OK.
Let's start again.
I think the idea of a thread for us to post our poetry is a good one.

So I'm starting a fresh thread but just so that it doesn't go as rapidly off topic as the last one I'm going to lay down some rules.

Posts that do not meet the rules will be deleted. I'm not an administrator but I'm absolutely certain that anyone who is will be happy to do that for me.

-------------

Rules.

This thread is for poems written by wordcrafters and for relevent comment on THOSE poems. I don't know about the sensitivities of others but for myself I'm happy to take CONSTRUCTIVE criticism.

Please don't post poems written by other people. We can start another thread for favourite poems if anyone is interested.

General discussions of what does and does not constitute poetry/art/music whether good/bad/indifferent are ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN.

Discussion of the specifics is encouraged. Don't be afraid of offending my sensibilities but if anyone else chooses to post bear in mind that not everyone has my rhino-hide skin. Before posting put yourself in the other persons shoes and THINK about what you are saying.

I know we have some good poets here and I'm always interested in reading poetry especially from "amateurs". (Though there aren't many openings for "professionals" that I know of!)

ANy and all poetry is welcome. Limericks, Double Dactyles, Clerrihews, Concrete Verse (though that's a toughie given the forum layout restrictions), Haiku, Epic Verse, Free Verse. It's all welcome.


------------------

If you cannot say anything without breaking the above rules then I suggest that saying nothing is a wise option.

-------------------

And now to a couple of my poems. Complete with explanatory notes.

-------------------

*The title of this thread isn't a grammatical error, it's a tribute to the late, great Ernie Wise and his comedic "literary ambitions" exemplified by his use of the phrase "The Play What I Wrote".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

This first poem of mine is, like many others that I have written, one that came about while I was travelling. It was partly inspired by the desert and partly inspired by the bone-deep weariness that sometimes overtakes you on long expeditions. It was written at a lowish ebb about a month into a nine month trip across Europe, North Africa and Asia.

-----------------------------

Elephant's Graveyard

We are the bones
In an elephants’ graveyard.
We are the sad pachyderm remains
Of the mighty.
We are the scraps and remnants
Of flesh that clings yet,
Picked over by the vultures
Of our imaginations.
We are bleached
Into a cracked and dusty white
By the sun of expectation.
We lie here in scorching sand
Inanimate, unchanging.
The wind of indifference
Buries us in inches.

And we are gone.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

The second poem is thematically similar but a little less metaphorically expressed. It was written about four months later, at another low point in the cycle as I travelled down through Malaysia on the final run to Singapore.

Sometimes While Wandering

Sometimes I get tired of the motion;
I need to be stationary;
I crave stillness.

Sometimes I get tired of the people;
I need to be alone;
I crave solitude.

Sometimes I get tired of the novelty;
I need familiarity;
I crave the banal.

Sometimes I just get tired.

Excellent!

It's interesting that in both poems the ending is a bit of a surprise.

I asked a similar question in the Linguistics 101 thread on poetry, but how did you decide when to end the line in the elephant's poem? Yet, I notice in the wandering poem you ended the lines with a punctuation. How did you make those decisions?

I'll do my best to answer you, but I've never tried a critical analysis of one of my own poems before.

So, let's look at the first one and the question of how to decide where the lines end.

Here's the poem again.

We are the bones
In an elephants’ graveyard.
We are the sad pachyderm remains
Of the mighty.
We are the scraps and remnants
Of flesh that clings yet,
Picked over by the vultures
Of our imaginations.
We are bleached
Into a cracked and dusty white
By the sun of expectation.
We lie here in scorching sand
Inanimate, unchanging.
The wind of indifference
Buries us in inches.

And we are gone.

-------------------------------


Let's write it out slightly differently and then examine it.

We are the bones in an elephants’ graveyard.
We are the sad pachyderm remains of the mighty.
We are the scraps and remnants of flesh that clings yet,
Picked over by the vultures of our imaginations.
We are bleached into a cracked and dusty white by the sun of expectation.
We lie here in scorching sand, inanimate, unchanging.
The wind of indifference buries us in inches.
And we are gone.

Now written out like this it's possible to see that stanzas 1,2,3 and and the truncated version of 5 follow exactly the same structure.

"We are" + complement + prepositional phrase.

Stanza 4 doesn't begin with "We are" but is essentially similar. The breaks are all positioned to place the prepositional phrase on its own line.

The fifth stanza has an extra line, effectively two prepositional phrases. This is a stylistic device that I use quite a lot, a shift of form.

The remaining two stanzas have a slightly different form because they are forming a conclusion to the poem. They have no prepositional phrase but have been broken by line length and by the syllable counts in the words at the starts and ends of the lines.
Thinking about it, I could have written it as

We lie here
In scorching sand
Inanimate, unchanging.

and I'm not sure why I didn't but the first line of this three line stanza would have looked a little short. I think I may have had it that way originally and been faced with the choice of joining two lines or adding padding. I don't really like padding so I guess I just chose to join the lines.


The last, separate line, is also a device that I have used quite a few times - separating the last line as a kind of coda to the main verse.

Other things to watch out for are, as we discussed in the PM thread, repetition of sounds and sequences. "We are" repeated multiple times. Lot's of sibilants. The rhythmic patterns of expectation/inanimate/unchanging/indifference.

What the poem does is takes a single metaphor - human life compared to the remnants of dead animals and plays on the theme with a decidedly downbeat coda about mortality.

---------------


I'll rip the other one apart for you later when I have more time.
I hope this helps.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Here's one of mine

CHRISTO’S GIFT


When Christo wrapped
the coast of Little Bay,
Australia in acres of beige

polyester, creating a package
of landscape resembling a mammoth Rocky Road
ice cream sundae, he may have meant us

to pretend, like a birthday child, not to see
the box which disarranges
familiar closet coats—

rather than scaling its draped vanilla crest, dubbing it ‘bold’,
a reference to the proliferation of cloned
McDonald’s arches, etc,

to walk away—the way you’d leave
your darkened cottage at summer’s end, taking care
to sheet the old chairs. He meant

the way we clasp
the few best things we have:
the way we imagine the rocks, the tundra
pitted with pale fern springing
to meet the sun,

how the cliffs will hug
the coast of Little Bay, at its unveiling.

That took a few readings and a bit of sorting out for me, but once I'd managed the trick, I rather like it.

And now the other poem and the other question - explaining the punctuation.

Here we have three primary stanzas and another of those codas that I am fond of. Each of the primary stanzas has three lines and the structure is mirrored exactly. We need examine only one.

quote:

Sometimes I get tired of the motion;
I need to be stationary;
I crave stillness.

Sometimes I punctuate poems, sometimes I don't. I'll confess that when I don't it's often through oversight or laziness. The giveaway is usually whether I have used capital letters. If I have I probably meant to punctuate as well, but forgot.
What about this then?
I could have used full stops but I felt that the meanings of the lines were too closely linked for that.
What about commas. It's just personal prejudice, I don't really care for comma splices (such as that one).

So as I wanted to indicate that the three verses, though mirroring each other in form were more sharply separated than the lines within a verse that left me with line 3 full stops and a choice of colons and semi-colons for lines 1 and 2. Given that the lines are so close in meanings I went for semi-colons.

There. That was nicely straightforward, wasn't it.

Bargain day at the mortuary = Dead Giveaway.

quote:

We are bleached
Into a cracked and dusty white
By the sun of expectation.


We are bleached into a cracked and dusty white by the sun of expectation.

Bob, I think the "sun of expectation" is thought-provoking, and well-placed at the center of the poem. Had you tacked it onto the end of a long line (as you show for contrasting analysis), I think I would not have been able to dwell on it in the same way-- I need to 'turn the corner' of the line in order to be surprised by it.

In general your sense of line is impeccable, which in my humble opinion means that you do not need all those prepositions. They are rational connectors which tend to diminish what strike me as intuitive and visual connections between the images.

zmj, I hope you will re-post your 8/22 "Trout" poem when you are finished with it. I really want to see that again! It seemed to me to be starting from a strong visual image and then sliding into that metaphorical idea of fish-as-idea, then back into a real fish.

quote:

Originally posted by bethree5:
I need to 'turn the corner' of the line in order to be surprised by it.

I like that description. In its way it sums up why a poem, even a free verse one, is not the same thing as prose. It's quite a good metaphor: prose as a long straight road going from a to b by the quickest route, but poetry as a twisting, winding track where you drive slower but enjoy the trip more. I like it.

As for the removal of the prepositions, I agree it could be done. However it would leave a poem consisting of sentence fragments and isolated images. That's a fine technique and produces a lot of excellent poetry. It just isn't a technique I use much myself.

Glad you liked the poems.

Great explanation for the ending of lines, Bob. Now I see it completely, and I will read poetry a little differently.

Bethree, that left me to wondering why you ended your lines where you did. I tried to analyze it, given what Bob had said, but couldn't figure it out.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Bethree, that left me to wondering why you ended your lines where you did. I tried to analyze it, given what Bob had said, but couldn't figure it out.

I try breaking the line all different ways until I’m satisfied that the shape of the line is conveying as much of the feeling as possible. The only general rule I follow is to avoid ending the line on a weak word, by which I mean for example a short preposition that would cause you to read right on swiftly instead of pausing for a microsecond. (You could do that of course if you had a reason to.)

Many of the line-endings of the first 5 stanzas emphasize repeating sounds: Stanza 1 Bay/beige, Stanzas 2, 3, 4 Road/coats/bold/clones; also clipped short vowels wrapped/ meant(us), etc., meant

Another rationale for many of the line-endings in the poem is to make sure the reader sees and follows the structure of what is actually a long, James-like sentence: “when Christo wrapped… he may have meant us to pretend…; rather than scaling…, to walk away. He meant the way we… the way we… how the…”

Also I’m trying to keep it light, playing with the little surprises you get from ‘turning the corner’ of the line—‘wrapped/the coast’ ‘a package/ of landscape’; Rocky Road sounds like landscape until you hit ‘ice cream sundae’; ‘proliferation of cloned’ sounds very ominous and weapon-like, deflated by ‘McDonald’s arches’.

‘taking care’ is at the end of the line to suggest more than a perfunctory duty-- that the objects are being personalized, as in "Take care!”; the same thought is behind ‘springing’ and ‘hug’ as line-endings… hopefully by the time you get to the end of the poem, your landscape is jumping up and hugging just like a birthday child.

IS THAT REALLY IT?


Two of us willing to post poems.
People, I am deeply disappointed in you.

Not surprised mind you, just disappointed. Every time I've tried to do this before the response has been equally underwhelming. I simply cannot believe that just the two of us want to contribute to this thread.

(I realise a couple of others have posted some very fine poems in other threads, but not here.)

Oh well. I suppose you must all be shy.

I will only post limericks and other "conventional" poetry. Anything else I am now steering well clear of since it will probably lead to another unresolvable argument about what poetry actually is.

For those who don't look at OEDILF or the Washington Post, here's the one limerick of mine that was accepted. I'll maybe post some of the others (many of which I felt were better) later.

I once loved a girl from Darjeeling;
Her beauty and skill sent me reeling.
But my afterglow fled
When she sat up and said,
“Can we do it once more – but with feeling?”

I know that you are an excellent limerick writer and a dab hand at double dactyls, how about something in a longer form? Rhyming couplets are fine, sonnets, any form of poetry at all and if you want to make all of yours have perfect rhyme and metre in whatever rhyme scheme takes your fancy, go for it.

And remember that rhyming poetry doesn't have to be humourous. Gray's Elegy

is

a) rhyming
b) very long
c) not funny at all
and
d) sublimely wonderful

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

quote:

And remember that rhyming poetry doesn't have to be humourous. Gray's Elegy

I realise that. I like most of Lewis Carroll's poems - many of them quite dark - and I enjoy the Rime of the Ancient Mariner - to name just two examples of non-humourous poetry.