You sit perfectly composed.
Your chair doesn't need a back.
You eye me, straight and clear.
Your hair is brushed free from your brow.
Your smiling teeth are serendipitous white,
Your hands are turned down on your lap, relaxed.
You talk easily. Your tongue makes no hard palattals,
your mouth rolls no unsightly gutterals.
You keep your head quite still while your eyes dance.
Your voice isn't too quiet either, nor is it strident.
You speak precisely, but not with prissy chill.
You sit perfectly composed,
your blouse is quite white under window light.
You're composed. Not posed. Calm composes you.
You sit here, and a poem just writes itself around you.
You're always welcome! How are your paintings?
You remind me of a cliche that stops being a cliche when applied to the particular.
You're that phrase "The purer the light, the more effortless the glow.... "
You're something that astonishes cliche in its rarity.
You happy artist!
After half a bottle of Californian Merlot,
My tongue becomes a medium of experience.
invested in human lives:
not in what it says
but in how it feels.
It becomes an instrument of consciousness and all that stuff,
like a bluerinse Doris at a seance getting a message.
My tongue feels like the life of a forty eight year old video rental man called Dennis
who lives in a very small but pleasantly decorated shangri-la in a London suburb
with his wife Karen who works long hours and leaves messages on the answerphone saying
she loves him, and to pay the bleedin' gas bill!
My tongue feels like Dennis does distance learning degrees.
It reads Proust,
Ray churchy per tomps per due.
Sends poetry to the BBC,
keeps up email correspondence with post-colonial feminist professors
and has known de toke o de erb in Notting Hill in August.
The tongue feels like a life well fakkin' lived, actualalllly.
This drink is magic juice.
I'll drink more and see if I'm you.
FX Door of old cornershop opens. Tinkle of bell. Inside shop, wipe of feet, yelp of little dog.
ELDERLY WOMAN BEHIND THE COUNTER(Gossiping with friend): Anyway, they saw him on Foxley Heath standing on a bucket, he was, with a hole cut in the apron.. looked very suspicious, calling "Here, Ermintrude"...... his wife's very religious you know... ahh, hello our new American neighbour! Mister Rumsfeld! What can I do for you?
RUMMY: Well, actually, I'd like two four packs of Carlsberg Special Brew and some king size Rizlas please.
ELDERLY WOMAN (aside): Yes, see you Mrs Halfscrote, see you at bingo on Thursday night! (To Rummy) What was that? Special Brew? 9.8% top strength? And waccy baccy papers? What's wrong? You should be buying razors, love, that beard looks awful on ye!
RUMMY (bows head): I know, I know. It... just .... hasn't been the same... since Georgie fired me..... the scorn.... the shame.... the ignominy of being ridiculed as an incompetent, penny pinching, criminally irresponsible warmonger, and an inept one at that.... reduced to drinking warm lager in a Yorkshire village farm outhouse forever... oh, the obscurity....boo hoo...boo hooo...... the horror.... the horror.....
Going back to the diatribe about presuppositionless poetry, or music, or even political messages, Fins, would you say that was one of the reasons the Romantics chose the natural world as their focal point, don't you think that by trying to convey as sense of their humanity by invoking the primitive instincts elicited by the "natural world" that they were in effect attempting to drain themselves of their time and place in the world? Isn't a sunset over the channel timeless, couldn't I in effect sit at the precipice of the grand canyon and be awed into that same dark wordless place as the first asians who came scraping across the alaskan bridge?
Just a thought, Descartes in his own naive way tried to do this with philosophy, he compared it to emptying a bushel of apples and putting them back in again in the order of his choosing, but isn't that what poets are always trying to do. We try to convey these universal sentiments of mankind in a way that transcends the boundary of our social climate?
Autumn leaves of pale maroon
blessed by the amber thoughts of noon,
hibernating in december’s dark
before glowing at the mountain’s hearth,
while shivering in the doorway of dusk
the handle turns and the icey crust
has thawed beneath the canopies,
outlawed by some calamity
from which wild deer are left fleeing
from their quiet rippling pools.
Crunching steps through unmarked trails
over the bed of dying shells, hallmarked
browns of the soil’s shroud, left by the shadow
of September days, broken twigs from
sick old men, warding saplings in their den
waiting for the children to eat at the adult table
softly storing untold fables like trophies on the
mantelpiece
Originally posted by EvilToasterElf Autumn leaves of pale maroon
blessed by the amber thoughts of noon,
hibernating in december’s dark
before glowing at the mountain’s hearth,
while shivering in the doorway of dusk
the handle turns and the icey crust
has thawed beneath the canopies,
outlawed by some calamity
from which wild deer are left fleeing
from their quiet rippling pools.
Crunching steps through unmarked trails
over the bed of dying shells, hallmarked
browns of the soil’s shroud, left by the shadow
of September days, broken twigs from
sick old men, warding saplings in their den
waiting for the children to eat at the adult table
softly storing untold fables like trophies on the
mantelpiece
I feel honoured to have this on my thread! Thank you.
Originally posted by EvilToasterElf Going back to the diatribe about presuppositionless poetry, or music, or even political messages, Fins, would you say that was one of the reasons the Romantics chose the natural world as their focal point, don't you think that by trying to convey as sense of their humanity by invoking the primitive instincts elicited by the "natural world" that they were in effect attempting to drain themselves of their time and place in the world? Isn't a sunset over the channel timeless, couldn't I in effect sit at the precipice of the grand canyon and be awed into that same dark wordless place as the first asians who came scraping across the alaskan bridge?
Just a thought, Descartes in his own naive way tried to do this with philosophy, he compared it to emptying a bushel of apples and putting them back in again in the order of his choosing, but isn't that what poets are always trying to do. We try to convey these universal sentiments of mankind in a way that transcends the boundary of our social climate?
Just a thought
Very, very good thought, EvilToasterElf, and quite exciting for me to consider because I love to discuss Literature, or, if you like, literatures.
I think it would be somewhat anachronistic to say of the British Romantics of 1780-1830 that their transcendent individualism or communing with a higher 'Nature' was wilfully solipsistic, politically disengaged or constitutive of a flight from history. Perhaps many who decades later adhered to the transcendentalist ideas of the American philosopher and poet Emerson (1803-82) sought this flight, but they were in part reacting to the rise of bourgeois capitalist ideology that was filtering through the epistemological world-view of the Victorian socio-realist novel, for example. The British Romantics were reacting to an earlier period of crisis, characterised by a collapse in moral, social and religious 'order' in the late Englightenment period of international Revolutions and uprisings, and Godbusting science: their focus was on the privilege of the individual imagination as countering rationalist epistemes which they had come to suspect as different from truth as the residual philosophies of the past, but this itself was a political act and not an escape from politics. The Romantic poetic speaker often gets an attack of doubt about the dangers of flying off from history or embracing fully the Sublime in dream-analysis, the irrational, drugs, or occult preoccupations, but, to nod to you here, his or her advocacy of sympathy with Nature is not wholly "worldly" either. The romantic poetic speaker 'bled' metaphorically and his or her tone was characterised by much of the stuff of the old Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s, but the register, lexis and syntax of Romantic verse is direct and ultimately communicative rather than alienative. Thus ultimately it acknowledges a social role and a political end to communicate another sense of truth that can be shared simply by narrator and narratee, writer and reader. This is in sharp contrast to the kind of depersonalised, fragmentary, allusive and multi-voiced narrative of "High" Modernism in 1922, that reacted in its time to another sense of philosophical and social crisis of world view and belief (and even that poetry maintained, perhaps because of its political and philosophical conservativism, an astute historical sense in a period of postwar change).
Originally posted by john girl let the man go thru
oh, holy crow I love this song!
Move aside
and let the man go through
let the man go through
If I stole
Somebody else's wave
To fly up.
If I rose
Up with the avenue
Behind me.
Some kind of verb.
Some kind of moving thing.
Something unseen.
Some hand is motioning
to rise, to rise, to rise.
Too fat, fat you must cut lean.
You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine,
Chump, change, and it's on, Super bon bon
Super bon bon, Super bon bon.
And by
The phone
I live
In fear
Sheer Chance
Will draw
You in
To here.
Too fat, fat you must cut lean.
You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine,
Chump, change, and it's on, Super bon bon
Super bon bon, Super bon bon.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Very, very good thought, EvilToasterElf, and quite exciting for me to consider because I love to discuss Literature, or, if you like, literatures.
I think it would be somewhat anachronistic to say of the British Romantics of 1780-1830 that their transcendent individualism or communing with a higher 'Nature' was wilfully solipsistic, politically disengaged or constitutive of a flight from history. Perhaps many who decades later adhered to the transcendentalist ideas of the American philosopher and poet Emerson (1803-82) sought this flight, but they were in part reacting to the rise of bourgeois capitalist ideology that was filtering through the epistemological world-view of the Victorian socio-realist novel, for example. The British Romantics were reacting to an earlier period of crisis, characterised by a collapse in moral, social and religious 'order' in the late Englightenment period of international Revolutions and uprisings, and Godbusting science: their focus was on the privilege of the individual imagination as countering rationalist epistemes which they had come to suspect as different from truth as the residual philosophies of the past, but this itself was a political act and not an escape from politics. The Romantic poetic speaker often gets an attack of doubt about the dangers of flying off from history or embracing fully the Sublime in dream-analysis, the irrational, drugs, or occult preoccupations, but, to nod to you here, his or her advocacy of sympathy with Nature is not wholly "worldly" either. The romantic poetic speaker 'bled' metaphorically and his or her tone was characterised by much of the stuff of the old Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s, but the register, lexis and syntax of Romantic verse is direct and ultimately communicative rather than alienative. Thus ultimately it acknowledges a social role and a political end to communicate another sense of truth that can be shared simply by narrator and narratee, writer and reader. This is in sharp contrast to the kind of depersonalised, fragmentary, allusive and multi-voiced narrative of "High" Modernism in 1922, that reacted in its time to another sense of philosophical and social crisis of world view and belief (and even that poetry maintained, perhaps because of its political and philosophical conservativism, an astute historical sense in a period of postwar change).
There are a lot of ism's in there but the one I missed was Eastern Mysticism which pervaded Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge at the very least, the quest for the "inner eye" and eye not of blue, or green or brown but colorless. The Romantic movement can be described as pioneering introspection almost as a direct corollary to this. It could be because nature most often tapped straight into those primal areas where one could find the inner eye open, and this quest is precisely what sets them apart from specific history, I challenge the supposition that this was a reaction to the neo-clacissism of the enlightenment but a push in an entirely different direction. But that's just me - bring on the pain
(Dons George Foreman gloves; picks up George Foreman grillsize quill; begins writing.)
Blake's spirituality was directly tied in with the political moment. Have a look at his "Introduction" to "Songs of Innocence and Experience":
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again.'
So I piped: he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
That word "stained" is pretty jarring. How can writing stain the waters of apparent concord? Well, think of the growth of literacy and printed matter in the 1790s and its effect in the context of the controversial war between Britain and France; three writers were put on trial for treason in 1794. There was heavy censorship of writing at the time. Blake alludes in his reference to writing to a contemporary debate in Britain about the fact that Britain did not (and, in 2004, still does not) have a written constitution. The idea of an unwritten constitution was transparent, like the naturalised 'waters' of supposed social agreement, but, as Thomas Paine had said,
"A constitution is not a thing in name only but in fact. It has not an ideal but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in visible form, there is none."
Blake was different from Wordsworth and Coleridge in that he was against censorship of the press, and he was a pretty hands-on artist when it came to understanding the radical potentiality of writing and printing one's work. He was arguing for the socially reformative as much as spiritually transcendent power of writing. As an engraver he used acids to burn away copper surfaces and reveal the infinite artistry of his illustrations, and in his transcendent poetry he wished to use language to stain the waters of social perception "to reveal things as they truly are, infinite". He was an idealist and a transcendentalist, but he wasn't politically disengaged: he was working class, a haberdasher's son, was heavily involved in the radical London Corresponding Society, wore a red revolutionary bonnet and nearly got himself done up on a charge of sedition in Feltham in 1803.
if what he did and produced is any indication of the real man,his mind turns me on so intensely.
this guy who worked on his art,writing and printing the books,continuing to do it despite threats and lack of funds-he's my hero.
i like to think about life back then.people took time to do creative things carefully.
the art audience was as fickle as always,but some got it.
now life is so fast and demanding.it's bullshit.it doesn't fit with the organic and thoughtful development of art.
we feel guilty taking the time to sit or lay down and dream for ourselves,plan and visualize how to bring our talents to fruition.
going to nature makes you do that.it makes you see that natural things always take the same amount of time to happen.gestation periods,the phases of the moon or the seasons-you can't make those things go faster.
what am i saying?
blake.
i want that natural and rhythmic partner who knows i appreciate the flow.i know he'd appreciate mine.
Blake was incredible. He was absolutely the man on the scene, more so than Keats or Byron in my view.
I've just been reading over some of Coleridge's thoughts in his Biographia Literara, which can be referred to in the course of my debate with EvilToasterElf, concerning how Romanticism is politically and historically engaged because of and through its transcendalism.
Coleridge argues that imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates [ideology] in order to re-create". Essentially, it is socially "vital" and in engagement with the present. Art is mimetic, but rather than "fancifully" mirroring the "fixed and dead" elements of dominant ideological perceptions of the world, it is not so much a call to nature as a natural power itself, in its ability to revitalise perception through language of the world beyond, to "humble and humanize" it, to "purify and exalt" individual experience with social consequence.
I think, EvilToasterElf, in summing up my argument I will acknowledge that yes, a dominant strain in Romantic poetic thinking and writing idealizes poetry as a timeless bastion of human value, but this tendency works ALONGSIDE the idea of the didactic purpose of poetry to effect social change. I'll say that we're both right, to an extent, but I wouldn't overstate the 'timeless' aspect as applying to all Romantic writers; just Wordsworth and perhaps Shelley, mainly.
Just found this quotation from Shelley, which shows that he too was aware of poetry's socially prescriptive powers:
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
By the way, regarding Eastern Mysticism in Western poetry. There's another -ism that goes with that and it's very politicised: Orientalism. There's another -ism that goes with that too. Proto-imperialism. And there's a theoretical methodology I could use to bore everybody on the Board shitless, in going into the political and historical implications of this, and it's called post-colonialism. But you know, I'm relaxed and happy, and fancy reading some of Pasta's poetry and just relaxing for the evening. So, I'll say it was a grand pleasure talking lit. stuff but I'm knackered now and fancy some fun!
I am the Thread Monster.
I start like a little worm, a germ,
a wriggling idea,
a little squiggle of life
in the rainy bog of the Word Farm.
Everybody comes to see me,
They like the shine of my skin
Gleaming in the sun
and they pat me, "Pretty little thread,
zippy little fella, though a bit funny-looking,"
and they pick me up
and take me to rich ground
cupped in the hands of praise.
But when they lay me down
They notice I am a little heavier
than when they had first held me.
I'm a bit corpulent, protracted,
extending with the odd wart,
the odd septic hair
and sceptic's muscle flinch,
and ridges of bulge and then more ridges,
inscribed with the wrinkles of indulgent feasting
on the fat of Word Land:
"Page 1, Page 2, Page 3".
I get bigger,
and b-i-g-g-e-r,
and B-I-G-G-E-R ...
Oh, and there are arms popping out now,
arms and legs with craters on the skin,
fists and satchel feet,
corn armour (corn amour!),
writing on the body the love of battle
with all the poor little wrigglers on the prairie.
But one day
from the great farm porch,
Great Farmer Versey is going to wonder
about the drought
and he's going to say,
"That little wriggler started off cute,
and he caught folks' attention
But he just got too goddam big
and he's drinking all the words up.
He's too big for the other threads
and I can't slim him down.
I guess I'll just have to shoot him."
So I'm just going to have to face it.
I should have known that small is beautiful.
I am the Thread Monster.
You guys have played your hearts out all these years
and given me so much in terms of real
energy to write and feel. Time gears
from singularity in the massing reel
of universe expansion: you provide
a space for stones like me to spin out wide
and make a rhythm for myself. You do
know that you are loved, the six of you?
That sounded a bit brown-nosey, didn't it? LOL
Ah, what the hell, embarrassing sentimentalism is a propensity you can't repress in poetry forever. Sometimes you've just got to let it come out, for worse or worser!
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Blake was incredible. He was absolutely the man on the scene, more so than Keats or Byron in my view.
I've just been reading over some of Coleridge's thoughts in his Biographia Literara, which can be referred to in the course of my debate with EvilToasterElf, concerning how Romanticism is politically and historically engaged because of and through its transcendalism.
Coleridge argues that imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates [ideology] in order to re-create". Essentially, it is socially "vital" and in engagement with the present. Art is mimetic, but rather than "fancifully" mirroring the "fixed and dead" elements of dominant ideological perceptions of the world, it is not so much a call to nature as a natural power itself, in its ability to revitalise perception through language of the world beyond, to "humble and humanize" it, to "purify and exalt" individual experience with social consequence.
I think, EvilToasterElf, in summing up my argument I will acknowledge that yes, a dominant strain in Romantic poetic thinking and writing idealizes poetry as a timeless bastion of human value, but this tendency works ALONGSIDE the idea of the didactic purpose of poetry to effect social change. I'll say that we're both right, to an extent, but I wouldn't overstate the 'timeless' aspect as applying to all Romantic writers; just Wordsworth and perhaps Shelley, mainly.
Man, songs of innocence, way to pick an obscure detail when Blake wrote an entire poem called America, with glaring and obvious political and social implications, along with the Marriage of Heaven and Hell where Blake re-writes biblical texts in terms of poetry. I wasn't really expecting to win this argument because your absolutely right, the moment we exit the womb we are a product of our senses, our thoughts, and our environment, there is no way to elude that no matter how "natural" your subject matter is. I think the reason why so many people fall in love with Blake is because during the Romantic Era he printed almost nothing in "mainstream intellectual circles" his power is in his candor he wasn't like Byron caught up in trying to write directly to the future, as most of us fall into the trap of doing. But this has been a fine quibble we've had here fins, and I myself am enamored of the Romantics, in fact I think I'll take a moment to repost my playful little response to Coleridge to lighten the mood.
In Binghamton did Steven Wheat
A swingin’ Bach’lor pad decree
Where Alf the 80’s hero, ran
Through channels measureless to man
On a zenith TV
So twice five feet of messy ground
With beer and raman were laying round:
And there were fridges bright with expired dills
Where blossomed many a nasty smelling leak
And here was laundry ancient as the hills
Covering old mags of pornography
But oh! That deep pedantic closet which slanted
Down the white wall athwart a plastic cover!
A ravaged place! As holy and demented
As e’er within a simpson’s toon was flaunted
By co-eds flailing for their pork-chop-lover!
And from the classroom, with painful boredom leaving
As if this university were teething
A mighty kegger momentarily was forced
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Ping-pong balls vaulted like holy grails
Or sinking ships beneath alcoholic gails
And ‘mid these dancing cups at once and ever
It flung up momentarily the sacred river
Five men meandering with a hazy motion
Through couch and chair the yellow river ran
Then reached the bathroom odorless to man
And sank in one flush to a lifeless ocean
And ‘mid this tumult Steve heard from the bar
Fraternity voices coming with more coors
The aroma of the drunken pleasure
Floated midway through the rave
Where was heard a techno treasure
With him spinning the party’s saved
It was a turntable of rare device
A sorority came with bags of ice!
A brunette with a tank top shirt
In the kitchen I once saw
It was a Staten Island maid
And on a tabletop she played
Dancing with other girls
Could I revive my kidney
From being drunk so long
That such a hangover ‘twould win me’
That my head felt like a gong
I would build my pad in air,
That smelly home! Those raves of vice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, What should I wear!
His bloodshot eyes, his matted hair!
And close your eyes while in his bed,
For he to many girls hath said,
That college is a Paradise.
I love debate about literature. I love arguing about interpretations. And I can't emphasise the importance of criticism in the perpetuation of literature enough. What has always bothered me is writers who are terrified of criticism. Sometimes I meet fledgling and nervous authors, dramatists and poets, and I read some people on the board, who say, "How dare critics criticise my work." I think this view stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what criticism is. I think, at best, it's a judicious and systematic appraisal or analysis of a work of art based upon a specific methodology or approach; a good critic will always seek to show that the cultural worth of a piece of art is not to be determined on some competitive scale of aesthetic balance of form and content but rather for its ability to identify and expose the socio-ideological conflicts and debates of its moment of production, even if its theme is ostensibly personal (for "the personal is the political").
And without the critics, who'd read Shakespeare and see his relevance today? Issues such as political sedition, tranvestisism and sexual transgression: we wouldn't be noting these things in his plays and recognising how radical the dude was! (Young boy actors, playing women disguised as men, provoking desires in other women characters, played by young boys ... it takes a critical methodology to think through the implications of this!). Without critical engagement in rediscovering the implications of the texts on the page and in performance from the turn of the seventeenth century to the PRESENT DAY, Shakespeare would be a museum piece. He'd be dead. Instead, he's still alive.
Criticism isn't about enforcing interpretative closure on a text: skilled criticism isn't, anyway. The crap you read in British music weeklies such Melody Maker and NME isn't music criticism, it's pretentious reviewing and wordy self-asserting posturing for the most part. These people writing this pap are neither musicologists of any sort, nor are they trained in critical or cultural theory to any considerable extent. No, criticism's about judging a text on its ability to keep growing and meaning from a number of viewpoints. The more multi-faceted and open to response a text is, the more alive it will be. I think we shouldn't talk of good or bad poems, but think whether we have created longliving, shortlived, or stillborn works in terms of their relevance to others.
"We're really
really
really
gonna purrneesh Lynndie England
furr what shay deed
we promise y'all
Dass right:
She gonn' suffer f' sho'.
We gonna cut down her cigarettes."
That was inspired by something on A Moving Train. I went there to see what they thought of the assassination of the Chechen President. It's not on the topic menu.
Keven33, I think your plan of studying Native American music would be a great idea. Hendrix consciously tried to get Cherokee rhythms into "I Don't Live Today", a song he said was about his Native American relatives, living in reservations northward from Seattle, up to Vancouver. He wanted to capture the feeling of their death-in-life.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Keven33, I think your plan of studying Native American music would be a great idea. Hendrix consciously tried to get Cherokee rhythms into "I Don't Live Today", a song he said was about his Native American relatives, living in reservations northward from Seattle, up to Vancouver. He wanted to capture the feeling of their death-in-life.
Fins I think you've officially snapped something on that one, who knows where that was supposed to go
Originally posted by EvilToasterElf Fins I think you've officially snapped something on that one, who knows where that was supposed to go
Keven33 sends me PMs and I can't reply because his PM box is always full. I saw him on the forum and thought I'd reply to him in the only way available.
All hail the fair-to-middlers
at Clacton, by the pier
Who fish for little tiddlers
Off-season, every year
They use a plastic hook to bait
and never catch their wish
But still they sit, and fish, and wait,
and sit, and, wait, and fish.
Crouched sideways, side by side
on the rain-drained graveshaft floor:
Three kings - between them fifteen crowns.
Upon each face, a broad brimmed golden mask;
a sun face, hammer beaten into stern eye glares.
Imperious snarls dictate the living and dead of war
that earned their honour.
I trudge the walled in pit
And bow down by a little corpse shrunken and soaked,
lift its mask and gasp
for there
perfectly preserved
after three thousand years
his face, eyes unlidded, open mouthed
stares out at me
nostrils flared
teeth like hewn bark
And the dropjaw mouth of dead rule
breathes this,
through the dustsmoke stench of a mouth
that once dictated empires of death:
"Here is your conquest,
Your riches, your palaces of freedom.
Here is Mycenae.
Here is the reign of kings."
Comments
Your chair doesn't need a back.
You eye me, straight and clear.
Your hair is brushed free from your brow.
Your smiling teeth are serendipitous white,
Your hands are turned down on your lap, relaxed.
You talk easily. Your tongue makes no hard palattals,
your mouth rolls no unsightly gutterals.
You keep your head quite still while your eyes dance.
Your voice isn't too quiet either, nor is it strident.
You speak precisely, but not with prissy chill.
You sit perfectly composed,
your blouse is quite white under window light.
You're composed. Not posed. Calm composes you.
You sit here, and a poem just writes itself around you.
You're always welcome! How are your paintings?
You remind me of a cliche that stops being a cliche when applied to the particular.
You're that phrase "The purer the light, the more effortless the glow.... "
You're something that astonishes cliche in its rarity.
You happy artist!
http://www.cannsdownpress.co.uk/jpg/32a.jpg
My tongue becomes a medium of experience.
invested in human lives:
not in what it says
but in how it feels.
It becomes an instrument of consciousness and all that stuff,
like a bluerinse Doris at a seance getting a message.
My tongue feels like the life of a forty eight year old video rental man called Dennis
who lives in a very small but pleasantly decorated shangri-la in a London suburb
with his wife Karen who works long hours and leaves messages on the answerphone saying
she loves him, and to pay the bleedin' gas bill!
My tongue feels like Dennis does distance learning degrees.
It reads Proust,
Ray churchy per tomps per due.
Sends poetry to the BBC,
keeps up email correspondence with post-colonial feminist professors
and has known de toke o de erb in Notting Hill in August.
The tongue feels like a life well fakkin' lived, actualalllly.
This drink is magic juice.
I'll drink more and see if I'm you.
FX Door of old cornershop opens. Tinkle of bell. Inside shop, wipe of feet, yelp of little dog.
ELDERLY WOMAN BEHIND THE COUNTER(Gossiping with friend): Anyway, they saw him on Foxley Heath standing on a bucket, he was, with a hole cut in the apron.. looked very suspicious, calling "Here, Ermintrude"...... his wife's very religious you know... ahh, hello our new American neighbour! Mister Rumsfeld! What can I do for you?
RUMMY: Well, actually, I'd like two four packs of Carlsberg Special Brew and some king size Rizlas please.
ELDERLY WOMAN (aside): Yes, see you Mrs Halfscrote, see you at bingo on Thursday night! (To Rummy) What was that? Special Brew? 9.8% top strength? And waccy baccy papers? What's wrong? You should be buying razors, love, that beard looks awful on ye!
RUMMY (bows head): I know, I know. It... just .... hasn't been the same... since Georgie fired me..... the scorn.... the shame.... the ignominy of being ridiculed as an incompetent, penny pinching, criminally irresponsible warmonger, and an inept one at that.... reduced to drinking warm lager in a Yorkshire village farm outhouse forever... oh, the obscurity....boo hoo...boo hooo...... the horror.... the horror.....
(etc)
Just a thought, Descartes in his own naive way tried to do this with philosophy, he compared it to emptying a bushel of apples and putting them back in again in the order of his choosing, but isn't that what poets are always trying to do. We try to convey these universal sentiments of mankind in a way that transcends the boundary of our social climate?
Just a thought
blessed by the amber thoughts of noon,
hibernating in december’s dark
before glowing at the mountain’s hearth,
while shivering in the doorway of dusk
the handle turns and the icey crust
has thawed beneath the canopies,
outlawed by some calamity
from which wild deer are left fleeing
from their quiet rippling pools.
Crunching steps through unmarked trails
over the bed of dying shells, hallmarked
browns of the soil’s shroud, left by the shadow
of September days, broken twigs from
sick old men, warding saplings in their den
waiting for the children to eat at the adult table
softly storing untold fables like trophies on the
mantelpiece
I feel honoured to have this on my thread! Thank you.
Very, very good thought, EvilToasterElf, and quite exciting for me to consider because I love to discuss Literature, or, if you like, literatures.
I think it would be somewhat anachronistic to say of the British Romantics of 1780-1830 that their transcendent individualism or communing with a higher 'Nature' was wilfully solipsistic, politically disengaged or constitutive of a flight from history. Perhaps many who decades later adhered to the transcendentalist ideas of the American philosopher and poet Emerson (1803-82) sought this flight, but they were in part reacting to the rise of bourgeois capitalist ideology that was filtering through the epistemological world-view of the Victorian socio-realist novel, for example. The British Romantics were reacting to an earlier period of crisis, characterised by a collapse in moral, social and religious 'order' in the late Englightenment period of international Revolutions and uprisings, and Godbusting science: their focus was on the privilege of the individual imagination as countering rationalist epistemes which they had come to suspect as different from truth as the residual philosophies of the past, but this itself was a political act and not an escape from politics. The Romantic poetic speaker often gets an attack of doubt about the dangers of flying off from history or embracing fully the Sublime in dream-analysis, the irrational, drugs, or occult preoccupations, but, to nod to you here, his or her advocacy of sympathy with Nature is not wholly "worldly" either. The romantic poetic speaker 'bled' metaphorically and his or her tone was characterised by much of the stuff of the old Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s, but the register, lexis and syntax of Romantic verse is direct and ultimately communicative rather than alienative. Thus ultimately it acknowledges a social role and a political end to communicate another sense of truth that can be shared simply by narrator and narratee, writer and reader. This is in sharp contrast to the kind of depersonalised, fragmentary, allusive and multi-voiced narrative of "High" Modernism in 1922, that reacted in its time to another sense of philosophical and social crisis of world view and belief (and even that poetry maintained, perhaps because of its political and philosophical conservativism, an astute historical sense in a period of postwar change).
Thanks again. I love these sorts of discussions.
oh, holy crow I love this song!
Move aside
and let the man go through
let the man go through
If I stole
Somebody else's wave
To fly up.
If I rose
Up with the avenue
Behind me.
Some kind of verb.
Some kind of moving thing.
Something unseen.
Some hand is motioning
to rise, to rise, to rise.
Too fat, fat you must cut lean.
You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine,
Chump, change, and it's on, Super bon bon
Super bon bon, Super bon bon.
And by
The phone
I live
In fear
Sheer Chance
Will draw
You in
To here.
Too fat, fat you must cut lean.
You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine,
Chump, change, and it's on, Super bon bon
Super bon bon, Super bon bon.
There are a lot of ism's in there but the one I missed was Eastern Mysticism which pervaded Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge at the very least, the quest for the "inner eye" and eye not of blue, or green or brown but colorless. The Romantic movement can be described as pioneering introspection almost as a direct corollary to this. It could be because nature most often tapped straight into those primal areas where one could find the inner eye open, and this quest is precisely what sets them apart from specific history, I challenge the supposition that this was a reaction to the neo-clacissism of the enlightenment but a push in an entirely different direction. But that's just me - bring on the pain
Blake's spirituality was directly tied in with the political moment. Have a look at his "Introduction" to "Songs of Innocence and Experience":
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again.'
So I piped: he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
That word "stained" is pretty jarring. How can writing stain the waters of apparent concord? Well, think of the growth of literacy and printed matter in the 1790s and its effect in the context of the controversial war between Britain and France; three writers were put on trial for treason in 1794. There was heavy censorship of writing at the time. Blake alludes in his reference to writing to a contemporary debate in Britain about the fact that Britain did not (and, in 2004, still does not) have a written constitution. The idea of an unwritten constitution was transparent, like the naturalised 'waters' of supposed social agreement, but, as Thomas Paine had said,
"A constitution is not a thing in name only but in fact. It has not an ideal but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in visible form, there is none."
Blake was different from Wordsworth and Coleridge in that he was against censorship of the press, and he was a pretty hands-on artist when it came to understanding the radical potentiality of writing and printing one's work. He was arguing for the socially reformative as much as spiritually transcendent power of writing. As an engraver he used acids to burn away copper surfaces and reveal the infinite artistry of his illustrations, and in his transcendent poetry he wished to use language to stain the waters of social perception "to reveal things as they truly are, infinite". He was an idealist and a transcendentalist, but he wasn't politically disengaged: he was working class, a haberdasher's son, was heavily involved in the radical London Corresponding Society, wore a red revolutionary bonnet and nearly got himself done up on a charge of sedition in Feltham in 1803.
i want to marry him.
if what he did and produced is any indication of the real man,his mind turns me on so intensely.
this guy who worked on his art,writing and printing the books,continuing to do it despite threats and lack of funds-he's my hero.
i like to think about life back then.people took time to do creative things carefully.
the art audience was as fickle as always,but some got it.
now life is so fast and demanding.it's bullshit.it doesn't fit with the organic and thoughtful development of art.
we feel guilty taking the time to sit or lay down and dream for ourselves,plan and visualize how to bring our talents to fruition.
going to nature makes you do that.it makes you see that natural things always take the same amount of time to happen.gestation periods,the phases of the moon or the seasons-you can't make those things go faster.
what am i saying?
blake.
i want that natural and rhythmic partner who knows i appreciate the flow.i know he'd appreciate mine.
I've just been reading over some of Coleridge's thoughts in his Biographia Literara, which can be referred to in the course of my debate with EvilToasterElf, concerning how Romanticism is politically and historically engaged because of and through its transcendalism.
Coleridge argues that imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates [ideology] in order to re-create". Essentially, it is socially "vital" and in engagement with the present. Art is mimetic, but rather than "fancifully" mirroring the "fixed and dead" elements of dominant ideological perceptions of the world, it is not so much a call to nature as a natural power itself, in its ability to revitalise perception through language of the world beyond, to "humble and humanize" it, to "purify and exalt" individual experience with social consequence.
I think, EvilToasterElf, in summing up my argument I will acknowledge that yes, a dominant strain in Romantic poetic thinking and writing idealizes poetry as a timeless bastion of human value, but this tendency works ALONGSIDE the idea of the didactic purpose of poetry to effect social change. I'll say that we're both right, to an extent, but I wouldn't overstate the 'timeless' aspect as applying to all Romantic writers; just Wordsworth and perhaps Shelley, mainly.
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
By the way, regarding Eastern Mysticism in Western poetry. There's another -ism that goes with that and it's very politicised: Orientalism. There's another -ism that goes with that too. Proto-imperialism. And there's a theoretical methodology I could use to bore everybody on the Board shitless, in going into the political and historical implications of this, and it's called post-colonialism. But you know, I'm relaxed and happy, and fancy reading some of Pasta's poetry and just relaxing for the evening. So, I'll say it was a grand pleasure talking lit. stuff but I'm knackered now and fancy some fun!
I start like a little worm, a germ,
a wriggling idea,
a little squiggle of life
in the rainy bog of the Word Farm.
Everybody comes to see me,
They like the shine of my skin
Gleaming in the sun
and they pat me, "Pretty little thread,
zippy little fella, though a bit funny-looking,"
and they pick me up
and take me to rich ground
cupped in the hands of praise.
But when they lay me down
They notice I am a little heavier
than when they had first held me.
I'm a bit corpulent, protracted,
extending with the odd wart,
the odd septic hair
and sceptic's muscle flinch,
and ridges of bulge and then more ridges,
inscribed with the wrinkles of indulgent feasting
on the fat of Word Land:
"Page 1, Page 2, Page 3".
I get bigger,
and b-i-g-g-e-r,
and B-I-G-G-E-R ...
Oh, and there are arms popping out now,
arms and legs with craters on the skin,
fists and satchel feet,
corn armour (corn amour!),
writing on the body the love of battle
with all the poor little wrigglers on the prairie.
But one day
from the great farm porch,
Great Farmer Versey is going to wonder
about the drought
and he's going to say,
"That little wriggler started off cute,
and he caught folks' attention
But he just got too goddam big
and he's drinking all the words up.
He's too big for the other threads
and I can't slim him down.
I guess I'll just have to shoot him."
So I'm just going to have to face it.
I should have known that small is beautiful.
I am the Thread Monster.
and given me so much in terms of real
energy to write and feel. Time gears
from singularity in the massing reel
of universe expansion: you provide
a space for stones like me to spin out wide
and make a rhythm for myself. You do
know that you are loved, the six of you?
Ah, what the hell, embarrassing sentimentalism is a propensity you can't repress in poetry forever. Sometimes you've just got to let it come out, for worse or worser!
Man, songs of innocence, way to pick an obscure detail when Blake wrote an entire poem called America, with glaring and obvious political and social implications, along with the Marriage of Heaven and Hell where Blake re-writes biblical texts in terms of poetry. I wasn't really expecting to win this argument because your absolutely right, the moment we exit the womb we are a product of our senses, our thoughts, and our environment, there is no way to elude that no matter how "natural" your subject matter is. I think the reason why so many people fall in love with Blake is because during the Romantic Era he printed almost nothing in "mainstream intellectual circles" his power is in his candor he wasn't like Byron caught up in trying to write directly to the future, as most of us fall into the trap of doing. But this has been a fine quibble we've had here fins, and I myself am enamored of the Romantics, in fact I think I'll take a moment to repost my playful little response to Coleridge to lighten the mood.
In Binghamton did Steven Wheat
A swingin’ Bach’lor pad decree
Where Alf the 80’s hero, ran
Through channels measureless to man
On a zenith TV
So twice five feet of messy ground
With beer and raman were laying round:
And there were fridges bright with expired dills
Where blossomed many a nasty smelling leak
And here was laundry ancient as the hills
Covering old mags of pornography
But oh! That deep pedantic closet which slanted
Down the white wall athwart a plastic cover!
A ravaged place! As holy and demented
As e’er within a simpson’s toon was flaunted
By co-eds flailing for their pork-chop-lover!
And from the classroom, with painful boredom leaving
As if this university were teething
A mighty kegger momentarily was forced
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Ping-pong balls vaulted like holy grails
Or sinking ships beneath alcoholic gails
And ‘mid these dancing cups at once and ever
It flung up momentarily the sacred river
Five men meandering with a hazy motion
Through couch and chair the yellow river ran
Then reached the bathroom odorless to man
And sank in one flush to a lifeless ocean
And ‘mid this tumult Steve heard from the bar
Fraternity voices coming with more coors
The aroma of the drunken pleasure
Floated midway through the rave
Where was heard a techno treasure
With him spinning the party’s saved
It was a turntable of rare device
A sorority came with bags of ice!
A brunette with a tank top shirt
In the kitchen I once saw
It was a Staten Island maid
And on a tabletop she played
Dancing with other girls
Could I revive my kidney
From being drunk so long
That such a hangover ‘twould win me’
That my head felt like a gong
I would build my pad in air,
That smelly home! Those raves of vice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, What should I wear!
His bloodshot eyes, his matted hair!
And close your eyes while in his bed,
For he to many girls hath said,
That college is a Paradise.
And without the critics, who'd read Shakespeare and see his relevance today? Issues such as political sedition, tranvestisism and sexual transgression: we wouldn't be noting these things in his plays and recognising how radical the dude was! (Young boy actors, playing women disguised as men, provoking desires in other women characters, played by young boys ... it takes a critical methodology to think through the implications of this!). Without critical engagement in rediscovering the implications of the texts on the page and in performance from the turn of the seventeenth century to the PRESENT DAY, Shakespeare would be a museum piece. He'd be dead. Instead, he's still alive.
Criticism isn't about enforcing interpretative closure on a text: skilled criticism isn't, anyway. The crap you read in British music weeklies such Melody Maker and NME isn't music criticism, it's pretentious reviewing and wordy self-asserting posturing for the most part. These people writing this pap are neither musicologists of any sort, nor are they trained in critical or cultural theory to any considerable extent. No, criticism's about judging a text on its ability to keep growing and meaning from a number of viewpoints. The more multi-faceted and open to response a text is, the more alive it will be. I think we shouldn't talk of good or bad poems, but think whether we have created longliving, shortlived, or stillborn works in terms of their relevance to others.
really
really
gonna purrneesh Lynndie England
furr what shay deed
we promise y'all
Dass right:
She gonn' suffer f' sho'.
We gonna cut down her cigarettes."
Fins I think you've officially snapped something on that one, who knows where that was supposed to go
Keven33 sends me PMs and I can't reply because his PM box is always full. I saw him on the forum and thought I'd reply to him in the only way available.
at Clacton, by the pier
Who fish for little tiddlers
Off-season, every year
They use a plastic hook to bait
and never catch their wish
But still they sit, and fish, and wait,
and sit, and, wait, and fish.
on the rain-drained graveshaft floor:
Three kings - between them fifteen crowns.
Upon each face, a broad brimmed golden mask;
a sun face, hammer beaten into stern eye glares.
Imperious snarls dictate the living and dead of war
that earned their honour.
I trudge the walled in pit
And bow down by a little corpse shrunken and soaked,
lift its mask and gasp
for there
perfectly preserved
after three thousand years
his face, eyes unlidded, open mouthed
stares out at me
nostrils flared
teeth like hewn bark
And the dropjaw mouth of dead rule
breathes this,
through the dustsmoke stench of a mouth
that once dictated empires of death:
"Here is your conquest,
Your riches, your palaces of freedom.
Here is Mycenae.
Here is the reign of kings."