Poem I wrote ten minutes ago

FinsburyParkCarrots

This fella on a park bench on Jesus Green, Cambridge, once asked me that as I was passing. He looked up with his big red eyes and said,

"Whaddooo yooo know?"

I answered, "Montaigne used to wear a medallion around his neck, inscribed 'What do I know?' That's a good point."

The fella said, "What the fakk did HE know??"

I said, "Nothing."

He smiled, and said, "You KNOW, don'tcha, mate!!"

Yellow

how funny
to have surpressed my own cheesy ether elvis impersonation today...






you people

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by Yellow
how funny
to have surpressed my own cheesy ether elvis impersonation today...






you people

Cheesy Ether Elvis......



Cheesberry Carp Ferrets again, Officer Dibble!

You okay, Yellow?

Yellow

cheesebury carp ferrets!!!

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET!!!!


damnit!


(damnit... what a dorky word... dammm NNNNit! silent consonants be darned)

but anyway, yeah...


i'm alright... you're sweet to ask enjoy those dusty books tomorrow... those inculnabusses (ha!) or whatever y'all call 'em...



peace, yo...

cassia

verteth parrots, carp ferrets (toxic happy combos of birds beans fish and weasels)

re: no language is stable....
have you ever
heard
of Mr. Ed?


(haha, girl attempts lame argument of The Talking Horse...
stable...giggles, established merlotitiy highly signified and partially realized by selfobservant third party, although no meaning exactly shared and maybe
a poet
sees more Diagonally, or, archedly curvingly swirlingly than simply vertically...and yeatsian gyre-y spiralishy which is spinning
and can see to go up and down yes and from big to small to everwidening circles of falconry
and it's pretty lapis blue of byzantium, too
or circular as a circus picadilly, hmmm, peculiar

"In fact Bourquin's tendency to describe the Labrador dialect by quoting at length from Kleinschmidt's description of Greenlandic is unavoidably a major methodological impediment for present-day researchers."

above re: the variance between words for snow in Eskimo (sub tribal dialectical differences)....

setaside2

Hey Fins

I like the work up there, though I may sorely wax eloquent about it.

If i may tie this one in to that other thread which was so entertaining and that I never got to get into... that one about pros and cons... I'll be on that shortly.

this is a poem wherein the reader, having no education in archaeological or greek history, would never have a clue as to what you are writing about.

This poem, while well intentioned, seeks, in a way, to distance itself from those not in the know.

I believe this is also something that CranMal discussed briefly in that other thread.

Is poetry poetry if it does not communicate it's meaning to the simpler mind? Does poetry have to have 10 syllables per line and refer to no less than 4 major texts and one archaeological dig? Why must it remain structured to prove its art?

I will comment on something else further in the other thread but, as you know, my poetry is the antithesis of structured word in many, many cases. I am the first and worst offender of allegorical metaphor and I live for the ties I draw between the ethereal and the base realities. They mean great things to me.

So I admit to defensiveness when someone leans out with brick wall structure so dense that only those who have had the proper training can ascertain its purpose (for without knowledge of the reference there is no point of destination).

I am actually fortunate in this case as, for a very short while, I was an archaeology major (tho to be honest it was paleolithic that was my forte at the time) so I knew of whom you spoke. I was the lucky one. But what about everyone else? Poetry was used as a mass form of communication, in rebellion of the written word used by the ruling class to separate and to control. Why should anyone care to read something so over the top? Hell, why would they read my drivel when I lay the paint so thick myself? Why on earth would they bother to attempt a connection?

Are we really that much better? Because we've read Yeats and Burroughs? Can quote Shakespeare and Byron, hell MARLOWE? Baloney, balogna. It means nothing.

While the poem above is incredible in its technical merits it seems devoid, to me, of much emotion beyond a surgical strike, a scientists feel, a professor's analysis. It is a tool with which to torture future English Lit classes.

I do not mean to disrespect your style though it may seem so. And it is perhaps an unfair analysis because I don't know you very well, but I have always felt that biopsy of poetry while writing is preemptive at best. To move with structure in mind is to limit, in my mind. Flowing in and out of structured thought while maintaining the bread crumbs back to the original flow and the original dream, much more entertaining and, more importantly, much more human.

I believe you are an excellent poet in the technical sense, in fact highly accomplished in that regard, and a heavyweight intellectual. I suppose that all I'm asking is to shut off the right brained poetry and let the left regain control. I think your words may rediscover a passion that has long since left you during your long nights of post descriptive analysis, research papers, and analogous diatribe.

Again I mean no disrespect. Please pardon my rudeness, though it may be difficult to do so now.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Not rude at all. I appreciate your comments very much.
I don't often write poems of this sort of density and allusion to particular disciplines such as archaeology. And I agree with your statement that poetry should be communicable. Yes, it was Blake who said we should strip away a poem to get at its essence. However, we can say a lot of things with poetry and certain things we say are sometimes going to reach different audiences rather than a universal ideal readership. I admit I was writing that poetry for a particular audience of people whose interest is specifically in Homeric studies, but because I'd just produced it, I put it up on the board just to see if it did communicate anything to a broader readership of people who read, write and discuss poetry to an often very high standard.

However, a lot of poetry and prose is difficult to digest without one's recourse to a companion-volume or an edition with scholarly notes...many of the Modernists can be deliberately obscure at times...and their work can read as dry formalism from the point of view of someone excluded from the work's intended readership.

I often feel excluded from the contemporary British poet Geoffrey Hill's work, before I've "studied" it. However, I agree with what Yeats said about "the fascination of what's difficult"...some poems are like ancient tablets....you try to decipher them thinking they'll be the Rosetta Stone, but sometimes they're as dull as Linear B tablets giving accounts of someone's stock (of reference sources, in this case).

Thanks for taking the time to give a judicious and eloquent response. I look forward to reading more of your work on the board.

Richard:)

FinsburyParkCarrots

Before we put the poem to bed, a few words.

The poem is about how the act of reading a poem is like an act of archaeology. We dig to get to its core. If we dig too quickly, to get to some immediately communicable essence of truth or a single, universally admirable idea, we treat the poem as a product and are disappointed when it does not speak to us about ourselves. We have laboured to tear away a build up of stratified structures to find the gold, but we find nothing, only archaic foundations.
I was trying to convey that the mystery, the passion, the communicable experience of poetry is often most satisfactorily revealed as the process of reading in itself: in the act of digging diligently...The gems are diffuse, not signposted, through the site of the text; they are small, sometimes they are unquantifiable. Sometimes you don't know they're of any worth, until you carry them around with you for a while, then they get heavier, heavier, and a glow starts to shine from the lips of your pockets.
There are little clues that if you strip away the structures of the poem in order to get tothe content, you'll lose what you're looking for....I repeat "o" and "no" sounds a lot. "AgamemNON" contains reflections of the words "no", "none", "known", and "none known": the "a" sounds are, like in Shakespeare's sonnets, supposed to suggest negation, like the a- negative prefix on many words.

Okay...now I'm off to do some work!

cassia

a perfect niche for every poem... I have had people reject my formal pieces as too elitist, also, and one New York editor subscribed to the belief that a poem should be able to be read and enjoyed by a taxicab driver.

I believe wholeheartedly that there is a need for that aesthetic, and my own mother dislikes my poetry because it "gives her a headache" and she says 'i'm sure it's very good, but i can't understand it.' I have experimented with form and style, and can dumb-down my vocabulary and references.

But even in simple of simple of poems, the word-associations are so hyperpersonal that each reader internalizes a meaning (and we all have our personal-experience allusions, if not academic).

I thoroughly love a richly dense multi-disciplined, highly esoteric poem. I am in a small audience, i know. If there's beauty, cadence, the more allusion the merrier. Makes a poem a palimpsest, and what i love about favoUrite poems, is the pleasure of going back to them again and again.

One of my favorite poets, I fell in love with in college with a book i found in the university library one day. Language completely over my head...talk about Latinate polysyllabic images, whoa

but god, you know, i loved it, loved it. And now, i've got about every looked up

I think there's a need for a remnant to hold to the archaic, the lyrical, yes--even the academic. But a time and a place, perhaps yes, and

there were those who felt the 'true' poet also had the responsiblity/calling of a prophet--
to tell forth truth to the 'masses'....
and in this sense, i can appreciate setaside's argument.

I prefer beauty over politic. For me, it is not just pretty mental window dressing, but a real transcendental moment of made magic (and what i like to write).

Let's most of all write what We like to read--if we find an audience that's great. Most here at this board dislike my stuff.....
and i know i don't fit here...but i was invited over by my pearljammergirl...i could try to shift my sensibilities...but that would be dishonest, somehow.

But it has been wonderful interacting with several voices. And to whomever reads: thank you. and Adieu~~

Being Enlightened

Originally posted by cassia
Most here at this board dislike my stuff.....
and i know i don't fit here

Oh my girl! You so fit! You're just delightful and passionate and full of love and sunshine and smarts and poetry!

You have been kind and gentle and sweet and I LOVE your stuff!

Please re-think bidding adieu!

But should you decide to stay away, take care and be safe and be happy and be full of all that love that you have! You shall be missed very much by myself as well as many others!

Love, {{{{{{BE}}}}}}}}}

Yellow

pish posh and hog wash... i think you fit... i like reading your writing... makes me wish i was you sometimes...



i like what you said


write what you like to read and maybe you'll find an audience...


you said a lot of good stuff

Yellow

oh... and i think i like poetry best
that makes me say


dang... that mofo crazy... just like me

setaside2

A few things here.

First.

I, for one, don't want you to leave cassia. I think you add quite a bit here, whether or not I agree or disagree with any given style is fluff. It doesn't matter. As you say, we write what we like to read, though I tend to write differently than what I enjoy reading, I do incorporate certain... color.... that I couldn't help but pick up from my favorite writers and even my favorite people, some of whom couldn't write a paper describing their own house. It's context sensitive. Also, it is effectual. So while I write this I rarely actually expect people to read things just because I wrote it. People will read and read into, what they wish. I have no control and wish no control over that fact. Don't sell either yourself or your poetry short just because a few people didn't like it. I'd have quit years ago, LOL, perhaps I should quit NOW if I had done so. Even if you're merely quitting this board, I consider it a loss to us and to you. If none of us could stand up to criticism, we couldn't stand behind our own work right?

Second.

Prophecy is not political. Oh, in this day and age it may be to some degree but only as it is twisted and used by the media. The Christ Himself could arrive and he'd be turned out as a charlatan. No Joke, that. Some allusion can be a grand thing in any given writing, especially novella type but too much in poetry, or any given text, is like going to a party and having 5 people in the corner talking about old times. You walk up and attempt to join this apparently scintillating conversation and then realize that you could never understand what they are discussing due to the fact that you never shared any of these experiences. So you ask to explain and are met with cold stares and the universal, "Huh. Guess you weren't there." and they turn their backs to you and continue onward.

I prefer to think that I wax far more in the beautacious than in the political. In fact I believe I've only written two pieces of true socio-political flow in my life and I think that only one of those has made it here.

Too much allusion is for the cliquish. And while that is harsh, I firmly believe it. It can be used, and in many cases HAS been used overwhelmingly to produce literature of the highest order but literature designed solely for the peers of the writer, and usually not even most of them. You are correct that in a great many poems, the word associations are indeed hyperpersonal, but allusions cannot by nature be anything more than flights of fancy. I have always respected both yours and FinsburyPark's ability to quote other writers in the manner that you do, but sometimes I feel it gets in the way of how you really feel. I could never quote another author and say, man, that is 110% ME. They can come close but dammit we're all individuals, let's say our own thing. I have no idea why that always fries me so but it does. My AP English teacher always did that and she always graded down for those of us who thought for ourselves. That is the type of academic literati that I have zero place for. She hated my poetry; it had "too much style (too MUCH style?) and not enough structure. Where is your meter (well some of them are in 6/8 or 4/4 but who cares, that's how they ended up, it was not intentional), where are your matched lines, where is your symmetry (there is a top, bottom and a middle, that's all the symmetry anything on this earth really has), where is the rhyme AND the reason... Pardon me? Did you even read?

Third.

A poem does not necessarily have to be understood by a taxi driver, but neither should one feel that they have to "dumb down" their vocabulary (what an awfully condescending phrase, you have to lower yourself to someone else's poetic level? honestly.) just to get their point across. That's not fair to anyone, that philosophy. Just write what you feel. If you feel you must use hypertechnical vocabulary and sussed up and conjointly created words to express what you feel then by all means, that is YOU then and you are being honest and heartfelt and the keyboard will agree with you.

But can you see how such poems filled with allusion can seem false intentioned? It almost suggests: look ma, I can write! Look how beautifully and cryptically I can write. It's gorgeous ma, but only the others will get it, it's just for us.

why are the masses so wrong to talk to? aren't they the hands that tell the time of this modern world? If we can affect them, then we shall most certainly affect the academics of this land. And that is the sort of thing we all look to do. Words that stay. Words that embed. Words that, in fact, draw themselves upon others' minds. Do I, because I choose to use third and fourth tier vocabular instead of sixth and seventh, do I really communicate my meanings any less than someone at the top of the ecumenical and etymological food chain? Are my poems or anyone else's really any less because of that? If so, then I call that elitism. I have read some of the finest work that I have ever had the privilege to read on this particular board and while none of it is Shakespeare (and I use that in the sense of style NOT in the sense of quality, in fact I have enjoyed many pieces in here far more than I have ever enjoyed Shakespeare that most famous of script doctors...), I don't really care. I read and they were beauty. It is of course, again, context sensitive. All perspective. And we all know how I babble on and on about perspective, specifically mine because I am quite sure that I am a biblioegotist. Or at least that "word-smith" with self esteem issues. LOL.

bah.

the fact of the matter is this. you DO fit here. You are a poetess of the highest order. You have reasons for your work and I enjoy reading a lot of it. Sure some of it doesn't agree with me but have you ever read a writer where just every piece is INCREDIBLE and MINDBLOWING and PARADIGMSHIFTING? no. nobody can do it. Genius is the art of maintaining consistent originality. Not CONSTANT but consistent.

I believe there are a few geniuses (horrid grammar but oh well, deal with it) on this forum.

I didn't mean to upset, or to offend, and I still don't mean to. I do have very strong opinions about prose and verse though and I suppose that just rings through here. If anybody ever asked me what I thought poetry was, well, it's described on one of Radar's threads around here somewhere. And I stand by it as my reason for writing.

Please don't leave cassia. 'Twould be a waste. And I'm sorry if i said anything to make you go. It wasn't my intent.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Cassia, you go and I'll get dyaogirl on your case!

I love you. I mean that. And phishgod.

I don't mind setaside's point at all, though, about my work. I have the same attitude as he does to poetry, to the literary theory and criticism I write. I know all the jargon, can apply it precisely, but without falsifying my points I try to be more lucid as I get more experienced, because I fear that in being over technical I'm excluding my readership.



But when it comes to poetry on this board, you're my favourite...there IS no-one to compare. Stay on...stay on!


You should never leave a forum because people say they don't understand you. They do. They just don't realise it yet.

setaside2

And this one's worse than the last...

the history of this board dictates that people leave the second they get recognised and the second they are indeed understood...

is this one of those?

I will miss her.

I often strive for understanding I sincerely hope she finds happiness wherever she goes... and may she find it within herself as well.

There seems to be a sadness within her work.

love,

seta

FinsburyParkCarrots

Me, you'll never lose me. Bring it on, mate!
:D:D
And if I'm not understood, then I can only say qijhvdnmloshhjkjenijoijobefws to that.

Cassia, we luvv ya. Come back. It's too quiet already!

FinsburyParkCarrots

I think everyone needs to lighten up a bit! What would have happened if I'd put one of my complicated poems up on the board!

When it's summer we'll be out in the park... we'll stroll back to our pcs to type our poems and post them to the board, and we'll leisurely stroll away again, sit out in the garden, watch the stars....

Sitting in with the dark and the ice outside is getting to people. Let's relax. Let's think about luuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrve. Ah said lurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrve.

I'm in lurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrve.
We's all in luuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrve.

Anybody else finally gotten over all those fokked up past relationships? Anyone else caught up in a new, real, all-time-best spiral into oneness with someone and marvelling at the way the old thoughts that sentiment was syrup go out the window at these beautiful times? Anybody got anything happy to proclaim?

I think there's reflection in cassia's work, but she laughs with the kind of joyous heart that beats only in the free-est of spirits, the poet. Her words are summer to me, to phishgod, to BE, to Yellow.....and to dyaogirl.:)

FinsburyParkCarrots

please tell cass
she's loved on this board.