Challenge: Full of Sound and Fury

[champagne1982]

So is that shifted at all if you read it aloud yourself? That makes a difference for me, but I don't know if it does for anyone else.

*sigh* Sometimes you're all alone and you just have to do it for yourself if you want it done...

bj

mmhmm.. I'm lazy. I find it hard to read aloud, especially something that isn't quite on the conventional side of form. People around me tend to look at me, aghast and as if I had just sprouted a penis on my chin... or something.

But yeah, the few times I can read aloud, it helps, but I still am wrapped in the "work" it takes to read the poem rather than the pleasure I can get from hearing someone else do it all for me.

I'm a closet audio-poem-o-phile.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

mmhmm.. I'm lazy. I find it hard to read aloud, especially something that isn't quite on the conventional side of form. People around me tend to look at me, aghast and as if I had just sprouted a penis on my chin... or something.

But yeah, the few times I can read aloud, it helps, but I still am wrapped in the "work" it takes to read the poem rather than the pleasure I can get from hearing someone else do it all for me.

I'm a closet audio-poem-o-phile.

I just want it on record that you started the whole double entendre thing even though that is a lie. Nice metaphor, by the way.

Guess I'm different, because there's a sort of pleasure for me in reading something aloud. One 'tastes' the words, feels them as they're shaped.

but then I'm rather oral as well as aural.

bj

 

[champagne1982]

I found the thread on Eve's Habit. We were to try and write a poem inspired by the sound of the wind; to make the poem an aural representation of the title. Eolian Poetry

eolian • \ee-OH-lee-un\ • adjective
: borne, deposited, produced, or eroded by the wind

I wrote:
Eolian Prairie

Words whoosh past birch leaf
rustle on the song of west
wind wonder. The slough
sighs slap against the shore
grasses and make the cattails
shiver each time a breath
stirs a reaction. Pond lilies
moan with the rise and fall
of her voice; exhaled poetry.

Angeline posted a terzanelle and WSO gave us a free verse sample of her own. Of course, dear Rybka left his mark on that thread, as he did many others on WE's site. But, there are many poems at Eve's Habit and interested people should try to pop on over and join, if only for the read.

You have to get past the moderators (Angeline and Wildsweetone) and the owner (Wicked Eve), but none of them bite and they all drink, from what I've heard rumoured. It's a poetic thing...

now that absinthe is no longer outlawed down there, I may just send them all a gift certificate. We can get hallucinogenic and write filthy absinthe inspired fellatio poetry or something.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Where do I find that please? This site is like a ruddy maze I get sidetracked and lost all over the place!!

 

[LeBroz]

Where do I find that please? This site is like a ruddy maze I get sidetracked and lost all over the place!!

Eve's Habit isn't here at Lit, it's Wicked Eve's own site. You can go there and register — I keep meaning to wander on over there but get tripped up by procrastination.

.
.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Sigh all I get is this ........ Sorry, registration is currently disabled. Ever had one of those days?

 

[champagne1982]

Sigh all I get is this ........ Sorry, registration is currently disabled. Ever had one of those days?

Just send Wicked Eve or Angeline or Wildsweetone a pm and they'll get you in, I'm sure. The site has some fantastic poetry on it and is Eve's personal repository for her poetry, no one wants to see it plagiarized as it has been in the past, thus the security.

 

[bluebell]

Thanks, Angeline, for the welcome and comments (and that goes for you too, bj).

I'll delve into your post now (are we cranially linked? I swear you're thinking the same things as me ).

...I prefer reading to myself because my imagination can do more when I can pause and think and then read on to my next pause.

Yes, I totally agree. Not only does it allow you to go at the pace you need to absorb what you want, but it becomes this private world. I know that's kind of a "duh" statement, but it struck me when I was reading what you typed there that reading to oneself could be, I daresay, almost as intimate as making love. And I don't just mean erotica either. That intimacy enhances the written erotica experience, to be sure, but there's a different connection that goes on between the reader and their material. That's probably why it's possible to have so many snafus about movies being made from books. People have specific images and feelings about what they're reading. Aside from any plot changes that get made, it becomes a visual manifestation of something that's been very privately created. It's bound to feel weird and sort of like a violation at times.

Maybe our connection to silent or aural reading depends entirely on the situation. Sometimes two people reading aloud to one another can be just as moving as reading to oneself. Sometimes a poet is so able to captivate at a reading, that you're totally aware of what's going on, and you're moved. A subsequent cuddle-up with that poet's work might just build on what you'd heard.
Most of the time I feel the same way as Champagne, "the few times I can read aloud, it helps, but I still am wrapped in the "work" it takes to read the poem rather than the pleasure I can get from hearing someone else do it all for me."

And your relationship to words and phrases, as well as the sort of auditory feel that Ange talks about, is very similar to mine. The sound, the sound is everything for me. That's why I keep going back to the example of Stein's Susie Asado, because that just demands to be spoken aloud. It just isn't the same otherwise; it doesn't have the same impact.

Here's the thing, does anyone else feel like even when they're reading silently they have the distinct impression that they ARE reading it out loud? I know that sounds weird, but sometimes I wonder whether there are two ways to read out loud: to yourself and then actually verbalizing.
When I read out loud, I almost feel like I've shattered the perfect, silent, attentive round-table environment I had set up in my brain. It becomes real. I have to worry if I'll trip over words or pronounce something wrong or be completely moved by reading a piece that doesn't move the audience listening to it.

And then I worry that if I only wrote for aural reading, I'd get more focused on the effect (e.g., shock, whatever) than the words.

Yes. There has to be a line between what it takes to write a poem that is effective both orally and silently. But where is it? Can we create both without pandering?

I think many, many people feel this way, mostly about poetry, but often about "literature" in general. I think it has to do with the way most of us are taught, as if literature and especially poetry is somehow too profound or intellectual for us regular schlubs, as if all we can do, at best, is have some dim appreciation for it.

...So we grow up with this attitude toward understanding or writing poetry that it's impossible. Or many of us who do attempt to write poetry try for this uber-formal voice and throw in as many five-dollar words as possible and it ends up sounding either pompous or incomprehensible.

*claps* Yes! That's exactly right! There's something heady about it that sort of prevents people from trying to read/do/understand. It feels like a massive chunk of knowledge and information must be processed before they can even approach that stuff. Which, when you think about it, is sort of natural. Lots of activities require knowledge and skill, but people aren't always so intimidated by just learning one step at a time. Gradually taking everything in.
I definitely still feel sort of lesser when I consider how much I don't know about poetry, but I'm trying. I tend to feel that it's easier to start at the highest point of interest and move from there. And I know I like to be "acquainted" with my authors and musicians. I like to know who they were/are as people because that propels me to find out more, to be interested in things that might have seemed daunting or vaguely boring before.

I love what bijou said about being someone who "makes things with words." I feel the same way. It can be so tense, writing. Thinking about writing, proofing the writing, wondering if you even ought to call yourself a writer, wondering if your work is even worthy to be labeled something as general as "poem" or "story". They seem like broad terms but if you think of them as labels, it gets scary. Like you're owning something about yourself that may or may not feel true. It could be true, but it may not feel true. It takes courage to write and even more courage to be good at it.

Of the authors on this board, I've noticed this quality most in both 4degrees and vampiredust's work - sometimes I read them first just for the sound; I may not even engage the "what is being said" function immediately. Their phrases are just explosions of sensation, of image and idea and sound. Only on a second or third reading can I get past that auditory high and begin to find meaning, to evaluate on a more rational level, to look at the Idea or the Story in the piece.

Yes. There are so many ways to read poems and turn them over in your mind (or your ears), it really is best to know that re-reading is a key function for being a reader. I imagine you're speaking more figuratively than that, but I do know what you mean. It's like lighting a fuse, which burns down and lights another fuse, which burns down and lights another fuse, and so on and so on. You kind of get a different sensation each time.

I hope you try for an entry in the challenge part of this thread as well. That feeling of intimidation you describe about poetry is part of the issue that I keep trying to address by taking these challenges to Regular People, Non-Poets, for their response. If we as "poets" really want to stop being an insular little ivory tower society, that's going to make a difference.

The wheels are turning on my end (amazing, I know).

ETA: Uh, not sure if this post made sense.

 

[bluebell]

Let's prime the pump a bit. Here's another piece by Tristan Tzara. Someone needs to explain to me what exactly is going on here and why it turns me on so much.


Vegetable Swallow
by Tristan Tzara

two smiles meet towards
the child-wheel of my zeal
the bloody baggage of creatures
made flesh in physical legends-lives

the nimble stags storms cloud over
rain falls under the scissors of
the dark hairdresser-furiously
swimming under the clashing arpeggios

in the machine's sap grass
grows around with sharp eyes
here the share of our caresses
dead and departed with the waves

gives itself up to the judgment of time
parted by the meridian of hairs
non strikes in our hands
the spices of human pleasures

This poem is really wicked. Not that I could tell you what's going on.
I'm wavering between thinking it has something to do with getting a haircut, walking on the beach during a storm, or meeting up with someone you idolized as a child...even though underneath my thinking I'm thinking that what I'm thinking Makes No Sense.

My guess at the reason it reads so awesomely (inwardly and outwardly) is all the opposites being thrown out there.
We've got this kind of loud chaotic imagery (whatever it is) crashing around like a giant in a pair of boat-sized boots on a crowded bar and then this quieter but persistent sibilance threaded through everything. Like someone is running the hissiest beer tap or soda squirter in the bar while the giant is dancing.

There's also this slight rhyming that runs a thin ribbon throughout, which offsets another set of opposing forces: the uses of hard and soft images. Smiles/bloody baggage, nimble stags/clashing arpeggios, sharp eyes/caresses/waves, judgment of time/spices of human pleasures.
And even those opposites can be listed in opposites. What was hard in the beginning of the stanza could be soft by the end and vice versa.
I'm just riffing this, by the way. I could be really wrong.


To add my own geek-out: I know I quoted from one of his poems before, but I'll admit again that I have a serious thing for Li-Young Lee. *laugh* I love this poem probably almost as much as Bijou loves Susie Asado.
It's partly because I met him and attended a few of his readings, and partly because his words are just so good. You can tell he takes his time with composition, and so you must take your time with the reading. It's not slow and ambling, it's just centered. He strips away everything that doesn't need to be there, and yet I've never once been unable to picture exactly what he's describing. And hearing him read it out loud was amazing. Almost orgasmic. He has such a soft, soothing voice. You have to strain your ears just enough to pay attention.

Okay, I'll stop gushing now. Here's the poem.

PERSIMMONS

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.

Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Do you mind if I cry? Without explanation?

 

[bluebell]

Do you mind if I cry? Without explanation?

Oh no darling. Just cover your eyes and pretend I didn't blab so much. That lot would make anyone cry. *wink*