Read Serious Poetry with me & Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think all happiness depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some other self, that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed in playing a game like that of a child where one loses the infinite pain of self-realization, a grotesque or solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terrors of judgement, an imaginative Saturnalia that makes one forget reality. Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the world's flight from an infinite blinding beam.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Quite like the idea of claiming Noel Gallagher as an inadvertent genius poet, mainly cos it would annoy the Quietus types
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I deyyyyyyyieeeeeeeeee
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Last night I was stoned as fuck and high on life too and I came across this Keats poem which I've never read before:

After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—
Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a smiling infant’s breath—
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet—a Poet’s death.


I was totally transfixed by this poem. It seemed Shakespearean ("when to the sessions of sweet silent thought...") to me. I love the "anxious month" taking "as a long-lost right the feel of May", and the images, particularly the "eyelids with the passing coolness" fluttering like leaves under "Summer rains".

Then I read "Ode to a Nightingale" which of course I have read before. I think this might be one of the greatest poems I've read, an incomparably transportive poem about being transported. I also realised that there's a conneciton to Yeats's "Byzantium" in the form of the nightingale, whose song transcends time (like the golden birds in Yeats), an image of poetry itself. It's the phrase "No hungry generations tread thee down" that evoked Yeats for me "Those dying generations"...

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:


Also, I recognised that Keats use of the word "Poesy" is a turn-off for the modern reader, because it seems mock-medieval, but that for Keats it wasn't a ridiculous word. And the Grecian references, which seem stock and flowery to us, are metaphorical - so that he calls the moon a "queen" but we aren't perhaps supposed to picture a faery queen, but the moon, vivified by association.

"And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;"


I mean this could make you puke but remember he's describing the moon, not a Queen, and it's less sickening. Perhaps.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Listening to a reading of "Augeries of Innocence" by Blake kicked this all off.

It suddenly seemed so obvious, so self-evident to me, last night - why rhythm is "good" as melody is. How studying metre won't unlock that for you, just as studying notation and harmony won't unlock the beauty of melody.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Found this - never heard Yeats's voice before, quite interesting - reminds me very much of Joyce's voice.


Much MORE interesting is how he reads his poetry. Like he's singing it, really.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
A Little Girl Lost

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time,
Love, sweet Love, was thought a crime!

In the Age of Gold,
Free from winter’s cold,
Youth and maiden bright
To the holy light,
Naked in the sunny beams delight.

Once a youthful pair,
Fill’d with softest care,
Met in garden bright
Where the holy light
Had just remov’d the curtains of the night.

There, in rising day,
On the grass they play;
Parents were afar,
Strangers came not near,
And the maiden soon forgot her fear.

Tired with kisses sweet,
They agree to meet
When the silent sleep
Waves o’er heaven’s deep,
And the weary tired wanderers weep.

To her father white
Came the maiden bright;
But his loving look,
Like the holy book,
All her tender limbs with terror shook.

‘Ona! pale and weak!
To thy father speak:
O! the trembling fear.
O! the dismal care,
That shakes the blossoms of my hoary hair!’
 

luka

Well-known member
resiliant urge undertaking ledge extent to assault webbing assimilation sequence. decode and align.
token wealth package assement. procure funding envelope.probe scion network weakness inheritable gene investment. total wipeout sector. align the cycle. this spin venture momentous next outbreak brochure would you take a moment to touch the lip of very gently and procure the model of your desire. this totem valence choke the neck and cant breathe while the numbers add up and love it dont you till gagging and shirt cuffs very white and starched because detail is always at the very edge of the sadistic. coupon redeem next one in repeat the cycle you again disgraceful could you feel at the furthest extremity of the just the limit of the at the very limit of the just in distance barely of the can you hear me?

funnel wealth attributes. slurry of undigested. new. raw footage events regurgitated into splice camera bleeding into barrel of the and still it doesnt end of the unexpurgated and unalloyed just how you like it brutal unedited barrage of the real you can never have. just again, school satchel never happened, never was that child, never happened frost beneath the feet and crackling, breath just a dewy vapour wasnt it never happened horrors screams but it never was supposed to and the ending category tape shiver falling shiver shiver falling into snow.

battery of tests run through can't be possible but it help me can't be but it screaming in the guts of anguish into retching into camera will you take take to adept into valley sweep above is panoramic on the wings and soaring this is the vast arc of your dreaming paramount star-glimmer children in the ever-night and laughing hahahahahahahhahahaha
just your imagination isn't it

cable my next of tell them terror horror horror tell them shrieking in the abject tell them how i ever but often did it again din of the traffic now no one can hear you slow reverberation of the diesel engines can you slow throb of jet engines up above and even Tashkent Belmopan Dar Es Salaam are they arcing over curve of blue and beyond and into can't you here just grieving patterns of the stomach are just that way of speaking if I wonder could I ever come close again to actual breathing hearing heart and heart and beating but you
know

battery acid coagulate remainder accumulate the fatal dosage past the every time just goading now hear again
could you seagulls in the high horizon, seal head and neck, in the sea-scurf in the flecked atlantic hail in the teal sky which is
ice on the shoulders and just that edge is mine, locked into bone as suffering. is mine as posesssion, mine.

grey anticlimax is never as anticipated hurl the bones behind you sobbing
never be the same again
fooled
that is
not again, but always, just the same way as before.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yes, it's the most entertaining interview I've ever read. It's hilarious. I've read it several times.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table


Barz
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Just read Prufrock on the bog

So many great peerlessly great lines but also stuff like

Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?

Where you can tell this is juvenilia (the best juvenilia imaginable).
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, do it. I had a look to see if anyone had archived it using the Wayback Machine, but they'd only saved the page with the paywall message. Idiots.
 
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