Poetry?...meh..

[Xamonas Chegwé]

"Serious" poetry? That's where you are going wrong. Poetry isn't "supposed" to be serious. It is simply "supposed" to be the poet's thoughts and emotions, compressed into a short piece of writing - all of the rest is frippery. Fuck Ezra Pound and his endless, abstruse references and thinly disguised nazism. Give me Ted Hughes any day. No classical pretensions here - just delicious words that dance in and out of surreality and realism both. You can feel the first rush of a new romance and the promise of its own destruction in these words. Fucking brilliant! But serious? I have an MP3 of this, read by Hughes himself which slaps me across the face with its sheer brilliance. Other people prefer T.S. Eliot. He's good too, I suppose, but I like Hughes.

Lovesong by Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

[Bella Fortuna]

Thanks for reminding me that I do indeed like Hughes too!

[Feck]

I think I have hit on a resolution and answer.





I don't actually like poetry.

I don't like Art I quite like some pictures and some sculptures , maybe things that are art ,But I dislike Art.

[colubridae]

In motion

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Hoping for guidance and inspiration in Ratz is clearly a misguided fantasy *sigh*

Try teh Cuttlefish.

[rachelbean]

Do you want some stuff that never rhymes,
Or shocking stuff, with gruesome crimes,
Or cryptic meanings, 'tween the lines,
Or lovey-dovey, 'please be mine's?

Perhaps you crave a rigid meter,
Or a gushing ode to a girl named Rita,

Maybe 
     you
          want a
               fancy
                    layout,

Or something that ends before the payo

Poetry is all these things
It's sometimes is very badly written too
And it doesn't always rhyme
Or make any elephant.

[Pappa]

Aside from haiku, one of the few bits of poetry that ever really got me was this:

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

by William Carlos Williams


It's fascinated me since I first read it about 15 years ago. Since then, I've really taken a shine to haiku and by extension other forms of Japanese and Chinese poetry. I also quite like the kind of unconventional stuff that XC tends to post from time to time (though I know nothing much about it). It's pretty much impossible to demonstrate in English, because the language isn't well suited to it, but I love Welsh cynghanedd poetry (particularly the short forms like englyn). They are like haiku, but with a strict internal structure of alliteration and inter-line rhymes. Because of the letter sounds, they don't really work properly in English, but I did write one once as an experiment:

The dung beetles

The dung beetles; they settle, they sit 'til
spring at last dawns and warms day;
adults appear from pupae.

it's not particularly good, but it does adhere to the complex rules of cynghanedd (I think), and that was what I was trying to achieve.

[Animavore]

I like Emily Dickinson. Don't really like anyone else.

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

[Feck]

I really don't like Emily Dickinson .....far toonice with her neat little rhymes and her Women's Institute outlook on life She should have stuck to baking cakes, weeding the garden and arranging the flowers in the church for funerals .

[Feck]

Out of the Depths Have I Cried

I beg pity of Thee, the only one I love,
From the depths of the dark pit where my heart has fallen,
It's a gloomy world with a leaden horizon,
Where through the night swim horror and blasphemy;
A frigid sun floats overhead six months,
And the other six months darkness covers the land;
It's a land more bleak than the polar wastes
— Neither beasts, nor streams, nor verdure, nor woods!
But no horror in the world can surpass
The cold cruelty of that glacial sun
And this vast night which is like old Chaos;
I envy the lot of the lowest animals
Who are able to sink into a stupid sleep,
So slowly does the skein of time unwind!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I have tried and tried to like it. I was taught it badly at school, forced to memorise pages and pages of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, which was a bad start. I got over that and began to appreciate it, but then...I don't know..meh..

Modern poetry in particular I find unreadable.

Anyone want to suggest something that might encourage me to appreciate it a bit more?

something epic, maybe?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I really don't like Emily Dickinson .....far toonice with her neat little rhymes and her Women's Institute outlook on life She should have stuck to baking cakes, weeding the garden and arranging the flowers in the church for funerals .

That is a really skewed and dismissive view of Emily Dickinson you have there, Feck. She was an anomaly in her time - a strong-minded, independent, intelligent woman. She spent a few months at a seminary - think religious university - before dropping out and living as a virtual recluse for the rest of her life. She would likely have died before attending the WI!

Very little is really known about her apart from what is revealed in her poetry and letters. She was a prolific correspondent with many pen friends but had hardly any real-life contacts (would have made a great Ratz IMO) and wrote poetry mostly for her own pleasure. The huge bulk of her writings were only published posthumously. She may have been lesbian but was almost certainly celibate in any case. She held a lifelong fascination with religion but the scrutiny with which she examines it in her poems and writings gives the impression that she was highly skeptical and possibly bordered upon atheism - the times she lived in being how they were though, such views tended to be hinted at rather than proclaimed.

Her life is as fascinating and mysterious as her poetry.

[Bella Fortuna]

I agree - when I was in Amherst, MA briefly once I was so disappointed to only get to see her house from the outside, as I've always found her fascinating and unusual for her time.

[Animavore]

I really don't like Emily Dickinson .....far toonice with her neat little rhymes and her Women's Institute outlook on life She should have stuck to baking cakes, weeding the garden and arranging the flowers in the church for funerals .

I thought you were one of the cool ones.

[Feck]

I really don't like Emily Dickinson .....far toonice with her neat little rhymes and her Women's Institute outlook on life She should have stuck to baking cakes, weeding the garden and arranging the flowers in the church for funerals .

That is a really skewed and dismissive view of Emily Dickinson you have there, Feck. She was an anomaly in her time - a strong-minded, independent, intelligent woman. She spent a few months at a seminary - think religious university - before dropping out and living as a virtual recluse for the rest of her life. She would likely have died before attending the WI!

Very little is really known about her apart from what is revealed in her poetry and letters. She was a prolific correspondent with many pen friends but had hardly any real-life contacts (would have made a great Ratz IMO) and wrote poetry mostly for her own pleasure. The huge bulk of her writings were only published posthumously. She may have been lesbian but was almost certainly celibate in any case. She held a lifelong fascination with religion but the scrutiny with which she examines it in her poems and writings gives the impression that she was highly skeptical and possibly bordered upon atheism - the times she lived in being how they were though, such views tended to be hinted at rather than proclaimed.

Her life is as fascinating and mysterious as her poetry.

I know but I was feeling Skewed and dismissive