Poetry sucks

[istewart]

And English departments that force students to read it should be done away with. It's gay.

And for an analogy:

Poetry : Literature actually worth reading

::

Finger paintings by a blind kid with Down Syndrome : Mona Lisa

[Claunchy]

You're an idiot.

[shant]

Have you ever watched "Def Poetry Jam" because I'm not a very big fan of poetry, but sometimes there is good poetry on there.

[BreakEvenPlayer]

You've come a long way from your posts questioning the "leetness" of the swatstika. Seriously, give up man.

[istewart]

[ QUOTE ]
You've come a long way from your posts questioning the "leetness" of the swatstika. Seriously, give up man.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you for remembering me in such a good context. But no, the fact remains that poetry is horrible.

[fluxrad]

You fail it.

[istewart]

[ QUOTE ]
Have you ever watched "Def Poetry Jam" because I'm not a very big fan of poetry, but sometimes there is good poetry on there.

[/ QUOTE ]

If you're referring to the thing on HBO then yes. I don't really like it, but it's a step above "traditional" poetry, if there is such a thing.

[TheIrishThug]

i'm so waiting for a 2+2er to show up and pwn u in a poem

[istewart]

Trees
The bird singing
Radios blaring
The sun
Glistening water shimmering on my baby's back

This right here is the essence of poetry and why it is horrible. Random words strewn together with no punctuation and no relevance to anything important.

you can't be serious. while that poem may, and does perhaps suck, you can't make sweeping generalizations about the art of verse like that. I mean, you can, but you sound retarded. no offense.

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing

Saying

We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.

-Jack Kerouac

[fluxrad]

"Terrence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping Melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad."
Why if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England Brews
Livelier liquor than the muse ,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home or near,
Pints and Quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely much I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.Till I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my sould's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went rough.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
- I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

-A.E. Housman

You fail at life if this isn't one of your favorite works.

[TheIrishThug]

[ QUOTE ]
no offense.

[/ QUOTE ]

dude, this is oot. flame him to [censored] for his ignorance. don't back off with that "no offense" bull [censored]. completely hurts ur point when u say that.

[chuddo]

bukowski

[istewart]

If I actually forced myself to read that I would kill myself.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
no offense.

[/ QUOTE ]

dude, this is oot. flame him to [censored] for his ignorance. don't back off with that "no offense" bull [censored]. completely hurts ur point when u say that. /quote]

Point taken. I take it back. I intend offense. Be offended. Retard.

[Eurotrash]

[ QUOTE ]
If I actually forced myself to read that I would kill myself.

[/ QUOTE ]



have some cream soda instead


http://img364.imageshack.us/img364/429/stewarts2up.gif

[TheIrishThug]

i personally prefer the root beer.

[istewart]

[ QUOTE ]
i personally prefer the root beer.

[/ QUOTE ]

[mikech]

[ QUOTE ]
And English departments that force students to read it should be done away with. It's gay.

And for an analogy:

Poetry : Literature actually worth reading

::

Finger paintings by a blind kid with Down Syndrome : Mona Lisa

[/ QUOTE ]
first of all, you do realize that poetry is the oldest form of literature? ever wonder why the "novel" is called that? because it was new. the first artistic expression of every civilization's language was in the form of poetry.

second of all, do you listen to rock bands or other popular music? if so, do you think those guys putting words to music and singing them is "gay" too?

[istewart]

[ QUOTE ]
first of all, you do realize that poetry is the oldest form of literature? ever wonder why the "novel" is called that? because it was new. the first artistic expression of every civilization's language was in the form of poetry.


[/ QUOTE ]

No, I didn't. But I don't see how this important. The Native Americans were the first people in America and now they're pretty much ignored. I highly recommend that poetry go the same way.

[ QUOTE ]
second of all, do you listen to rock bands or other popular music? if so, do you think those guys putting words to music and singing them is "gay" too?

[/ QUOTE ]

Completely irrelevant. I'm listening to actual music being played. I can't say I place a lot of importance on lyrics although catchiness is key. There is NOTHING CATCHY about poetry, and there is NO MUSIC.

[/ QUOTE ]
and there is NO MUSIC.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are balls-out wrong. The music is in the rhythm of the words, the way they roll over your tongue and out of your mouth. Sadly, you are completely deaf to it's beauty.

[istewart]

Yep.

[shant]

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

-- William Carlos Williams

I think that's a poem that doesn't suck.

[fluxrad]

[ QUOTE ]
If I actually forced myself to read that I would kill myself.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm surprised you haven't read it before.

[CourtesyFlush]

SHE HAD THE JUGS

Yes, she was witty; she was intelligent. She was born of high station. She spoke and walked proudly. She was the kind who displayed nobility, who showed style and class. But above all, she had the jugs.

Many people called her by her last name; some closer friends had a confidence with her and shared the intimacy of her first name. But to me, she was always "Lady jugs a-plenty."

It is true. She was clever and she was charming, but above all, she had the jugs.


I thought this was a poem, and found out it wasn't. I decided to post it anyway. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

-Rilke

-Going out on a limb here with an original...

End of a Fling

She
wanted to go shopping
we drove through the rain
laughing at the other cars

at the market the sky
was tearing open wet
I ran inside
grabbed condoms and beer
the clerk laughing
slid them through

we drove back laughing and touching
each other
until she asked me why
one of my eyes was in the sky
it's because of another woman I said

I asked you not to talk about those things
she said
but we had grown closer in the past weeks and I figured I'd test the places
where we had joined with a little
shot of truth
why not
we were lovers
between the hours

up in my apartment the rain
was lightly drumming the windows
and the air was humid and silent
I put on Massive Attack and we drank
and she told me she had secrets

of men and drunken lovemaking
I laughed somewhere beneath jealosy

she was sitting on the floor and peeling
the colors off of her
sweating beer bottle
I was on the couch smoking tobacco
that my lover of the hours
had brought me from across an ocean

she got up and sat next to me and soon
we were kissing
and we didn't have to worry about words
anymore
I got on my knees
and kissed her between the legs
and she brought me into the bedroom
where I kissed her to her climax
and after
I asked for her body

the condom was sticky and thin
and one of her eyes was in the ceiling
and after a while she said that it hurt

so we stopped and she curled up in a ball
and I asked if I could masturbate
she said sure and asked me
to set the alarm for seven thirty

and asked why I took off the condom
and I said that we didn't need it
and began

I've never just watched before
she said

[Neal_Schon]

Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin' anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit
He took the midnight train goin' anywhere

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night

Working hard to get my fill,
everybody wants a thrill
Payin' anything to roll the dice,
just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

Don't stop believin'
Hold on to the feelin'
Streetlight people

[BreakEvenPlayer]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
first of all, you do realize that poetry is the oldest form of literature? ever wonder why the "novel" is called that? because it was new. the first artistic expression of every civilization's language was in the form of poetry.


[/ QUOTE ]

No, I didn't. But I don't see how this important. The Native Americans were the first people in America and now they're pretty much ignored. I highly recommend that poetry go the same way.

[ QUOTE ]
second of all, do you listen to rock bands or other popular music? if so, do you think those guys putting words to music and singing them is "gay" too?

[/ QUOTE ]

Completely irrelevant. I'm listening to actual music being played. I can't say I place a lot of importance on lyrics although catchiness is key. There is NOTHING CATCHY about poetry, and there is NO MUSIC.

[/ QUOTE ]


Why even bring the Native Americans up? This has nothing to do with Native Americans. He said that poetry was the first form of written expression for EVERY civilization.

I know you're an ignorant [censored] who just wants to make a controversial thread... "Oh, look at me, I hate something that everyone generally regards as good." Seriously though, you should just give up man.

[jacki]

[ QUOTE ]
It's gay.

[/ QUOTE ]

Anybody that uses 'gay' as a synonym for 'stupid' or 'lame' is obviously intellectually challenged.

[istewart]

You clearly can't read. I made no connection between poetry and Native Americans.

You should seriously consider killing yourself.

[istewart]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It's gay.

[/ QUOTE ]

Anybody that uses 'gay' as a synonym for 'stupid' or 'lame' is obviously intellectually challenged.

[/ QUOTE ]

Call GLAAD on me then.

[pryor15]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water fiats 'doating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night,

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, I listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels,

who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the E.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be [censored] in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate [censored] and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930'S German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam-whistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddhas or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive' or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisy-chain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally * * * * * *, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

"Howl", Allen Ginsberg, 1956

[BreakEvenPlayer]

Hey bitch. You clearly made a connection between Native Americans and poetry.

The OP stated that poetry was the *FIRST* written form of artistic expression for every civilization. You went on to claim that the Native Americans were the *FIRST* civilization on our continent, and that no one cares about them now (which is retarded and besides the point). You're making a direct connection between poetry and Native Americans.

Just give up man.

[pryor15]

[ QUOTE ]
-Going out on a limb here with an original...


[/ QUOTE ]

i like it. nicely done.

[PoBoy321]

Have you considered the possibility that the last 3000 years of Western Civilization and their appreciation for poetry, just might be right, and you, some college kid who doesn't like his English class, is wrong?

[PoBoy321]

Ginsberg. Beautiful.

[smokingrobot]

william carlos williams is awesome.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
-Going out on a limb here with an original...


[/ QUOTE ]

i like it. nicely done.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks dude. "Howl" is one of the best. Cheers

[smokingrobot]

wow, ridiculous statement of the day!

that said, what's so amazing about the mona lisa besides the fact that its so well known?

[Escape]

[ QUOTE ]
wow, ridiculous statement of the day!

that said, what's so amazing about the mona lisa besides the fact that its so well known?

[/ QUOTE ]

The look in her eyes. That said I don't like poetry.

[smokingrobot]

bukowski has this really great poem.

and neruda has one of the best poems about love ever, to get all sappy 'n [censored].

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
wow, ridiculous statement of the day!

that said, what's so amazing about the mona lisa besides the fact that its so well known?

[/ QUOTE ]

dudes, everybody knows that the mona lisa is leonardo davinci's self-portrait dressed as a woman. THAT'S what that famous smirk is for. check out other self-portraits of leo, and you'll see what i mean

[smokingrobot]

if catchy and pedestrian is important in rock music, then yes, perhaps in that world, poetry should be burned.

i disagree with you wholeheartedly, but you're entitled to your own view. albeit one that would come off to most people as sounding highly illiterate. (which i know you're not. maybe you just havent come across poetry that you actually enjoy... perhaps an anthology of poetry will help you find something you like)

[PoBoy321]

[ QUOTE ]

bukowski has this really great poem.

and neruda has one of the best poems about love ever, to get all sappy 'n [censored].

[/ QUOTE ]

I love Pablo Neruda. I'd never really read any of his stuff before this summer, but I worked with this girl who kept a book of Neruda poems and a tape of his readings in her car and I just think that he's written some of the most beautiful things I've ever read (I'm sure the fact that I had like a huge schoolboy crush on the girl had an effect, but whatever). Either way, I kind of want to learn spanish so that I can get a better appreciation for his works.

[smokingrobot]

yah, there's a really good collection of most if not all his work. i forget who published it, but its a picture of him in his 50's or 60's on the cover. it has both the spanish and english.

[smokingrobot]

i'd post some baudelaire but my books are all packed. he's worth checking out. les fleurs du mal, very interesting stuff.

not too familiar with Neruda, but here's a good one from Octavio Paz:

My eyes discover you
naked
and cover you
with a warm rain
of glances

.

A cage of sounds
open
to the morning
whiter
than your thighs
at night
your laughter
and even more your foliage
your blouse of the moon
as you leap from bed

Sifted light
the singing spiral
reals-in whiteness
Chiasm
X
planted in a chasm

.

My day
exploded
in your night
Your cry
leaps in pieces
Night
spreads
your body
washing under
your bodies
knot
Your body once again

.

Vertical hour
drought
spins its flashing wheels
Garden of knives
feast of deceit
Through these reverberations
you enter
unscathed
the river of my hands

.

Quicker than fever
you swim in the darkness
your shadow clearer
between caresses
your body blacker
You leap
to the bank of the improbable
toboggans of how when because yes
Your laughter burns your clothes
your laughter
wets my forehead my eyes my reasons
Your body burns your shadow
You swing on the trapeze of fear
the terrors of your childhood
watch me
from your cliffhanging eyes
wide-open
making love
at the cliff
Your body clearer
Your shadow blacker
You laugh over your ashes

.

Burgandy tongue of the flayed sun
tongue that licks your land of sleepless dunes
hair unpinned
tongue of whips
spoken tongues
unfastened on your back
enlaced
on your breasts
writing that writes you
with spurred letters
disowns you
with branded signs
dress that undresses you
writing that dresses you in riddles
writing in which I am buried
Hair unpinned
the great night swift over your body
jar of hot wine
spilled
on the tablest of the law
howling nude and the silent cloud
cluster of snakes
cluster of grapes
trampled
by the cold soles of the moon
rain of hands leaves fingers wind
on your body
on my body on your body
Hair unpinned
foliage of the tree of bones
the tree of aerial roots that drink night from the sun
The tree of flesh The tree of death

.

Last night
in your bed
we were three:
the moon you & me

.

I open
the lips of your night
damp hollows
unborn
echoes:

whiteness
a rush
of unchained water

.

To sleep to sleep in you
or even better to wake
to open my eyes
at your center
black white black
white
To be the unsleeping sun
your memory ignites
(and
the memory of me in your memory

.

And again the sap skywise
rises
(salvia your name
is flame)
Sapling
crackling
(rain
of blazing snow)
My tongue
is there
(Your rose
burns through the snow)
is
now
(I seal your sex)
dawn
from danger drawn

dude i'm listening to this song right now and your avatar's chomping is in perfect rhythm to the song, which is highly bizarre and cool.

[smokingrobot]

hey you know the poem where he talks about riding in his car and i forget what else, but its [censored] ing hillarious. as if this narrows it down too much.

[Danenania]

you
are
stu-
pid

[ilya]

A powerful thesis, and so cogently argued!

....

I'm not sure that you're bright enough to appreciate sarcasm, so let me make my meaning crystal clear:

your post betrays an ignorance and closed-mindedness so profound that it is ALMOST below ridicule.

[jason_t]

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Flames
By Billy Collins

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it.

Picnic, Lightning
By Billy Collins

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.

The title of this last poem is from one of the most beautiful sentences in literature ever. It comes from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and the full sentence is

[ QUOTE ]
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

[/ QUOTE ]

[jokerthief]

You just say this because you don't understand poetry....er wait, you're right poetry does suck.

[touchfaith]

god what a bunch of dribble...

[jason_t]

You see, because of this

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73/jason_t712/thinman.jpg

I have no idea what you just said. But I can make a pretty good guess. You criticized the poems in some dismissive way without even taking the time to read them. Your failure to attempt to appreiciate the beauty of them, the time I took to find them and post them and your attempt to be critical and dismissive all to provoke some reaction is likely indicative of the attitude you have that led to your wife cheating on you and the life of depression, despair and misery that you now have and will forever have.

[touchfaith]

bet mine took less time.

[mikech]

[ QUOTE ]
There is NOTHING CATCHY about poetry, and there is NO MUSIC.

[/ QUOTE ]
here is the final stanza of one of my favorite poems, "Byzantium" by WB Yeats:


Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.


if you don't hear the music in a line like "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea," then poetry is simply not for you. that's not necessarily any fault of yours, you not liking poetry; the fact is that poetry is introduced and taught very poorly to most kids. i HATED poetry in high school, and to this day i think the easter-egg-hunt style of looking for "symbols" or trying to find some "deep secret hidden meaning" in a poem is a stupid way to read poetry. there are many tangible and immediate pleasures in a poem, from the way images evoke emotions and sensations, to meter and rhyme, to the way certain words sound when strung together. there IS music in poetry, and there is joy in interesting and new manipulations of language. i hope someday you come to appreciate some of it.

[Los Feliz Slim]

[ QUOTE ]
Against that time, if ever that time come,
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Call'd to that audit by advised respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass
And scarcely greet me with that sun thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity,--
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part:
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause.



[/ QUOTE ]
- W Shakespeare

[smokingrobot]

i thought that picnic, lightning line was hillarious.

nice post, i'll have to check out some billy collins.

[RunDownHouse]

[ QUOTE ]
You see, because of this...

[/ QUOTE ]
OK, so I hit reply to ThinMan's post so I could actually see how close you were.

Dead. [censored]. On.

Not that you care, but my respect for you just jumped.

To add more great poetry:
[ QUOTE ]
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

[/ QUOTE ]

-Eliot

[ QUOTE ]
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

the

goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

[/ QUOTE ]
-Cummings (which needs to be read in print so the spacing is right)

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

-Eliot


[/ QUOTE ]


Very nice. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorite Eliot's.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (first two stanzas)
By T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

[Dr. StrangeloveX]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[InchoateHand]

Yes, I posted this in the last thread about poetry. Don't comment in that direction unless you are hankering for more melanoma/basal cell carcinoma photos.


An enduring favorite:


The Orange

An orange ruled the world.

It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.

The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors' motors rumbled hymns of praise.

Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, "Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch." And the passengers would be silent with awe.

The governor of Florida declared every day a holiday. On summer afternoons the Dalai Lama would come to the grove and sit with the orange, and talk about life.

When the time came for the orange to be picked, none of the migrant workers would do it: they went on strike. The foremen wept. The other oranges swore they would turn sour. But the orange who ruled the world said, "No, my friends; it is time."

Finally a man from Chicago, with a heart as windy and cold as Lake Michigan in wintertime, was brought in. He put down his briefcase, climbed up on a ladder, and picked the orange. The birds were silent and the clouds had gone away. The orange thanked the man from Chicago.

They say that when the orange went through the national produce processing and distribution system, certain machines turned to gold, truck drivers had epiphanies, aging rural store managers called their estranged lesbian daughters on Wall Street and all was forgiven.

I bought the orange who ruled the world for 39 cents at Safeway three days ago, and for three days he sat in my fruit basket and was my teacher. Today, he told me, "it is time," and I ate him.

Now we are on our own again.

-Benjamin Rosenbaum

[brettbrettr]

James Tate, "Goodtime Jesus"


Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

——
from Riven Doggeries, 1979

--brettbrettr, poetry major, class of 2000

[brettbrettr]

Billy Colllins is something of a nit.

[brettbrettr]

Dean Young is IMO the best american poet.

Sources Of The Delaware
Dean Young

I love you he said but saying it took twenty years
so it was like listening to mountains grow.
I love you she says fifty times into a balloon
then releases the balloon into a room
whose volume she calculated to fit
the breath it would take to read
the complete works of Charlotte Bronte aloud.
Someone else pours green dust into the entryway
and puts rice paper on the floor. The door
is painted black. On the clothesline
shirttails snap above the berserk daffodils.
Hoagland says you've got to plunge the sword
into the charging bull. You've got
to sew yourself into a suit of light.
For the vacuum tube, it's easy,
just heat the metal to incandescence
and all that dark energy becomes radiance.
A kind of hatching, syntactic and full of buzz.
No contraindications, no laws forbidding
buying gin on Sundays. No if you're pregnant,
if you're operating heavy machinery because
who isn't towing the scuttled tonnage
of some self? Sometimes just rubbing
her feet is enough. Just putting out
a new cake of soap. Sure, the contents
are under pressure and everyone knows
that last step was never intended to bear
any weight but isn't that why we're standing there?
Ripples in her hair, I love you she hollers
over the propellers. Yellow scarf in mist.
When I planted all those daffodils,
I didn't know I was planting them
in my own chest. Play irretrievably
with the lid closed, Satie wrote on the score.
But Hoagland says he's sick of opening
the door each morning not on diamonds
but piles of coal, and he's sick of being
responsible for the eons of pressure needed
and the sea is sick of being responsible
for the rain, and the river is sick of the sea.
So the people who need the river
to float waste to New Jersey
throw in antidepressants. So the river
is still sick but nervous now too,
its legs keep thrashing out involuntarily,
flooding going concerns, keeping the president
awake. So the people throw in beta-blockers
to make it sleep which it does, sort of,
dreaming it's a snake again but this time
with fifty heads belching ammonia
which is nothing like the dreams it once had
of children splashing in the blue of its eyes.
So the president gets on the airways
with positive vectors and vows
to give every child a computer
but all this time, behind the podium,
his penis is shouting, Put me in, Coach,
I can be the river! So I love you say
the flashbulbs but then the captions
say something else. I love you says
the hammer to the nail. I love Tamescha
someone sprays across the For Sale sign.
So I tell Hoagland it's a [censored]-up ruined
world in such palatial detail, he's stuck
for hours on the phone. Look at those crows,
they think they're in on the joke and
they don't love a thing. They think
they have to be that black to keep
all their radiance inside. I love you
the man says as his mother dies
so now nothing ties him to the earth,
not fistfuls of dirt, not the silly songs
he remembers singing as a child.
I love you I say meaning lend me twenty bucks.

[bravos1]

[ QUOTE ]
This right here is the essence of poetry and why it is horrible. Random words strewn together with no punctuation and no relevance to anything important.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmmm this statement reminds me of your typical post... coincidense.. I think not!

[thatpfunk]

[ QUOTE ]
James Tate, "Goodtime Jesus"


Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

——
from Riven Doggeries, 1979

--brettbrettr, poetry major, class of 2000

[/ QUOTE ]

I got to meet James Tate last year. He did a reading at my school at then taught a 3 hour class for 6 students (i was one of the lucky people to be chosen). He was pretty funny, a little senile, a pretty indifferent about the class. Very nice man. I felt honored when he complimented and criticized my work.

[britspin]

I just wanted to say that if you have some collections of Classical poetry (Ovid, Homer, Petronius Arbiter, Juvenal, Horace etc) in your room, and a woman you find attractive happens to be in that room, she may well ask you about your favourute poem and if you happen to mention the second elegy in Ovid's Art of Love - which can be found here (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0140443606/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-4003284-4812960#reader-page), she will likely ask you to read it to her and if you do she will be quite delighted and think you a finer and more loving and romantic person than you actually are.

That is all.

[MikeNaked]

[ QUOTE ]
And English departments that force students to read it should be done away with. It's gay.

And for an analogy:

Poetry : Literature actually worth reading

::

Finger paintings by a blind kid with Down Syndrome : Mona Lisa

[/ QUOTE ]

Didn't read the whole thread but I wanted to point out that music, film, and art all suck too.

[MikeNaked]

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true --
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe --

The Eyes glaze once -- and that is Death --
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

- Emily Dickenson

I love that crazy bitch.

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
Billy Colllins is something of a nit.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hahaha.

[rmarotti]

[ QUOTE ]
Ginsberg. Obnoxious, pedantic, and unlyrical

[/ QUOTE ]

FYFP

(goddam i hate ginsberg.)

[Saddlepoint]

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You're probably gay
YSSCKY

[imported_anacardo]

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

One of my favorites.

I'm also a huge, huge William Blake fan.