Poetry?

Yea or nay?

Generally not much of a poetry fan. Most of it is pretentious and twee.

Tried reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and some Ovid and stuff like that -- incredible effort put into writing it but it's hard to understand why.

My dead sister bought me some Billy Collins books while he was Poet Emeritus. His stuff is pretty good, better than most. But still not something I'd sit down to read for pleasure.

My kind of poetry is the non-rhyming type, where unusual phrases ("poetic phrases") invoke a particular mood of reflection and confusion. I submit two examples.

First is one I clipped from Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. Know nothing about the author or context. Just like the mood.

Quote :

Fucked Mind

Then we see 3 raccoons by the door.
They're wearing visors.
They're exactly Jessica's size.

They're very out front.
It's all I can do to get behind them.
- Tom Clark

The other one I wrote, on April 19, 1976. No idea where it came from or what it means.

Quote :

Taxi

An intriguing catalepsy has taken me over
with the exacting details of a 30-split of meat.
I hear a tiny white voice calling me
with instructions for the dissection of my mother's womb.

I lie still, unable to move beyond the reaches of
the triangle of life, death, and love
And making wild motions with the insides of my eyes
so that I cannot see you descending the staircase.

I have taken possession.

I have caught hell.

I am in an inferno of deceit.


Please don't tell Ronny I'm coming home.

Any Carl Sandburg fans here?

Errant Arrrgh!

Real poetry only please.
Robert Frost is a real poet.
But I have my blah blah blah on Facebook and she posts these "poems" and they are all like free thought flow crap. That's not poetry. You cant just forget all punctuation and break up the lines and voila, now it's poetry. Nope. Sorry that's cheating.

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

-Billy Collins

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If a man were stranded in the desert with nothing but Oreos
He would emerge in better condition than he went in

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Oreos for breakfast, Oreos for lunch
Oreos taste good anytime, even on a hunch


-NoCoPilot
(circa 1976)

There once was a man from Racine
Who built a fine screwing machine
Concave or convex
It could screw any sex
But it was a right bastard to clean

A gay guy at the bridge club was getting some gentle ribbing (from friends, not exactly harassment although these days you wonder), and responded with this:

There was a young boy from Madras
Who had a most wonderful ass.
Not soft round and pink,
Like you probably think,
But the kind with long ears, that eats grass.

Seen on Facebook.

Cameron Malcher:

There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And haikus confused

and then in the comments, starseedjenny:

A clear river flowing with leaves
Runs through a red forest of trees.
Such a vision of maple
Is a boon if your able
To sit still and attain inner peace.

Aw man, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is my absolute favorite poem. A lot of parallels with my own life, so it resonates deeply with me. A lot of people don't realize that Coleridge makes one of the very first literary cases for animal welfare in that poem. Admittedly that was not the point of it, but still, kind of cool. I'm a huge fan of Keats, Byron and Shelley. Additionally, Shelley's wife, Mary, wrote my all-time favorite novel, Frankenstein, which I also really relate to. And she wrote it as a teenager. Seriously. A teenage girl wrote arguably the first real sci-fi novel and one of the world's most renowned literary classics. I love that.

Well she was 21, which in 1818 was well into the responsibilities of adulthood.  But I agree, it's a remarkable accomplishment.  Have you read what triggered the book?  Apparently she attended, or her husband attended, a demonstration by Giovanni Aldini of the newly-discovered electrical nature of nerves.  Aldini toured the country making frog's legs twitch on a table, and -- earlier in 1803, when Mary was only 5 -- an executed criminal's body twitch.

Quite startling stuff at the time.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Well she was 21, which in 1818 was well into the responsibilities of adulthood.  But I agree, it's a remarkable accomplishment.  Have you read what triggered the book?  Apparently she attended, or her husband attended, a demonstration by Giovanni Aldini of the newly-discovered electrical nature of nerves.  Aldini toured the country making frog's legs twitch on a table, and -- earlier in 1803, when Mary was only 5 -- an executed criminal's body twitch.

Quite startling stuff at the time.

No, it was published when she was 21, but she was 19 when she wrote it. Okay, tail end of teenhood, but still. Can you imagine any 19-year-old today writing something like Frankenstein? I didn't know about Aldini but it doesn't surprise me. There was a lot of interesting threads that went into the creation of the novel, the main one being when she, her husband, Byron and Polidori spent a stormy night telling each other ghost stories.