battlefield life
velvet I site
Posts: 192
jim morrison wrote:A man rakes leaves into
a heap in his pard, a plie,
& leans on his rake &
burns them utterly.
The fragrance fills the forest
children pause & heed the
smell, which will become
nostalgia in several years
i wrote this one last tuesday, it might need some racket-wrenching but i think i kind of like it.. whatever it is.
Battlefield Life
A myth remains about this land
Of culture deep
And growing man
For ‘morrow’s day and ‘morrow’s night
That still tomorrow Nature might
Enjoy the pomp
Our nation loves
This land of fire and
Ring of delight
Conjoined together in a ruse of light
We mind the factories and the shops
To bake the bread and farm the crops
As time rolls on
The human map
Ascends to sunlight draped in black
all suggestions remain extremely welcomed, so please, feel free to rain on my parade (which in respect to mr morrison i have tried to keep not-soft, because let's face it, we need to actually accomplish something or 2010: watch it go to fire!, and i doubt anybody really wants that..).
adieu.
change begins with discontent.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
I have no suggestions.
Its brilliant...
Reminds me of the old Master Poets actually
you're not supposed to say things like that.
seriously i'm not trying to be rude, that was one of the kindest things anyone has ever said about something i have "created". kind of reminds me of this time i went to a movie.. it's so hard eating popcorn when your date doesn't want any, and every bite tastes so good but you have to slowly crunch and chew and let the butter dissolve in your mouth so as not to chatter in her precious little ear that is so close to you you just want to reach over and whisper in it and nibble on it and go to town on her silky-smooth neck until you spin her head around enough to meet and taste her mouth.. and sometimes run-on sentences are kind of like poetry to me, but i'm more of a prose guy than a true poet.. my poems are best in photograph form, or so i tell myself.. because before the movie she told me my photogrpahs were amazing, and i let her.
so i suppose i'll allow your comments eden, but only if you truly accept my gratitude! i'm a master by no means, a mere rookie in this room of poetic form, but i'm getting more comfortable sitting on the floor, and i rather enjoy the view! thanks again for your kindness, it truly sparked some needed confidence on this day.. err 4.30am [i just woke up--i even sleep like a weirdo!]
did i just quote myself what is with that?
also i added the morrison not to be cool like him but because i want to start a really big fire soon, if anyone wants to help.. lemme know!
having said that, this poem made me feel warmer inside each time i've read it.. thanks for writing it and sharing it with me
see Ed's church?--he's breathing fire.....
As for this piece, it's not too bad but it doesn't grab me. I think the capitalisation in the line beginnings could go. Also, get rid of those 'morrows. They're over inflated archaisms that scream of amateurish self-consciousness.
Just my honest opinion.
How can you say theres no poetic Masters on the internet?
And I didnt say she WAS a Master, I said it reminded me or was "reminiscent" of the old style poetry.
I bet the most talented poet in the world as we speak is sitting in some dingy house in a far off land and no- one will ever see his work.
Poetry/ art is SO subjective that who can really say?
Ive read poems on the internet Fin, that were far more accomplished in my opinion than some of the modern published poets whose books I own.
Ive been writing myself and studying the Masters since I was 15 , an her poem - albeight rough around the edges was very good at its base.
And I think "self consciousness" is at the root of ANY good poet.
Also, just my humble opinion
Er, well if there's another Yeats out there I'll keep surfing the web.
And at the heart of every bad poem. Not that this poem is bad. It just needs tweaking.
Haha...Touche' my friend
yes i agree with most of this judgement.. although i like to think i am quite professional at being self-conscious. the capitalization was actually accidental from typing in microsoft word and pasting here, and over-inflated archaic-ness is a fancy of mine, albeit unbecoming of "mature" poetry.. see "mature conventions" are the aim of my work, as i wish to burn them all to hell, to speak in your language of modernity or postmodernity or whatever it is supposed? to be called these 'days'.
thanks for your input!
what a douche.. i'm glad you feel warm inside, but that's hardly the point..
i hope your photography is much better than your art-criticism.
eden, hey thanks for the defense! 'tis lovely to see some debate arising here o'er me archaic speech! and don't fret, i'm not scared of the ole english rabbit here. btw, i'm not a she.
and if i were yeats, i would probably pack-up, move down south and hide my head in the sand, just another sad old man, dying of cancer aaahhhh aahhhhh..
sorry, i'm insane and yesterday was the end of my prescriptions.
have a nice day!
i feel like saying hello and goodbye
i wonder why there could be such a place
maybe its for the people who are misrepresented by youth
either way it has to be done again
you think i need to redo the poem?
yeah, who would want to win a nobel prize for poetry?
at least you know you're crazy, saves me the time of pointing it out.
see Ed's church?--he's breathing fire.....
As for there not being true master poets on the internet i'd most likely have to concur, but looking at it from an autotelic standpoint the internet is still an invaluable resource.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam
not that i disagree entirely, but what exactly is the language of "the time"? should i rethink my poetic outpourings in the vein of Larry the Cable Guy?
archaic words are only such because no one presently has found a way to utilize them with strength, and i'm not suggesting that i have, but i am also not afraid to try.. and try i will continue to do.
also, post-modernism is a bogus term that describe a genre of aesthetic thought. modernism can not be defeated, for everything 'present' is inherently 'modern' all the time.. that is: Nature is new every day, thus every day is manifest as modernity. Post-modern thought is merely recognizing this fact and seizing upon it to create art that tweaks the modern-precedents..
and back to archaic words and old masters.. old masters remain masters because no one new has topped their acheivements with language, which, btw, are only masterful because they themselves found, "in their time", new ways to deploy old language tricks, such as syllable reduction. such words only became the language of such "archaic times" because poets and artists of those times acheived such new-found feats of expression with old-forms of language. although language evolves, it never really changes that much.--hehe i just wrote that!
i don't mean to argue with such intelligent and clearly constructive [positive-minded] criticisms, really i appreciate every comment anyone makes about my pieces (except that mother-bleeping Dreams in Red, hate that guy)..
but welcome to my "Battlefield Life".
Nice debate topic. Modernism (at least in Europe) was a largely bourgeois reaction in the arts and the newer social sciences, from about 1880 to 1930, to the collapse of religious certainty, the growth of a scientific uncertainty principle, and the effects of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud on constructions of individual and social consciousness, identity and agency. It redefined concepts of "The New Woman", the decadant and the homosexual (a term first used in a psychiatric dictionary as late as 1900). It registered the effects of Western anxiety about the state of the British Empire, the metropolitanisation and increasing complexity of 'the modern mind' in an era of burgeoning mass communication, and most powerfully it responded to the cataclysmic effects of the First World War on economy and class. The experimental form of modernism - incorporating alienation, fragmentation and depersonalisation of the individual subject through exploration in language of the Freudian unconscious - was a massive reaction to a perceived chaos and spiritual malaise in a wartorn, metropolitanised Western society.
The form was avant garde until about 1933, when socio realism came back into prominence largely due to the social urgency of the rise of Hitler in Europe. What had defined modernist politics was often a kind of cultural fascism and exclusivity, an elitism that stretched literary form and content to its limits as much to preserve high art for a select few (such as the Bloomsbury group) as to find new ways of expressing massive change. The more socialist, realist and politically committed poetry of the intellectual left of the thirties replaced the preoccupations of modernism. New poets such as Auden, Spender and Cauldwell thought at the time that poetry should be accessible for political value, should alert people out of their complacency and serve a purpose for social good. This trend in the arts towards social prescription is not what one might mean by post-modernism, though.
Postmodernism is perhaps best termed ultra-modernism. Postmodernism is not a reaction to the concept of modernity itself. It's more of a reappraisal of much of the form if not the class ideology of modernism in the contemporary contexts of both theory and artistic/literary/musical/architectural/cinematic practice. It rather takes many of the formal and thematic concepts of modernism and situates them in the mainstream of popular culture, taking them away from the elite. For example, the film "Pulp Fiction" uses devices of flashback, flashforward and intertextual allusion. Those techniques are familiar to us all now: but in the modernist era they were used in books that didn't sell outside of a specific class.
This isn't a definition of terms but a description. Hope this helps.
Cheers.
yeah thanks for engaging. i think your paragraph about post-modernism is essentially the point i was trying to make. sure it may not be a direct "reaction to" modernist theories, but it is an off-shoot of the modernist 'avant-garde' projects, and yes, Pulp Fiction is a great example.
as for the modernist history you know details far and above my historical knowledge, kudos, there's just so much to read!
it's interesting to me though how you desribe the effects of this transition [from modernism into realism] on poetry, perhaps because it seems to have largely effected many of the fine arts in general. my thinking has been that the only way to counter the political fascism that results from the "reality" that there is a cultural elitist strcuture (in order to improve the mass of civilization this would be desired) is not to engage the arts in politics, but to engage politics into the arts...
the question also arises: what is a postmodern poem? i mean, what is its structure?
the very notion of something being 'postmodern', say as pulp fiction with its progressive mode or presentation, is very difficult to conceptualize in poetry, because unless we're writing sonnets and stuff there is already a sort of freeness to poetic expression.. or maybe you see the history differently?
EV - St. Louis 7/1/11 ** Tulsa 11/19/12
I like the story your sig paints
where is it from....
Well, let's take a modernist poem such as The Waste Land. We note the following characteristics: allusion, intertextuality, multiperspectivalism, occlusion of narratorial agency, alienation. Yet the poem uses mythical and religious allusions (such as the religion of the Upanishads) to make a rather anti-modern call for a return to socially cohesive spiritual Truth in the midst of uncertainty and upheaval.
Postmodernism uses many effects of modernism, without the same search for Truth in chaos. Postmodernist literature in theory celebrates its randomness. Mass communications, the growth of the media and education, the catalysmic effect of two world wars, the collapse of the British Empire and the rise of US power had a big impact on philosophical thinking, in a world of conflicting belief-structures and constructions in language of reality. Structuralists had seen language as an interoperating network of sign-systems which in unity signified an extra-linguistic reality or 'signified'. But in what we now call the post-structuralist period (the late sixties and early seventies primarily), the philosopher Jacques Derrida and literary critic Roland Barthes started to look closely at the ways in which the meanings of phonemes, words, phrases or larger texts shift according to the innumerable contexts of utterance and reception, and began to advocate that Truth was something outside of the confines of language and thus unknowable in language. (This doesn't mean, as some critics mistakenly think, that Derrida is saying that there's no Truth. He just means that language is too imperfect and volatile to reflect absolute, objective Truth.) Because we use words in many different contexts, their meanings can never be fixed by their immediate contexts or by negotiation with our ever changing understanding of what words mean in theory and practice. "Meaning" through language is thus a relative concept: an effect of language, moving about and depending (in a very unstable way) on the neverending, other contexts in which language is used.
So, a postmodern poem will interrogate its own claim to meaning. In theory, it will defer indefintely its own textuality but in practice it still adheres to conventional aesthetics to a degree. I don't think a truly postmodern poem has been written yet. A postmodern poem might have to be so avant garde that each character in the text must be written on a small piece of paper and scattered across the far reaches of time and space to prevent the constrictions of form and emphasise linguistic play, but even then there would be some spacial arrangement in effect if not in intention, and thus there would be inevitable closure!
For me, most postmodernism is pretentious. My area of interest is in post-colonial poetry from India, the Caribbean, Ireland and Africa (particularly South Africa). Like postmodernist poetry it will often be self referential and enjoy playing with signification, but it does it with a belief in its own power to represent reality and effect a posssiblity of continuing a decolonizing, heterogenising influence on what was once the canon of "English Literature", turning it into literatures in English (or englishes).
Abolsutely Fascinating! [to begin with a little postmodernist pun;)]
seriously finsbury, a spectacular display! my interpretation has been much like your description here: modernism was an attempt to form some definition into the chaotic, subjective realm of the physical world, or Nature. post-modernism was/is the artistic embrace of that subjectivity, often taken to the radical extreme of total 'insanity', or complete lack of knowledge in any form about the world where one exists.
my sentiment is the same about post-modernism: in art terms it is very pretentious in that it is a presentation of one's ideas, self, experiences.. for others to view, and thus interpret, but realistically there is NO MEANING for one to obtain from such an experience.. post-modern art is essentially nihilism in that it attempts to 'be' the experience of meaninglessness.. but somehow through that process is supposed to be revealed 'total meaning'.. it is a process of provocation that is supposed to reflect one's subjective place in the universe and within human culture. the problem, though, is that every post-modern piece of art is therefore equivalent.. if all such works seek total meaning through an interpretation of total meaningless, then we only need one of them!
thus your flavor for the rich foreign poetries you've mentioned is extremely admirable in my book [which i'm still working on;)].
basically to me art hinges on the fact that no human can know the mind of another in totality, there is just no objective interpretation of anything in Nature outside of one's body. there is knowledge, or truths, but no Truth. my thinking has been very political lately. i think social renaissance will come not from art becoming political, but from politics becoming rooted in art..
of course that may take millenia to manifest, but it also may not.
i'm not a very good writer.. i dont read too much, i dont study recent fundamental advices, and i rarely take criticisms to heart [they have to really burn to get through my thick skin:)].. but i think i may have a "post-modern" poem for you finsbury, and maybe i'll even write you in somewhere [i'd say most likely if i keep drinking wine at this rate today!]..
so wait did i just call myself pretentious and ally with the very camp i just denounced? ah art, it's so infinitely funny!
more, let's hear more!!...
"Born of a Broken Man" - Rage Against the Machine
EV - St. Louis 7/1/11 ** Tulsa 11/19/12
I will never again question Fin on ANYTHING regarding the laws of poetry!^^^^
*Bows before him on hands and knees*
was this is response to me? sorry i can't follow you..?
also sorry for the delay, had to run to ups and the grocery.. having a bbq tonight since i got the grandparents' house for my taking!
oh, one more thing.. poetry has laws?
As for laws in poetry, I don't think there are any.
is that a good thing?
i would love to discuss this line further, but right now i have to start the chili!
and thanks again for the discussion.. ooh also, on your interest in the more exotic cultures and their poetry, the more i thought about that, it began to remind me of music and the manner in which other cultures experience time. it's interesting to me because every 'music' is its own rhythm of living, and i think that is why i've always been drawn to pearl jam as much as any of other musicians playing today.. they're still no tchaikovsky, but nobody is perfect!