Read Serious Poetry with me & Corpsey

version

Well-known member
Cheers for that. A bunch of it went over my head as I dunno the poets he's referencing, but it was a decent read. The stuff re: making a "clean break" and not repeating oneself probably made the strongest impression; being surprised by your own words and his knowing that the book on molecular forces would be of significance jumped out at me too. I've definitely experienced the former, writing a piece of music or whatever then going back to it and wondering where it came from.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
A sentence in Prynne, taken not altogether at random: "Did one / breech up, furl down top to wonder blank or pretty / to its far affected double pontiff hilted dab in / severance divot".

Now "double pontiff hilted dab in / severance divot" is just a tremendous sequence of words almost maximally unconnected to one another, so oblique to each other's purposes that they twinkle like points in a vast night sky of connotation. And you can draw lines between them, form a constellation, look at the shape of it. Alongside the static image of the word-constellation there's also the rhythm, the train of associations, the mouthfeel* and earfeel and brainfeel of the thing. I picked this sentence out because I liked the feel of it.

So the sentence, and the poem to which it belongs, is doing at least these two things, forming a snapshot of a collection of linguistic tokens arranged in collage, and scampering along rhythmically and sonorously making a shape in the space of spoken or imagined-spoken utterance, without doing most of the usual things that sentences do: indicating something, conveying a wish or an attitude or an intention, providing a clue as to the speaker's wishes or state of mind. It's abiding pretty strictly to the rubric that "a poem should not mean, but be". And there's something quite deliberately walled-off about it, but on principle, so that the matter of the poem can be apprehended and experienced and experimented with outside of the usual constraints of interpretation - "what does this person mean? what do they want me to feel? what kind of person are they telling me they want me to think they are?"

* yes, I know
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I have a Freudian fantasy somewhere up there of reading this Prynne guy's poems and absolutely tearing them apart in front of my father Luka's brimming eyes

Is that wrong?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
What does it look or feel like to do violence to these poems? Do they tear like a rack of ribs, or wet tissue paper? Do they smash and crumble to sizzling ash under a rain of critical meteorites?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
In other words, if one wanted to say, really crushingly and ruthlessly and definitively, what was wrong with them, what was inadequate or shady or just unsurpassably displeasing, where would one start? What kinds of judgement would one make?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'd have to read one first I suppose

"double pontiff hilted dab in / severance divo" doesn't make me want to though

Mainly the fantasy is about overcoming the crushing paternal weight of Luka's superior aesthetic judgement

The bastard
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Cowper was the leading poet between Pope and Wordsworth, apparently, and Coleridge rated him highly. I happened across this poem about the snail yesterday.

The Snail
William Cowper - 1731-1800


To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall,
The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall,
As if he grew there, house and all
Together.

Within that house secure he hides,
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides
Of weather.

Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting power is such,
He shrinks into his house, with much
Displeasure.

Where'er he dwells, he dwells alone,
Except himself has chattels none,
Well satisfied to be his own
Whole treasure.

Thus, hermit-like, his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meets one, only feeds
The faster.

Who seeks him must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combin'd)
If, finding it, he fails to find
Its master.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think it's a very very funny interview. He's a great character. The section in Thailand is amazing. It's hilarious. The rumour is Jeremy in the yellow submarine film is based on him. I haven't watched it though so who knows.
 

luka

Well-known member
He was mates with Rupert sheldrake in the late 60s early 70s when sheldrake was at Cambridge working on wound response in plants. You might like this essay poetix. Again, lots of fun, if not always easy to follow.
It's about the long prose poem that comes out of his involvement with sheldrake. Grapejuice recently emailed sheldrake about this and the response was, yeah, very clever man, understood my work but I didn't understand his at all!

https://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/g2-katko.pdf
 

luka

Well-known member
Selected lines from the kirghiz disaster, Prynne

"Juniper, moss agate, jurassic boredom glows in the empty waiting room"

"searching the band for another station reveals new liassic beds near the previous shelf."

"They are zealots in the park all over"

"Then I eat a care-
ful selection of food.
My fork skim thought-
fully from side to
side. I keep up a
steady munch"

"He now drops the heavenly coin in the doorway"

"So that Jerome springs back into place, your friendly dental technician trailing his new bridge-work"

"The redeemed corset strains into view again and we perk up finally by the counter"
 

version

Well-known member
"Juniper, moss agate, jurassic boredom glows in the empty waiting room"

"searching the band for another station reveals new liassic beds near the previous shelf."

"They are zealots in the park all over"

"He now drops the heavenly coin in the doorway"

These four.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Perhaps the answer is poetry.

They are zealots in the park all over

I don't see what's interesting or beautiful or anything about this. Version does.

He now drops the heavenly coin in the doorway.

Nope.

I'm not slagging it off, I'm genuinely stumped.
 
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