fallen verses

Hobbyhorse, Hobbyhorse (A Paradelle)

Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
The scribed truths in this letter barred,
Every recharter formerly allowed by preaching.

Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Turbo flooding sent up the inbox. The records imperfect.
Chain of results. Of the falsifier.

What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
A called guide is replying sportingly to what refund?
Astraddle dismay, he is offered a had hobbyhorse

The recharter is astraddle a barred dismay.
The hobbyhorse guide is called, allowed by
Imperfect truths formerly in the inbox of preaching.
This letter turbo-scribed is a what? Results falsifier.
Every chain had records replying to flooding
Sportingly sent, the refund he offered up of the A.

The Read Write Prompt for this week was to use echolalia as the “hinge” of the poem. The wikipedia description of immediate echolalia seemed suggestive of certain poetic uses of repetition and it occurred to me the paradelle, as a form, seemed kind of echolalaic (anyone?). And, because I like to surprise myself when I write, I headed to WatchOut4Snakes and used their random word generator to get some “seed” words. Anyway, other people’s variously echolalaic or ekphrastic poems will be shared here.

Briefly, regarding the paradelle, they are tough. Not so much to write (unlike, say, a sonnet), but to write well.

Disagree with me on what the refrains of the villanelle do cognitively with the most formal definition of the villanelle if you want. There’s room for interpretation that.

Disagree with me on whether content or form is most important in poetry.

Disagree with me on the role of poetry in the world, if you want to!

Do not, ever, fucking disagree with me on the definition of a goddamn word when I am right!!!! Don’t be some “expert” when your first freaking use of the word in question is WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Meter, in poetry, is not synonomous with form. Not. Synonomous.

Meter = binary opposition of the phonological features of language in a regular pattern. Courtesy the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

Syllables have no opposition!!!!!And are not, for that matter, phonological features of a language!!!!!!!!

Syllables != Meter

Love the exclamation mark!!!!!!!!!!!

*It’s like road rage, but sipping a latte and wearing a beret.

Laughing in the Wind
after Rosetti

Still no one has seen the wind.
In these sepia photos the night
sky is the color of espresso.
Spring rains can be warm and gentle.
No one has really seen those either.

Still, no one has seen the wind.
Science, however, turns with the answer:
smoke. A trick that works in tunnels
but autumn remains stubbornly
unconvinced. Fire is too terrible.

Unless it is the incandescent burn
of passionate eyes. There is
velocity when falling,
even when falling in love.

The wind itself remains silent.
The wind itself explores all surfaces.
Realize, however, that the wind
is, itself, something to be explored.
Like silence. Like love.

Dana challenged us with a collection of words. Since I am never one to ignore a dropped gauntlet (er.. except the 30-40 prompts I didn’t do), I used that list as the basis. It took a few iterations before I found something that started working for me, and that is what remains above.

I didn’t use it, but in the wordle image the phrase “science turning tricksy” stood out to me. But it’s tricky like a mischevous god not tricksy like a con man. At least not true science, but you know what they say about true scotsmen.

Actually, being a pretty damn strict materialist / rationalist, I have enormous respect for science and the paradigm it works under. I don’t think it’s tricksy at all. I think Art is tricksy as all get out. And that is o.k. too.

via Poetry Hut Blog

Burger King Launches Canadian Online Poetry Contest (link)

…

Haiku is an ancient form of Japanese poetry consisting of a set number of syllables per line: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third. The website includes haiku samples and an easy-to-use haiku-writing application….

/boggle

I think this calls for bullet points:

• “Ancient” is a very fluffy word in this context. Language is so fluffy to begin with but then we take words that have meanings and we stretch those meanings and stretch them and stretch them and soon, they have holes big enough in their ears you could mini-putt through them! So, while this is true, it is only true in some meanings of the word. Regardless, I don’t think I would call the 17th century ancient.
• Syllables: well, Japanese does not have syllables, so it is, in fact, impossible for Japanese poetry to have a form based on them. Japanese is measured in on (which are moras), which are not syllables!!!!!
• Per line? Well, the line issue. The glaring 5-7-5 of grade school prosody. Haiku (as an independent form) were not three line poems. Often, they were written in one line. Or, when mixed with visual arts in haiga, were formed according to how they best fit with the image (something the poets at Postal Poetry are working with).
• 5-7-5… well, remember, not syllables in Japanese, but on. Haiku are not 5-7-5, not really. They employ (in their most formal sense) a kireji (cutting word) after the fifth or twelfth on. The kireji serving as a point of separation similar to colon, semicolon, dash, ellipses, something of that nature. A little math and you can see how 12/5 or 5/12 gets thought of as (5+7)/5 or 5/(7+5) to get the tripartite form we use in western haiku.
• “easy-to-use haiku-writing application”  ????? write text, count, edit text, recount. Notepad does this!!!!

Feel free to ignore the man behind the curtain wearing the gold paper crown.

And feel free to ignore whoever wrote that idiotic trade-journal article. I mean, fuck, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, WIKIPEDIA it! How about, mr. fast-food-writer-man*, you write about the new innovation in fryers and leave the poem-talk to people that know more about poetry than your average 4th grader!

*I say man, of course, meaning the non-gender specific referent for person while still conveying “The Man.” mr. fast-food-writer-person just wouldn’t have had the same edge to it.

A Pin Worked Loose

Tatterdemalion slink into depleted villas,
each step chasing memories deeper into
these antiquated courtyards.

Here are artifacts which nobody recognizes.
They remain untouched. Visitors, focused inward,
do not notice them. They tarnish, fade, rust.

Outside, civil guards scream obscenities.
Someone has posted Lorca’s broadsides
believing both duende and Andalusia are omnipresent.

Somewhere else, meditation resurfaces a lost “I.”
In that same place a girl is born. An old woman dies.
Later, the process is repeated. And again. And again.

In an open notebook are words brilliant but forgettable-
tenuously held together scraps called verses.
The page is a pin worked loose- the center holds,
but a breeze carries the frayed edges out of sight.

It seems such a waste to let those words stand alone on this page. Especially when so many of them will be repeated from piece to piece, each a playful rehuffling of context and content.

Tatterdemalion is a word I have only encountered previously in a Terry Brooks novel: Knight of the Word. It was a magic creature, animated by the spirit of a dead child, built of scraps. Similar to its real definition in an essence. Tatters, the ends, fading, decay. I also think it echoes the essence of this excercise. We all started with scraps and are putting them together.

Most of my poetry is written in a first-person perspective. I edited to remove the “I” from this poem. It seemed, to me, the “I” was too strong an identity for the poem to hold. The “I” was too complete. So I deleted it.

I’m curious to see so many other takes on this arrangement of words. See both what words get used most often and how their meanings change from place to place.

Additional information: I wrote the majority of this poem while listening to James Blunt’s album Back to Bedlam. Judge as you will.

Check out everyone else’s responses at Read Write Poem while you’re at it!

So, by now, I imagine most poets on the internet have heard of Issue 1 from forgodot.com*. I don’t care at all about any ethical issues with their use of peoples names and false attributions of poetic texts. Do. Not. Care. I think we, as people not just poets, place way too much stock in the notion of creation anyway. Nothing new under the sun in sex or poetry.

What interests me is the system by which the poems were created: the Erica T Carter algorithm. The poem below was “written” using that algorithm and, frankly, I would be happy to call it mine. Perhaps it is mine: I set the machine in motion to produce the result. Perhaps it is Jim Carpenter’s since he created the machine. Who knows. Who cares. As artists our job is to create, but that creation is not ex nihilo, it is a process all its own whereby our experiences, be they real, dream, borrowed, are filtered and twisted and looked at through broken glass until art is expressed.

The problem is not that forgodot used people’s names without permission, or even that they attributed falsely the generated texts to writers, or whether Issue 1 is just flarf. The problem is that these programs clearly show that poetry is not, in some aspects, a human act. The relation of words on the page is something can be generated by a program. It is nonsense but, let’s be honest, much avant-garde work may also be nonsense. The problem is that this shows our viewpoint of poetry is that it is solely the relationship of words to other words.

Poetry is not just the relationship of words to each other. That is verbal music, no more. Poetry is the relation of ideas to words to emotions. It is an evocative art rather than a representational one. That is why Erica T Carter and Issue 1 is ultimately irrelevant**, there is no evocation. Just words.

A crescent of negotiations

Her viridian crescents chuckle and crawl
Catching for a child

Clip any case to care about the
cochineal of contempt
How long should
I be a creed above her
coming crucifix?
Is this cashmere then, this cherubic consciousness,?
I am close

“I plan prints,” I
call
Between this prank
and that prank

What did I cite, covering, coming
above my crystals?
The hand next
I am costly
This time I
confer her

I am needed by an exclaim
There is my wizard-finger, there is another,
and there the wings of cobalt
blue she nurtures
I give her a way
But what if I should
wade sometimes, sometimes, yellow and wrong?

*IF you somehow have not, some links: Harriet 1 and 2, Silliman, Wet Asphalt, SeeqPod.

**IRRELEVANT as Art, I mean. It is interesting in other ways. Particularly the sociological sphere of poetry.

“What makes me fall in love with your WoW blog” by Larísa

Recently I’ve been thinking about why I like some WoW blogs more than others. There are blogs where I eagerly lick every single word that comes out. They’re so excellent that I always feel I’d wanted a little bit more. And then there are other blogs, some of them actually very well established, with hundreds or thousands of daily visitors, who leave me absolutely indifferent.
You could say it’s just a matter of taste, a gut feeling or something like that, but I’d like to explore it a little bit more. What exactly is it that makes me fall in love with a blog? What do some blogs have that other lacks?
* * *
After some pondering I realized that I should go further back in history to find the answers. – all the way back to the old Greece. I think the well known authors and philosophers from that era would have become excellent bloggers. They really knew how to catch an audience.
According to the classic rhetoric you should use your Ethos, Pathos and Logos, which is exactly what many of the best bloggers do, whether they think about it or not.

Go. Read. Probably ignore the links because they won’t mean anything to you (which is okay).

Back? No. Alright.

Okay… I think Larisa raises some really interesting points about breaking down stylistic elements of communication. The examples meant quite a bit to me, because I read those blogs every time they post, but for the rest of you, I hope the ideas made sense even without the highlighting.

I think those classical elements (ethos, pathos, logos) are pretty much inherent in human communication whether it’s formally assembled or purely random conversation. I also think the -os that is dominant is going to strongly alter the way the communication is presented. Not that there are hard and fast rules involved, but the more logos-directed, the more likely you are to find more structured, ordered types of communication.

Really, lists and thesis-oriented paragraphs favor communication with discrete and/or sequential data. Mostly informative.

Getting into pathos and ethos, there is a breakdown of the form into something more free-flowing (ah, no hating! sweeping generalisations!) where disparate elements can go together. There is no need to contain and, for that matter, you can conflate and mix metaphors all you like when you don’t need to prove anything!

Blogging fits an interesting niche, I think. As a method of communication, it serves well enough in any mode. (though I think there are limitations to the medium, but that’s another topic) Poetry, as a method of communication, I don’t think fairs all that well with logos. We tap into pathos, perhaps ethos. A lot of poetry is about bypassing reason. In a way, you could call poetry a form of propaganda. Political poetry (most especially from the “wrong side”) could easily be considered propagandistic. And anyone who know any literary criticism should be able to BS about the propagandistic nature of poetry about love, or nature (and how the poem/poet reinforces stereotypes/the patriarchy/heteronormativity/[insert -ism here].)

Is that all poetry should do? Should verse be instructional in a factual sense? There are some poems that present factual information. I think those are mostly side effects of the trope of the poem rather than the point. Would an instruction manual in verse be poetry or just a collection of really bad rhymes?

As part of a much larger question of what is poetry, and what is art, and what is artistic prose that is poem-like, we can consider the nature of poetic communication. I’m fine with keeping poetry in the realms of the emotive rather than the intellectual, but that excludes poetry that plays with language without meaning… it’s a fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy line.

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It’s a static-crusted world:
constant interference from the streaming
24/7 into our minds
which are as alterable as wikipedia.

The data in the table is corrupt
and we need to reindex;
we have forgotten to back-up
emotions. Memory is salvageable-
it is watching television without color
and we soon bore of it.

Attention is the microtransaction of the mind.

Sign the check,
enter your pin,
wait for the confirmation email and continue.
Always verify the information is correct.
No one can retrieve you
if you have lost
the password.

One thing I’ve always struggled with in my own mind is whether it is appropriate or not to contextualize my poems. To explain them. A dictum from most critique I’ve done is that it is best to not speak at all, to not provide answers: ultimately, the poem stands on its own in some journal or some book and that’s that. However, I feel that viewpoint neglects the benefits of the medium of blogging. Here, we are not limited by page count. We can collect information and hyper-reference and cross-reference, and probably do other compounded-reference words that I don’t even know!

This poem was written in response to two things: Jillypoet’s read write prompt (you can read others’ replies here), and a snippet of lyric from the song in this Brotherhood 2.0 video. The lyric that prompted this has since been removed as I opted to not write a love poem. I think perhaps I write too easily in that genre. So, a departure, a deviation, one of the damn few poems I’ve written this year. In case you happen to be curious (and I still plan to work with it, probably in some sort of love poem) the lyric that I “caught” was: “As in a mirror, dimly.”

A thought:I am awesome. However, I am synergistically super-awesome. Like an anode, I require a counterpart for these sparks to be more than just flares in the darkness.

A note: I am aware that an anode (speaking technically) has no meaning outside of being in a pair with a cathode and that there would be no sparks. All symbolic language fails at some point because no thing is ever the same as an other thing. At best we can have facile similarities that have connotation. And sound pretty and/or interesting. Meanwhile meaning continues eluding us because, ultimately, a word is also a thing.

I spent most of that night watching
the perfect half-circle of her lips
and feeling the slow rise and fall of untroubled sleep.

I woke while the shower was still running
and pictured the dark curve of hair
cascading across the small of her back
before it was vigorously towel-dried.

There was footsteps,
the sounds of doors and drawers
and the whisper of cloth against skin.
The zipper of a suitcase.

I kept to the imperfect artifice of a shallow breathing.
With my eyes closed I watched
as she stood in the doorway,
turned toward the bed-
her lips formed an unasked question,
and she waited for its answer.

In the silence-
which proved answer enough-
I chanced a deep breath
to capture the essence of her perfume
(the only thing that lingered).

If asked to describe it,
I could only say
that it smelled like twilight,
like the very last touch of pink
after the sun has set.