creativity and genius as tortured yet spiritually transcendent expression.
There wasn't much of this bleeding going on, a couple of centuries earlier, in the courtly sonnets of Sidney, Wyatt or Spenser. A lot of the time these writers were inserting in-jokes and classical rhetorical tropes and references to each other, slap bang in the middle of "heartfelt love poems", as some kind of Elizabethan Cambridge-mens' contest in literary virtuosity. Even the non-Cambridge Shakespeare's sonnets tend to be re-read in the romantic light when a lot of Sonnets 1-126 could well have been, in their time, cleverly disguised treatises on the politics of poetic patronage, dressed up as love poetry for the (male) patron. (Sonnet 29 has been argued by Professor John Barrell - on the evidence of the lexis and syntax of the 1609 Quarto edition of the poem - to be about court patronage and its vicissitudes, rather than about romantic love; remember also the "rival poet" sonnets in the sequence.) I even suspect that this kind of extremity of feeling, this absence of what Eliot called "an Objective Correlative" - an expression of an extreme state of feeling disproportionate "to the facts as they appear" - is being sent up by Shakespeare in "Hamlet"(c.1601); it would be a further two centuries before this kind of Byronic poet-as-St-Sebastian culture became 'cool'.
Romanticism in England petered out by about 1830, and by 1922 the primary tendency in Modernist writing was towards an anti-romantic depersonalisation of the text; the occlusion of narrative agency; the use of defamiliarisation and verfremdungseffekts to shatter the notion of the poet, the seer, the centralised perspective. Postwar British poetry such as that by Philip Larkin restores the notion of the centralised narrator but the tone is one of wry detachment and supreme irony, a persistent self-assertion of self-effacement. If he's bleeding, it's slow and imperceptible.
Just some thoughts. Don't hit me!
First off, I could never hit anyone!
I believe in freedom of speech!!!! I could never hit anyone just because they voice a thought or an opinion, even if it differs from my own.
My goodness, you are so educated and intelligent and creative!
I'm just glad you share your thoughts and creativity here and that I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to better my understanding of poetry because of people like you!
Holy shit. That's the last thing I'd ever want. Eddie Vedder said in an interview that "Music should be faceless, really." Well, I agree to an extent with Ed's idea, and might even transpose it onto the question of literature. Still, I argue with everyone, and I'd even argue with myself and with Ed (if he'd let me!) here, against my own point, that literature, faceless or not, and even if written about another historical period or geographical locale, can never be TOO anonymous because it can't help but betray the ideological conflicts of its precise moment of production, even as unwitting gaps and silences in the world-view of the narrative.
Oh, as an aside: What do I mean by gaps and silences? How does one read for ideological (rather than narrative) fissures? Well, a Marxist critic called Pierre Macherey coined this idea. You can study a book that purports to offer one world view and start picking it apart for the hidden ideological assumptions - its social unconscious, if you like - that actually show an opposite view. I love taking supposedly liberal texts and finding hidden conservative discourses in them that have somehow been naturalised in the background of a text. Take Forster's "A Passage To India." An articulate and compassionate indictment via the novel form of British colonial brutality and corruption, in the depiction of the fictive Chandrapore Raj, with its old-boys' network of complicity in setting up Dr Aziz on a charge of raping Adela Quested purely on the basis of prejudice? A liberal Englishman's call for reform of colonial administrative communities in India? That's the novel on the surface. But what about the Orientalist significance of the symbolism of the Marabar caves with their amorphous echo and their maddening occult powers? What about all that heat that sets demonstrating "natives" off like "savages"? And Professor Godbole? Nahh. Look hard enough and the racist structures are not merely intact but implicitly promoted.
Er, what were my points? Yes. I remember. I'd like to write anonymously but some critic will be able to pinpoint my ideological and historical moment, in time. All our writings are inevitably prone to the kind of scrutiny that presents oppositional readings to those which we intended. A Republicans' statement on A Moving Train may read in a few years time as fascinating for its self-interrogating anxieties about nationalist self-definition (thus, 'liberal' contexts intervene); a self proclaimed communist might say something that in hindsight reads like the ideological product of the Bush years.
I was thinking how redundant and counter-productive it can become when it gets over-allusive, a bit too haughty and wears a big badge saying "This is an ironic comment." I think that on this side of the pond we have the monopoly on irony - sorry, I do (well, we had Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen) - we've developed a kind of doubletalk that reads like singletalk: clean, straightforward, and apparently sincere. The sheer skill in registering irony here is in knowing how to manipulate lexis and sytnax ever so slightly so as to splinter meaning into the possibility of a subversive reading. The most ironic speeches have been delivered as addresses to monarchs and leaders, and rewarded with golden chattels and flash titles!
das some evil shit, man
certainly ego bolstering
and no doubt i've preyed on the linguistically challenged WAY back in the day
and more recently, to walk away snickering when some asswipe corrects me incorrectly
(i've actually been chastised for using the word "rich" to describe an experience instead of someone's wallet or financial accomplishment... bizzzzzarrre!)
still... the impression might be gathered that brits are a rather cold lot... maybe cold, maybe scared to show weakness?
not YOU of course
everybody loves mr.carrots
Well, I'm Irish really, as was Sterne, and Jane Austen was suitably near to the British aristocracy not to be caught up by puritanism's coldness. I think irony comes from a generous spirit, and it means something very different over here, born of the Enlightenment era and perpetuated through Austen's work: the wish to instruct morally into the shared vulnerability of us all by deflating via subtle mockery preposterous affectation and inflated romantic "sensibility". (See "Northanger Abbey", which mocks the cult of sensibility and the Gothic tradition not coldly but affectionately.) It certainly has nothing to do with ego bolstering. Just the opposite. This is why it doesn't work Stateside.
interesting notion, yeah?
Irony has nothing to do with poking fun with people with vulnerabilities. Oh, I forgot. That was Denis Leary's excuse when confronted over disablist remarks. He was being "Ironic." He has no notion of the concept.
Irony has nothing to do with breaking taboos in a laconic manner, to be sophisticated. I've seen this tendency. That's not irony at all. That's something else entirely. I don't know what. it's probably just a case of being offensive and trying to get away with it by being clever and aloof: pretending to test moral conventions but really doing the shock jock routine. That's a convention that's about twenty five years old. Nothing to do with my point. I'm talking about a fully fledged literary, linguistic and philosophical concept of hundreds of years' standing, which has professors chewing their pencils because of its astonishing untranslatability into any other cultures except those of the former Soviet Union.
i think...
maybe i don't even know what you're talking about
but, i get the dry humor so prevalent in movies like Mr. Bean...
cracks me up
If I have anything to declare,
I'll tell them yes,
I am in love with a woman
who lives near the Puget Sound.
I'm sure they'll let me through
With such a happy parcel.