So I was pretty messed up the other night. drinkin & otherwise. the real point is, when I woke up in the morning, I had this poem written in a word document on my laptop. I only vaguely remember writing it.... and I think it turned out pretty cool, considering 1.) I don't write poetry. ever. and 2.) I was too wasted to remember even doing it.
so read it... probably isn't finished, and I may work on it some more, but I like what I see:
I inhaled the yellow from your hair and I took your handful of confusion and tossed it through an open window, the one that's been open before (but rarely since) I've brought it to your attention.
I gave the doubt to all my friends who placed it where they won't pretend as though she just floated in one afternoon, always monitoring patiently—without protection—how we arrived here in the first place.
There was an easy quiver her voice when she realized I didn't know the cards to be stacked in any kind of manner, nevermind against everything—it took a while—but now it's something we live with.
Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 2:02 am Posts: 91597 Location: Sector 7-G
Buffalohed wrote:
I don't really know how to judge poems but I think this is interesting.
It's statements like this that only further the douchebaggery of people like Mickey. You don't have to know how to "judge" poetry, just think about what the words mean to you and the emotions that it causes you when you read it (try out loud).
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cutuphalfdead wrote:
Buffalohed wrote:
I don't really know how to judge poems but I think this is interesting.
It's statements like this that only further the douchebaggery of people like Mickey. You don't have to know how to "judge" poetry, just think about what the words mean to you and the emotions that it causes you when you read it (try out loud).
Ok first of all, I didn't say anything about subjective/objective art, so fuck off. Way to be a cunt here, Peter.
Second, don't be so fucking dense, of course you can judge poetry. Like any art form, there are certain technical areas in which poems can excel or fail. Freshness of language, complexity of emotion, use of line and meter or lack thereof, authentic voice, auditory elements, visual elements. It's like saying there's no way to judge a Michelangelo painting from a fingerpainting. You're just being a prick if you make that claim, in addition to the fact that you're trying to discredit an artistic form and an artist's talent.
Here's an example. Read these two poems:
Quote:
Al
I always liked to get a rise out of people, especially my people, oh those little existentialists, those little sweatered coffee boys who loved my freedom, my nausea but who would still squirm the first time they realized hell is other people. I pictured this while writing and it always gave me a good laugh. Rejecting the Nobel, that took some balls too, huh? I thought that was a riot. Albert didn’t think so, but he took it for the money later anyway. He never quite got it, life, not the money. He got all the money. I’ll just never forget the time in his apartment in Paris, when we sat in his living room and he told me about being thankful for life even if it’s meaningless and I told him, now look here Al it’s only meaningless if you can’t take the joke and then I poured my coffee on his pants. Whoops, wasn’t me. I’d better go see the doctor, I think I have a horrible case of bad faith. Well, Al didn’t find that funny one bit, didn’t even want to be an existentialist after that. Sometimes he took things so terribly seriously, and it really was a shame, because he could have been terribly funny, especially with that arab, but he could never keep a straight face when he lied and really, that was my biggest secret.
Quote:
The Poet at Seventeen
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.
Outside the vineyards vanished under rain, And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;
Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess, Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own. Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish.
I hated high school then, & on weekends drove A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone. Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing,
And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then. I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings, The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy
Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind Of solitude the world usually allows Only to kings & criminals who are extinct, Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow
As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin Each autumn, & made that little hell of days— The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans
Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs. The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared.
And the girls I tried to talk to after class Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed, With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment. Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road.
A life like that? It seemed to go on forever— Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember
The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend. And then the first ice hung like spider lattices Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,
And then the first dark entering the trees— And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner, The way they always seemed afraid of something, And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.
Both poems have something to do with memory and something to do with the difference between the self and others. The difference is that the first is one of my early attempts at poetry, and the second is "The Poet at Seventeen" by the incomparable Larry Levis. You can't look at these two poems and not judge between the two. While mine is amateur in voice and inauthentic, filled with cliches, terribly bland emotions, and really childish allusions, Levis's poem makes good use of the line, feels real and gritty, uses a collection of images that play off each other, and all in all is one fucking incredible poem. There is an objective element there. You'd be a moron to say otherwise.
Now, of course there can be subjective takes on poetry. That's why there's no clear answer to who the best poet of all time is, or even which poem is a poet's best work, because each person responds to a poem differently and each poem plays on different emotions within the reader, not to mention the fact that the idea of a cliche is temporal in nature and that technical invention doesn't impress some people the way it impresses others. Yes, I'll give you that willingly. You could say that you get more "emotion" out of Billtop's poem than you do out of mine or Levis's, and that's fine, but at a certain level, Levis's poem is just technically better than either of the other two. It comes down to levels--the objective level and the subjective levels.
And really, anytime you say something like "you can't judge art," you make yourself sound like a huge tool. It's that kind of egalitarianism that really defines who has anything worthwhile to say about art and who doesn't, because if you can't separate an Eliot poem from a high school diary, you really shouldn't be talking about poetry at all. Same goes for music, same goes for visual art, same goes for cinematography. The objective elements are what allow the emotion to take body in the work of art. You can't appreciate a good scene in a movie if it isn't shot in an artistic manner, and you can't really feel the emotion in a poem if the poet writes about time going "at a snail's pace." And I take this personally as well. I'm trying to be a writer. I'm working very hard at trying to be a writer, and for you to come in here and imply that there's no objective level on which I can improve my writing and that nothing separates me from people who aren't studying poetry and who aren't writing poetry and who aren't making a concerted effort to find their own voices and to write in an authentic and fresh manner? That basically discredits the entirety of what I'm trying to do. Fuck you.
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given2trade wrote:
Oh, you think I'm being douchey? Well I shall have to re-examine everything then. Thanks brah.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:41 pm Posts: 23014 Location: NOT FLO-RIDIN Gender: Male
cutuphalfdead wrote:
tldr
i was just pushing your buttons anyway
Doesn't make you not a cunt. It's like me saying, "There's no difference between your professional radio show and me jerking around with garage band. It's about emotion." Fuck off.
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given2trade wrote:
Oh, you think I'm being douchey? Well I shall have to re-examine everything then. Thanks brah.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:41 pm Posts: 23014 Location: NOT FLO-RIDIN Gender: Male
cutuphalfdead wrote:
Yeah Mickey didn't walk into anything. I was just being a douchebag and was pretty out of line. Sorry guys.
I dunno about "pretty out of line." I mean I still take offense to your comment and the way of thinking about art that it's a symptom of, but really, a lot of people think that way and you kinda caught the brunt of a pool of anger, whereas you were really doing the same thing here that I was doing in GD--just fucking around.
_________________
given2trade wrote:
Oh, you think I'm being douchey? Well I shall have to re-examine everything then. Thanks brah.
Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 2:02 am Posts: 91597 Location: Sector 7-G
Mickey wrote:
cutuphalfdead wrote:
Yeah Mickey didn't walk into anything. I was just being a douchebag and was pretty out of line. Sorry guys.
I dunno about "pretty out of line." I mean I still take offense to your comment and the way of thinking about art that it's a symptom of, but really, a lot of people think that way and you kinda caught the brunt of a pool of anger, whereas you were really doing the same thing here that I was doing in GD--just fucking around.
Yeah I don't even believe what I said here.
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Oh yeah, and apart from the fuck you Chud stuff (which I wasn't involved in so I'll stay out), I agree with Mickey's points entirely.
But y'all know that, right?
The widespread idea that poetry is all about 'feeling' and 'emotion' and that you can't judge a good poem from one that is shat out in five minutes is a huge heap of bullshit that offends me. No one says that about other forms of art, but what they say about poetry tends to undermine all the decades of hard work people put into learning and becoming experts at the craft.
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