Everyone else's less wonderful poetry thread

poetix

we murder to dissect
Fuck it, I'm just using this thread to post my own poems now.

Forgive me if I go astray, or do not.
So much of each bright day is sunk in dreaming,
mazy distraction fractally unspooling,
attention splintering against attrition,
you long for boozy rosiness to blossom
or yoga session leave you luminously
empty-headed.

The yogi is unclean beneath his robes.
The roses are advanced in fermentation.
You picture headspace as a loft apartment,
well-sunned, from which the cleaners have departed
leaving a scent of lavender, a sheen
on every surface, tranquilly awaiting
yuppie tenants.

Not this arrears- and rodent-ridden bolthole
where fugitive and half-deranged you quiver
or, worse, are quite at home, in sloven's Eden
which no loss ever ransacked, the heaped papers
aspiring to the ceiling, the floor a lava
of cast-off underthings, even the very
walls perspiring.

The psyche, it is said, is unforgetting,
a chiselled ledger, or a swizzled swirl
of mingled waters, of which each drop drawn
contains all others potently diluted,
non-lethal cocktail from which clarity
is not forthcoming, even at the point of
dissolution.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Really like that! Reminds me of Eliot and Larkin (Luka always gets this 'reminds me of' thing from me, apologies).

Both you and Luka have a certain poetic tone/register I notice which divides it from spoken speech (or chatty speech as you get on here)

e.g.

'The yogi is unclean beneath his robes'.

You'd never SAY that, would you?

This sort of tone feels more 'natural' in, say, Eliot because he comes from the olden days when people wore bowler hats.

I'm not criticising this tone but I'm interested in why you (and luka) use it
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
There's a sort of ceremonial language that's built up over the centuries within English poetry, alongside the development of things like the Anglican liturgy, such that when you say things like "age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn" you're recognisably speaking in ceremonial garb. I think with Luka's poetry these robes get put on and taken off at will, along with other kinds of costume. I steal a lot from Auden, who did really weird things with syntax and grammar - "consider this and in our time / as the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman". I admit I enjoy wearing the robes - sexy priests are very much in vogue right now.

On the other hand, Geoffrey Hill's recently-published posthumous work includes this gem: "No upright poem in its uptight English can seem to me quite free from limescale under the rim."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's sort of too close for comfort also!

'Not this arrears- and rodent-ridden bolthole
where fugitive and half-deranged you quiver
or, worse, are quite at home, in sloven's Eden
which no loss ever ransacked, the heaped papers
aspiring to the ceiling, the floor a lava
of cast-off underthings, even the very
walls perspiring.'

This is the sort of subject matter I'd be wary of getting into if i wrote poetry, as I think i inevitably would - the wankhole aesthetic, the self-flagellating squalor porn. ("Love again, wanking at ten past three")

Terrifically well written though!
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
On the other hand, Geoffrey Hill's recently-published posthumous work includes this gem: "No upright poem in its uptight English can seem to me quite free from limescale under the rim."

Even this is uptight though ('can seem to me quite free')!

As you say, though, it's an appropriate sort of pose. Yeats was very into the bardic pose, the ceremonial function of poetry.

I think Larkin divested himself of it to an extent, so that his poetry almost could pass as spoken language.

Wordsworth claimed he wanted to make his poetry unpoetic in that sense of heightened rhetoric. Not sure if he pulled it off and some of his prosaic lines now look Poetic to our modern eyes, or if he failed.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
There's some purpose to it in this case - the squalid digs are an extended simile for the state of one's "headspace", and the point is that the unconscious is a hoarder, forgetting nothing: whatever meditation or boozy oblivion might offer, they can't cleanse your mind of everything it's accumulated...
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Larkin modulates in and out of the ceremonial - it's there for most of the "heightened" moments of his verse, but counterbalanced by a deliberate prosaicness and occasional coarse outbursts. Sometimes he lands the most devastating lines without ceremonial dressing though: "The sky is white as clay, with no sun. / Work has to be done. / Postmen like doctors go from house to house". (I suppose you could argue that "plain" English would say "postmen go from house to house, like doctors")
 

luka

Well-known member
Fuck it, I'm just using this thread to post my own poems now.

Forgive me if I go astray, or do not.
So much of each bright day is sunk in dreaming,
mazy distraction fractally unspooling,
attention splintering against attrition,
you long for boozy rosiness to blossom
or yoga session leave you luminously
empty-headed.

The yogi is unclean beneath his robes.
The roses are advanced in fermentation.
You picture headspace as a loft apartment,
well-sunned, from which the cleaners have departed
leaving a scent of lavender, a sheen
on every surface, tranquilly awaiting
yuppie tenants.

Not this arrears- and rodent-ridden bolthole
where fugitive and half-deranged you quiver
or, worse, are quite at home, in sloven's Eden
which no loss ever ransacked, the heaped papers
aspiring to the ceiling, the floor a lava
of cast-off underthings, even the very
walls perspiring.

The psyche, it is said, is unforgetting,
a chiselled ledger, or a swizzled swirl
of mingled waters, of which each drop drawn
contains all others potently diluted,
non-lethal cocktail from which clarity
is not forthcoming, even at the point of
dissolution.

I was saying to corpse on the Penman/Prince thread I assumed you took the opening line from 1999 (quoted in the Penman essay) cos I was intending to steal it too and use it as a launchpad. The identity between mind and room is interesting to me.

"the door to the teenage bedroom is always closed as it is the first space we learn to expand into. within those limits we extend consciousness beyond the skull walls. it is a training programme."

Know what I mean? It's also the basis for all that 'the magic of tidying up' stuff, and the JP tidy your room instruction. There is a shared identity there. It's not just metaphor.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Hill, from Funeral Music:

Averroes, old heathen,
If only you had been right, if Intellect
Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace,
Our lives could be a myth of captivity
Which we might enter: an unpeopled region
Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing
With perpetual silence as with torches.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
In leafy canopy or gallivanting
cornfield trespass, twig-strewn woodland track
to epiphanic clearing, windy rise
to hilltop menhir, bracing lakeside stomp
et cetera, you are restored, self-present
in self-forgetting, Caliban's broad church your
inner sanctum.

As children in those wolf-encircled woods
by dwindling campfire wait for guardians
from hillside blown or fallen in the lake,
spreadeagled figures who have lost their hats,
so amateurs of spirit restively
sit out the Kali Yuga's unrelenting
interregnum.

"Our father", says one, "is a mighty hunter,
for whom a wolf is nothing but a pelt
with halitosis". Something nearby starts,
dashes from patch to patch of undergrowth.
The youngest sniffles. None will live to morning,
nor find between those severing incisors
inward meaning.

Beautiful creatures though. But so are urban
foxes, and less partial to your children.
Iron like irony keeps well at bay
that distant howling. Foxes rut and screech
beneath my window, gnaw discarded wings,
in matters of high spirit not remotely
interested.
 

luka

Well-known member
You're bothered by the wolf call. The mythos of dark wood and re-enchantment. You want an iron sword to keep it at bay? Looking for a weapon which will serve?
 

luka

Well-known member
I wonder if the opening doesn't overpower the proposed rebuttal? But I doubt I'm reading carefully enough.
 

luka

Well-known member
Do we want to foxes gnawing at discarded chicken bones, scavengers at the periphery, disinterested in high spirit? Is that what is proposed?
 
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