Poetry Corner (No Spam please)

[dragon wench]

[QUOTE=Fiona]
DW Byron's a good choice. Do you prefer love poetry ?[/QUOTE]

I realised when I posted the Byron piece what I had done. I wouldn't say necessarily I prefer love poetry. I also like a lot of politically oriented poetry, and much of what I like probably defies genre completely. In essence, I just posted those poems because I like them a lot. The poems I read or think about are often quite mood-dependent. If I were in a more cynical frame of mind this evening, chances are my choices would have been different, I suspect.

[Chimaera182]

[QUOTE=Fiona]Feel free. Should be interesting [/QUOTE]
lol I'm almost not sure if you're being serious or devious in some way. Anyway, one of the things we learned in that class I mentioned is that none of these schools of thought are perfect (what in life is?); I could take a poem and dissect it via the Marxist/materialist school of interpretation, but going by that school, you turn everything political. Or if you go with the Feminist school, it reduces everything to the subtle subjugation of women through language and how literature may condone or scold this. Each school reduces everything to one specific way of thinking, and you just can't do that to everything.

For two examples on how this is so for Marxism... my teacher brought with him book on a Marxist's interpretation of how Winnie the Pooh was actually a story of exploitation of the Proletariat (the story when Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit's hole, and Rabbit puts the shelf on him and treats him as a fixture in his home). There was also a paper I read years ago where a Marxist converted the Smurfs--the Smurfs, of all things--into a story about the evil capitalists (Gargamel and Asrael) trying to take away all the honest workers (the Smurfs, obviously) had worked for.

I'd feel a little odd in that way, since I don't believe the schools are absolute in their judgement. But I keep waiting for a love poem that objectifies women and launch a feminist tirade.

[Phreddie]

Relevance?

Does the poetry i have to write for physics homework count?

[SyntheticD]

i think im gonna start to really like Gamebanshee, i love poetry and i have never seen it on a gaming forum so to those who have provided thank you for the experience, you guys and gals rule, i dont like to write it on the other hand but i love to read it

very very cool you all keep posting i love reading it.

[Fiona]

I like both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (is that allowed). Here is one of Ms Plath's :
The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

Sylvia Plath

And here is one of Mr Hughes:

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Ted Hughes

If you are interested in lit crit I think these two poems make a good comparative study. They illustrate perfectly that the work itself trancends any one approach. The poets were closely linked in their personal lives. Both poems deal with power but in very different ways. They can be approached politically; and also from the standpoint of gender. But in the end there is so much more, and insights can come from anywhere

[Maharlika]

Pablo Neruda.

Love Sonnet XI
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

[Maharlika]

An original from a close friend of mine...

Misery Be Thy Name

Ah, misery,
your love tastes like
copper swallowed
together with the last
morsel of trust.
Your every touch
is a sliver of lightning--
white flashes, that
bring forth a
vertiginous multitude
of crimsons and purples.
An amalgam of offering
to the unyielding, cold floor.

[Maharlika]

Another one from the same friend...

Raindrop

I
stood
under a grey
downpour willing
each drop to assuage my
grief. It understood my sadness,
learned it from every deafening roar
of thunder, every searing touch of lightning,
lived it with every call of flower, grass and
earth; of falling and drowning in a self-
made rivulet; and so it kissed me,
full of pathos and tenderness,
until my tears became
the rain.

[Maharlika]

I merged both poetry threads.

Carry on, my friends.

And yes, no spam please from hereon...

--- Maharlika ---

[Fiona]

I can't post this one because it's got a forbidden word in it. But it is especially for Phreddie, if he's reading. I hope it does not offend you. I truly think you might find it interesting. If not, I am sorry

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/4129/america.htm



I am a little sorry there is to be no spam, and I hope that does not put off anyone who might be new to poetry

[Chimaera182]

The link isn't working, Fiona; it edited Emily's last name (I'm assuming that's who ****inson is, but I know I may be wrong).

Does this no spam include critiques? 'cuz that just about ruined my fun. And after Fiona posted an easy one. lol

[Fiona]

Chim, Thanks for pointing that out. I think it's fixed now

I hope it doesn't preclude crits. I did think that was a good idea

[Chimaera182]

Well... America certainly was interesting. I could understand and see myself in a lot of it in the beginning. The majority of it was just sheer fun; the man's clearly poking fun at the near-hysteria (near-hysteria, what a joke, it was full on hysteria) of the red menace. Spies are everywhere. And how about that change of tone near the end, where he starts to sound dumb? Like he's implying only the foolish would fall for this hysteria to begin with. Or was he taking a stab at the crimes America was responsible for in the past? When he started in with the "Him no good" thing, it reminded me of all those movies where they portray the native Americans speaking garbled English (if you don't know what I mean, if you've seen Monty Python's Flying Circus, think of Eric Idle as the "Indian" in the Crunchy Frog sketch).

But I do like it.

[Fiona]

Im glad you liked it. Here is something very different. DH Lawrence is mostly known for his views on free love etc, I think. His poetry is perhaps less famous.

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge
of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid
black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness.

[Chimaera182]

Snake looks familiar. I'm sure I've read it before. At first, I thought it was a different one, where the narrator followed the snake to lead it to safety away from such "human education."

But isn't it nice to look at such poetry that critiques humanity itself? How we can be so civilized, so cultured, so smug and smart, and resort to our barbarous nature? You can see the snake as any number of "barbarous" tribes and civilizations that the smart and sophisticated and technologically-superior cultures attacked. And later, sometimes centuries later, we regret doing it.

[Fiona]

I agree. But there is more there too, don't you think ? This poem addresses personal responsibility. It glorifies the natural world over the human, and that is something which permeates all of Lawrence's work. In that sense he echoes Clare, I think. He is depressed by his indecisiveness and seems to see that as a product of civilisation rather than humanity. That theme is reflected in the celtic tradition which the merging of the threads has addressed in the Ossian poem and " who will follow fergus". There are mystic elements and suggestions of archetypal (jungian and freudian) thinking here as well. Again I think these things are very rich. Any approach is only a tool. In the end to read in a quiet place with no distractions is best.

Sorry if I seem to be preaching. I don't mean it.

[Maharlika]

I think critiques shouldn't be classified as spam.

I just hope that the critiques stay on topic as far as the poems presented are concerned.

[Fiona]

Thanks, that's a relief to me

This one pleases me, though I am not sure why.

Anger's Freeing Power

I had a dream three walls stood up wherein a raven bird
Against the walls did beat himself and was this not absurd ?

For sun and rain beat in that cell that had its fourth wall free
And daily blew the summer shower and the rain came presently

And the pretty summer time and all the winter too
That foolish bird did beat himself till he was black and blue.

Rouse up, rouse up, my raven bird, fly by the open wall
You make a prison of a place that is not one at all.

I took my raven by the hand, Oh come, I said, my Raven,
And I will take you by the hand and you shall fly to heaven.

But oh he sobbed and oh he sighed and in a fit he lay
Until two felow ravens came and stood outside to say:

You wretched bird, conceited lump
You well deserve to pine and thump.

See, now a wonder, mark it well
My bird rears up in angry spell,

Oh do I then? he says and careless flies
O'er flattened wall at once to heaven's skies

And in my dream I watched him go
And I was glad, I loved him so,

Yet when I woke my eyes were wet
To think Love had not freed my pet,

Anger it was that won him hence
As only Anger taught him sense.

Often my tears fall in a shower
Becaue of Anger's freeing power

Stevie Smith

[Fiona]

I'm going to double post. I don't care.

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning.
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it ws too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving, but drowning.

Stevie Smith

[Chimaera182]

I'm not sure I get the point of that last poem...

I want to say something about how one person's opinion can get drowned out in a sea of people, but he's not even waving. So maybe something more about how a person who doesn't signal their own opinion gets drowned in the opinions of others.