mvuent

Void Dweller
the other day i was looking through a poetry anthology i was apparently assigned in 8th grade. in the intro, the editor says that when analyzing a poem, the first thing you need to do is determine the speaker, audience, and rhetorical situation. to demonstrate this point, he uses a wordsworth poem. he says it's not really clear who the speaker is, but we can speculate. he says the audience is even tougher to define, but apologizes that "this is not always the case". he then notes that "we don't have many clues" as to the rhetorical situation. so why did he use the poem as literally his first example? surely his analysis strategy would look better if it worked at least once? is his entire pedagogical model based on some kind of personal humiliation fetish, and if so, are people like this really who middle schoolers should be learning about poetry from?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I do think it's worth thinking about who the speaker is, even though you usually can't exactly tell, because they don't explicitly say "I'm Count Grishnack, the neo-nazi black metal artist imprisoned for murder" e.g.

But it's easy to assume the speaker is 'the poet' when often it's actually a door-to-door vacuum salesman with gall stones and a ten inch wanger.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"I (a disgraced pork butcher from Southampton, hounded from my home for carving up a stray cat) wandered lonely as a cloud"

original draft, "the christabel notebooks"
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was reading dryden recently (have i told this 'story' already?) and at first i was very into it but after a while i got sick of the A/B/A/B rhyme scheme, the monotony (though brilliantly handled) of heroic couplets...

And all at once I saw

Then I read Wordsworth and it was such a relief, really... No need to rhyme every line, everything more sober and unaffected, sentences spilling over lines, highly organised but not regimented, and above all no need for 'wit'.

I'm sure it isn't as simple as dryden/pope/swift et al... HERE COMES WORDSWORTH

But in an anthology at least you think WW really did change everything in english poetry
 

sus

Moderator
[Don]
God having failed to provide us with water
We put our faith in capitalism

[Chorus]
Foreigners recline in shade

[Don]
The trick is to get enough sun, but not too much

[Linda]
That’s life, she said

[Chorus]
She was inspecting an
Iridescent beetle which
On- close inspection was
Shown to be a two-backed beast

[Linda]
That’s just life, she said
There’s no language for it
Goldilocks knew alllllllll about that.
There’s nothing but feeling,
And the feelers who follow it.
Her eyes were whim wending up
the spiral of a vine
Growing from a terrace trellis
To shade
The foreigners.

[Don]
The foreigners looked like foreigners;
it was hard not to
Time in the sun, a quality of gaze
Something about hunger,
how much gear you carried.
Are you applying sunscreen
Are you checking a map
Only travelers got sunburns
It was a process of adjusting to new climes

[Chorus]
They watch the cyclists eat croissants da asporto
They watch their lycra swallowtails twist in the wind
Flags, flapping colors, nylon heraldry

[Don]
Her special power was a social agnosticism
In the realm of formal judgments

[Linda]
To her they are not “running shoes”
They are something insectoid, they’re
Covered in cobwebs they’re
Splayed with eyes and wings

[Don]
This allows her to make novel moves
In games of decorating

[Linda]
Champions see the game different
They have a different theory of relations

[Don]
The objects in their world
Do not exist in ours
 

sus

Moderator
Reading Chesterton's "Santa Barbara" I realized for the first time

that in rhymed & metered poems, the final word lingers in the mind

& waits for its harmonization, in the coming lines

it is like music, it is an undertone, silently sustained

anticipation which if upset, seems dissonant
 

Murphy

cat malogen
Do you listen to Bob Ashley? I posted some of his lyrics higher in this thread. He's real great.



the transcript available muddies what’s spoken in the track, so better to gleam your own ideas of its word flow, has a lick of I Am Sitting in a Room acoustics as the vocals distort further, quite short too but effective tripping sounds for the uninitiated

 
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