the pros and cons of being a poet...
Yellow
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i'm walking out of this restaurant, and the person i'm with coughs...
i say "sweetie, you sound like cardboard"
and five people standing in the foyer laugh and smile and one says "omg, that is like, so good!"
and i'm talking with my boss who's writing a tribute to her son for his yearbook, she says, "you're the poet, tell me what i need to change"
ummmm.....
can i just re-write the whole thing?
not that it's not good... it's just that you're speaking singularly of a collective force and well um.... (see boss fidget in chair...)
hoo boy
i say "sweetie, you sound like cardboard"
and five people standing in the foyer laugh and smile and one says "omg, that is like, so good!"
and i'm talking with my boss who's writing a tribute to her son for his yearbook, she says, "you're the poet, tell me what i need to change"
ummmm.....
can i just re-write the whole thing?
not that it's not good... it's just that you're speaking singularly of a collective force and well um.... (see boss fidget in chair...)
hoo boy
It's all yellow.
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or maybe it's no one is a poet truly, I don't know, just rambling.
carry on all you poets, I am sure the heck not one.
Jason
i myself am a lyricist as i write lyrics...
poetry if more general because anyone can say anything ispoetry...even if its not true...
but anway...
im a little confused on the last one..
wtf...i had something that made sense to say....oh well..
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the shadow.
and well, i'm as conscious as i should be about keeping myself in servitude, for whatever reason that may be... i enjoy the paycheck immensely
and i call myself a poet...
when a stranger asks me, what do you do?
i say well... i make a living doing this, but i'm also a singer/songwriter and a poet... that's what i do for fun... i learned to play guitar so I could sing my words
my words came first
so... anyway, about "being" a poet? i didn't always see myself that way, but for whatever reason, perhaps because i aspire to publish maybe someday??? i call myself a poet and that's all i think i need to pass....
put me in a room with other poets, and they generally dig my stuff, i guess... and that helps a whole lot, too
Now I ain't no poet
Get it?
And my college poetry prof did too. And a few other people.
But truely, I'm not a poet because I'm limited. I'm limited by happiness, in as if I have one, I don't have the other, generally. I'm a hobbiest or an opportunist, but either with above average talent.
And I'm happy to share with those I hold in high poetic esteem. Hence, my lingering here.
SPANK, SPANK
I get skittles in my veins whenever I hear the "P" word used near me. I think it's a glorious compliment. Poets have stethascopes on brainbeats, they have heart autopsies in their pockets. They know life and death and every color in between. They kick ass.
that's where i put my poet
Does the rain get in? Are you going to fix it?
no
nothing gets in or out
Ah, a self contained, self preserving unit.
SPANK! Nice to see ya around!
push the little daisies and make em come up
Indeed. Ween.
Whatever happened to them? I think Beavis and Butthead didn't do much for their careers....
But what makes language, vision, experience, poetic? Discuss!
That's poetry to the layperson (spoken as I dismount my high horse).
While those may aid in expressing poetic vision through words, they are not poetry. Poetry, as I alluded, is vision. It's a way of seeing the world that's different than how anyone else has ever seen it, and then being able to describe it to somebody else. Poetry is a blessing, not a large vocabulary. That's what dictionary.com is for. Poetry is a calling, not a sense of rhythm. That's what Casio keyboards are for.l
Poetry is not red roses nor blue violets. Poetry is not "where for art thou". Not anymore. Poetry dies with cliché and is reborn in its avoidance.
Poetry is birthing old ideas before new eyes.
:: end self-important poetry rant ::
Poetry can use iambic pentameter and the images passed down via a cultural history of myth and still create novel visionary effects...but poetry like all cultural forms is inevitably conditioned by social being, however subversive it might be. Some newer forms are deliberately obscurantist, and aren't really deliberated as subversive but as elitist expressions of "high" art for a select readership. It's a sort of cultural fascism, at worst.
I think that the concept of the poet as some transcendent magus speaking in tongues and pushing the articulation of subconscious experience to the limits - at both extremes - of communication is in some respects a bourgeois prerogative. After modernism died off in Britain in the '30s it was replaced by the socio-realist Auden's verse, which struggled after the principles of clarity and the realisation of the power of "cliche" as a means of conveying fundamental shared assumptions about society and the individual consciousness, which would always be pre-modern and subversive of dominant ideological refashionings of the world. This language could convey subjectivity and social issues without the experimentation of the Modernists: it could use the oldest tropes to find essential experiences. Kavanagh and Beckett sought to write "without style"; Joyce said after "Finnegans Wake" that he wanted to write something "very simple and very short."
To say that any literary form is defunct, especially if its popularity endures amongst literate, educated academics and writers as well as readers, is to require a thorough and immediate reading of TS Eliot's essay "On Tradition and the Individual Talent."
gosh how i liked that song...
My intelectual British friend, please don't misunderstand me!
I did not mean to imply that well-established form or style was utterly devoid of poetic quality. Nor did I mean to deprive any classic works, once-innovative bodies, etc of their poetic merits.
I was simply saying that Joe Jock can sit down, put some words with a nifty rhythm down and slap as many old English and multisyllabic terms as he can into something and it still not be poetry.
There is beautiful poetry in the world in iambic pentameter. There is beautiful poetry that endulges in the evil of cliché. There is beautiful poetry that breaks all the rules and that follows all the rules.
The problem lies in that we are oftentimes tempted to paint by numbers... use the formulas that have worked for others and form our thoughts and ideas to fit those molds. That is what I say poetry is not.
See the difference?
By the way, yes, I know what you mean, CMR. What we call "Pam Ayres" poetry over here. But even doggerel has its day!
black·smith ( P ) Pronunciation Key (blksmth)
n.
One that forges and shapes iron with an anvil and hammer.
One that makes, repairs, and fits horseshoes.
....just replace iron with words...
the word: wordsmith, just doesn't capture it for me
even the horseshoes..
if the horseshoe fits...
wear it..
oh, wow... that was a cliche wasn't it?
that poetry is worthless
I know I hate it.
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SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK
SPANK Haiku
Doesn't capture it for me either, but, believe it or not, there are many British Marxist literary critics who would be delighted with the term because it doesn't fetishise or mystify literature as a magical process but considers it as a means of material production......
These critics don't tend to be poets.
How many spanks on the spankometer now??!!!!
Ah, you have created a masterpiece!
LOL!
SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK - hidden messages for you! SPANK Haiku! Too funny!
That HAS to be your new sig!!!!!!
1,124,586,945,124,157,141 and counting.
My Delta Pi Name is SPANK abacus!