Poetry

[Wintereis]

Hey, I have been revising a couple of older poems. The one I am interested in getting feedback from is a bit difficult, so bare with it. I hope you enjoy.


Fractal I

(On Deep Time)

Each has come to this border
to write themselves in stone.
Here, where the Missouri River
cuts an ancient coast in cross-section
are records of obsolescence: remnants
of fan like shells, belemnite fragments,
life before stone gathered them in gradients.

You have until this instant forgotten
the to be unfolding from the page,
and from this past at hand, I have
a question of seem and other didactics—

like how a polished stone was once
an ammonite’s shell, opalized in volcanic ash.
It has no memory of its ancient inland seas
or how beneath sediment life becomes stone
as it measures the cool weight of seasons.

If this is you or me or the history
of any lived poem—if stars fission
an ageless bundled energy or leaves
squall a saffron light on city sidewalks

none of this is here until you are here.
This is before there were flowers on earth,
and what we read is told from landscapes
in limestone two-hundred-million-years-ago.

If these thing are no more than shadows,
reality plays in the lamp light on cave walls,
and you have killed the only one
who ever whispered truth in your ear

for the love of illusion. If a poem is its own
reality and you dot your eyes with ink stains
and suffuse yourself in texture and frissons,
you have breathed again in the early light,
you have seen yourself written into strata.

[The Virgin]

when i can't understand a poem somehow, it's a sign that that poem is actually good. since your poem confuses me, congrats! it's a good poem.

[toomuch45]

pretty good poem i would definately like to hear moremile:

[The Virgin]

why majority or all of the poems are the figurative/metamorphic type? i mean you have to read it over and over again to understand the meaning... or i'm just dumb, i guess.. hehe

[Wintereis]

Figurative language and metaphor are quintessential to poetry in all regions of the world and throughout history. It is an aspect of what differentiates it from informative or, depending, prose writing. It is not unusual to have to read a poem several times to understand it or to even get more out of it than you did the first time. In this way, it is much like a good film or novel. Part of what those who enjoy poetry get out of it is the object of discovery. Since I tend to integrate contemporary philosophy and lean slightly more toward avant garde writing, mine can tend to be a little more difficult to understand than more traditional or even formal poetry,not that I view any of it as dialectical by any means. Thank you for your feedback.

"Traditional"





"Avant Garde"

[OrphanPip]

I have this feeling T.S. Eliot is rolling over in his grave for being called traditional. But he was an elitist douche bag anyway. I've been rereading The Wasteland today, and he's not exactly what I would call an easily understood poet. (Though it was more Pound's mantra to "make it new")

I'll take a closer look at the poem and comment when I'm less busy, and have the time to break it down and look at it seriously.

[Wintereis]

Certainly, Eliot was a Modernist, an innovator in his time, but he started publishing almost a century ago. It can hardly be considered Avan Garde by contemporary standards. Should I have used Byron? I would think he would be positively antiquated when juxtaposed with today's writers. No one writes like Byron today but some still do write like Eliot.

"Easily Understood Poet":

[marshlander]

I don't pretend to have caught all your references, but I enjoy such a tumble of words that carries me along with it. Thanks, I'm sure your work will bear many repeated readings.

[OrphanPip]

Yes, well I tend to side with those who argue there really isn't much of a break between the modernist and post-modernist, apart from maybe thematic focus. I think the links to other high modernist like early Pound and Stein are readily apparent, though there is probably an intermediary influence of the Beats and the New York School poets at work too. I'm hesitant to refer to Eliot as traditional, because I'm not sure how far from Eliot we've really gone. While what you chose to call avant-garde recalls Stein or Frank O'Hara, some highly innovative contemporary poets, like Anne Carson, certain seem to be working in the same way as late-Pound and Eliot. Is one really more experimental or daring than the other? I'm not so sure.

Edit: Although, Borges I think is a major influence on Carson as well. And maybe those post-modernist trends that unite a Carson with a poet like John Ashburry do distinguish them in a significant way from modernist, even if I'm not sure major stylistic innovations have been made by anyone since the 50s.

This is all debatable of course, I'm not much of an expert on contemporary poetry anyway.

[Wintereis]

Yes, well I tend to side with those who argue there really isn't much of a break between the modernist and post-modernist, apart from maybe thematic focus. I think the links to other high modernist like early Pound and Stein are readily apparent, though there is probably an intermediary influence of the Beats and the New York School poets at work too. I'm hesitant to refer to Eliot as traditional, because I'm not sure how far from Eliot we've really gone. While what you chose to call avant-garde recalls Stein or Frank O'Hara, some highly innovative contemporary poets, like Anne Carson, certain seem to be working in the same way as late-Pound and Eliot. Is one really more experimental or daring than the other? I'm not so sure.

Edit: Although, Borges I think is a major influence on Carson as well. And maybe those post-modernist trends that unite a Carson with a poet like John Ashburry do distinguish them in a significant way from modernist, even if I'm not sure major stylistic innovations have been made by anyone since the 50s.

This is all debatable of course, I'm not much of an expert on contemporary poetry anyway.

Thanks for the history lesson, but I already had it several years ago, and I am not so much interested in semantics as I am in trying to move toward something unique and something that expresses how I think and feel and that challenges me. Far too many people get caught up in defining art rather than looking at it. I think that tends to be a particular vice of the New York School and its descendants. But, that is the great misfortune of language itself and cognition in general, over reliance on the categorical in a world that functions in continuums. I like to think--being more the product of a natural milieu rather than a social one--that I am more visceral than The New York School or at least hope to be. Thank you for the discussion. It was a nice reminder of all those old debates I used to have in class.