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Is this poem bad?

twelveoone said:
hits on head, bathtub generated

I think that I shall never see
stars like as loverly
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You're talking about "machine generated poetry". Everyone who is writing believes what they are doing is good / interesting / important. Or they want attention. Otherwise, why are they even doing it? It's just many different facets of the same thing. There is no real purpose to poetry (beyond the purpose shared by all art forms — and it isn't even very relevant as art, since "nobody" reads poetry).
 
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Tsotha said:
You're talking about "machine generated poetry". Everyone who is writing believes what they are doing is good / interesting / important. Or they want attention. Otherwise, why are they even doing it? It's just many different facets of the same thing. There is no real purpose to poetry (beyond the purpose shared by all art forms — and it isn't even very relevant as art, since "nobody" reads poetry).
Click to expand...
yeah but is that
sentimentalism
or even trite?
I try to write something that is of interest (hopefully for at least three readers) and it is important that I be good at it, considering the bullshit I do write.
And I'll use every cheap gimcrack, gimmick, I can lay my hands on, to get the reader to the end with at least some sense of satisfaction.
There is nothing "profound" (like our good buddy claims) about it. Any of it. All tools are "gimmicks". All life history is to a certain degree is "made up", nothing quite ever is the way it happened, so even the prime source (the writer) is suspect.
What is "good" or "bad" is determined by an arbitrary set of values as determined by the incompetence of said individual. If they even chose to think about it.
That is right "incompetence", as the human mind conks out and will miss certain things, certain linkages. Too many variables.
Trees is a perfect parody of what Tzara thinks has value in good poetry. Note I said parody.
First line
I think/ that I /shall nev/er see/
acceptable substitution?
I think/ that I /shall nev/er see/

I could care less, how amusing is it to me?
Not very - it directly goes, and I am not talking about the materiel
How faithful is it to its own existence - covered by butters and I

Some it fails, just because it has no prurient interest.

So if it is trite or sentimentalism, how so?

And damn, you are a pitbull Tsotha, fucking relentless. I like that.
 
Tsotha said:
What does it matter whether they died in a war or from slipping in the bathroom and hitting their heads on the bathtub?
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I suppose if 37 million people slipped in their bathtub and died young, during a four year period, it would matter a great deal. Certainly, safety in the home would become a matter if international importance.

If we concede the sun does not breed maggots in a dead dog, poetry is not generated from within. It is a distillation of all that is poured into the vat. How a poet died may not be of particular significance, but the events leading up to it probably will. A small school of poets sat in trenches and bunkers and wrote short verses to mail home. Although we can't know how they saw their future, somewhere between the first casualty and the 37 millionth, a fatalistic feeling must have set in.

How a poet dies may not matter to the poem, but if it doesn't affect the reading of the poem, something is lost.
 
bronzeage said:
I suppose if 37 million people slipped in their bathtub and died young, during a four year period, it would matter a great deal. Certainly, safety in the home would become a matter if international importance.

If we concede the sun does not breed maggots in a dead dog, poetry is not generated from within. It is a distillation of all that is poured into the vat. How a poet died may not be of particular significance, but the events leading up to it probably will. A small school of poets sat in trenches and bunkers and wrote short verses to mail home. Although we can't know how they saw their future, somewhere between the first casualty and the 37 millionth, a fatalistic feeling must have set in.

How a poet dies may not matter to the poem, but if it doesn't affect the reading of the poem, something is lost.
Click to expand...

We'll said, Bronze. I, in fact, think that WWI may have influenced the development of modern poetry more than anyone or anything else.
 
twelveoone said:
btw, this is why Du bist Du, nicht Sie

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

As is, it comes off as sarcastic

everything else works as something counterproductive (almost self parody) until the final two lines

the change I made in line defers the conclusion,
A sight as lovely as a tree
shifts focus more firmly on to the tree
until
Poems are made by fools like me,

And added benefit to my change is it increases the twee factor, which if later sarcasm where to be introduced...via sumac...I was almost tempted to rewrite...see that is what poetry is all about...
Fucking Inspiration!
Click to expand...

pretty sure this can be applied to most people, till they buy into some sort of collective thinking that beheads all thinking except 'the way'.

you see sarcasm - i believe that would depend on delivery (if spoken aloud) and individual interpretation when read or spoken by the same person making the judgement call. for me, i hear a genuine message, delivered with a small sneer embracing the word 'poem'. seems to me it's saying the natural beauty/strength/integrity whatever of a tree, its effortless, unpublicised character, beats hands down any contrived word-art our minds can cobble together.

having said that, i appreciate you pointing out the whole ''the'' tree concept. went right over my head. makes for interesting reading and illustrates how i should take more time contemplating possibilities...

sumac, ha - i like sumac :cattail:
 
To tell you the truth they both bored me to tears for different reasons, but I won't bore you with those! If I write something simplistic I make it funny and hope nobody notices :)
 
bronzeage said:
I suppose if 37 million people slipped in their bathtub and died young, during a four year period, it would matter a great deal. Certainly, safety in the home would become a matter if international importance.

If we concede the sun does not breed maggots in a dead dog, poetry is not generated from within. It is a distillation of all that is poured into the vat. How a poet died may not be of particular significance, but the events leading up to it probably will. A small school of poets sat in trenches and bunkers and wrote short verses to mail home. Although we can't know how they saw their future, somewhere between the first casualty and the 37 millionth, a fatalistic feeling must have set in.

How a poet dies may not matter to the poem, but if it doesn't affect the reading of the poem, something is lost.
Click to expand...
Not particularly germane regarding trees, written in 1913.

Kilmer was probably poetry gratest (sic) gift

follow the links

3rd one down
Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Loko Mori or, Nanny State 911 and the Four Lokos of the Apocalypse

google

Now go out and plant a tree, and when it grows, carve an ass in it, and kiss it in Kilmer's memory.

I'm whittlin my sumac now.
 
bronzeage said:
Covered that point in a previous post. Please try to keep up.
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How a poet dies may not matter to the poem, but if it doesn't affect the reading of the poem, something is lost.

Q. What?
would be the subject of another thread
 
Tzara said:
The Catholic theme is inadvertent. I was reacting to a passage by Ted Kooser where he was comparing a poem (actually a line in a poem) by Swinburne to one by Hopkins, both of which made extensive use of alliteration. He dismissed the Swinburne as shallow and clever but praised Hopkins.

That got me thinking about how we (either in general or individually) assign the labels "good" and "bad" to poets and particular poems. The first "bad" poem that came to mind was "Trees." I figured most of us would label it as "bad," but I was curious why--what about it makes it bad.

The Hopkins poem is more difficult, and perhaps a matter of taste. While I quite admire "Pied Beauty," I find some of his poems so jam-packed with stylistic gimcrack that they seem like self-parody.
Click to expand...

http://books.google.com/books?id=3oi_6oxZfGoC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=Kooser+Swinburne&source=bl&ots=H6eGwSw47r&sig=_SNs68gzjIsCn5W7GBhfc4NwAQU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9svJU7fIK4nksAStt4HgCg&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Kooser%20Swinburne&f=false

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets
By Ted Kooser
page 70 on?

while not disagreeing with Teddy
a line in isolation, "Black is the book of the bounty and its binding is blacker than bluer" will do not do much about providing much information about the windiness of the ol windheaver (sorry couldn't resist) Charles vis–à–vis Hopkins.
 
Tzara said:
Trees
Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.



Source: Poetry (August 1913).
Click to expand...
sets up rymin coups in two line stanzas, wonder how common was that in 1913? Almost like a ghazal stucture, intersected with the old "argument" style of poetry. Structure/ organization is fantastic. I wonder how many are reacting to the "there must be a god..." crap argument. Which he is not really pulling.

Snatch/thatch; I wonder if ol incest fest is going to use this in a series over in new poems?
But only Mom can make me cum.
Go ahead steal it. Five.
 
yep. in context.
Nephelidia
By Algernon Charles Swinburne
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat?
Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation,
Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past;
Flushed with the famishing fullness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation,
Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast?
Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath.
Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses—
"Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die."
Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be,
While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod;
Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm-breathing baby,
As they grope through the grave-yard of creeds, under skies growing green at a groan for the grimness of God.
Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer:
Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things;
Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn that is freed from the fangs that pursue her,
Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.

That was one of the saner lines.
and it is tougher to parody
The horrors of hemorrhoidal heartbreak strained through the sinews of shit
well its getting there
 
UnderYourSpell said:
Just how did this thread get into puke and piles? :eek::confused:
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Depends on how you read it:
The horrors of hemorrhoidal heartbreak strained through the sinews of shit
( piles has more than one reading also.)
I read this like more as asshole generated excess, a subtle dig at Swinburne, of course some (and it would be well within their right) might mistakenly apply that to me. Oh, the horrors! The fucking horrors. And Swinburne did pile it on. Didn't he?

Now the one line in question
Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer:
Has a pretty good follow though
Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things;

I didn't really parse all of this, but I suspect, he might be referring to the Bible probably KJV. Which may explain a bit of the camouflage, as he did not want to upset the anons of the day.
 
The poet of one poem. That poem is horrendous, even in an early 20th Century context. It was sing-songy, same as the hooks in any number of current pop songs. The sentiment is cloying, and it was perfect for the emerging progressive movement that was embracing national/state parks all over the country. Hence Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. I bet I can find the first two lines on some preservationist propaganda regarding just the Adirondack Park decade by decade going back to the printing of the poem. Also, Joyce is a girl's name.
 
Well, God did invent hemorrhoids, so i guess your KJV reference makes sense, 12.
Seems everytime God tubafarted there was another plague on the way.
Lev 7:13 ask not for whom the tuba blows, He farts upon thee!
Or i'm off on the wrong trail again.
Hey! Where is everyone?
 
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Does this poem

A) suck donkey balls?
B) make you horny?
C) smell like a grilled cheese sandwich?
D) some of the above
 
pensivepoet said:
Well, God did invent hemorrhoids, so i guess your KJV reference makes sense, 12.
Seems everytime God tubafarted there was another plague on the way.
Lev 7:13 ask not for whom the tuba blows, He farts upon thee!
Or i'm off on the wrong trail again.
Hey! Where is everyone?
Click to expand...

The Grapes of Wrath?
 
Tzara said:
The Catholic theme is inadvertent. I was reacting to a passage by Ted Kooser where he was comparing a poem (actually a line in a poem) by Swinburne to one by Hopkins, both of which made extensive use of alliteration. He dismissed the Swinburne as shallow and clever but praised Hopkins.

That got me thinking about how we (either in general or individually) assign the labels "good" and "bad" to poets and particular poems. The first "bad" poem that came to mind was "Trees." I figured most of us would label it as "bad," but I was curious why--what about it makes it bad.

The Hopkins poem is more difficult, and perhaps a matter of taste. While I quite admire "Pied Beauty," I find some of his poems so jam-packed with stylistic gimcrack that they seem like self-parody.
Click to expand...
BTW Tzara, was that the correct reference?
Kooser mentioning Hopkins as exuberate? And dismissing Swinburne as clever wind, in his ode to transparency.
1: archaic : to have something in abundance : overflow
2: to become exuberant : show exuberance <exuberated over his victory>

Don't you think in both examples they both sort of overplay (def 1) it?
And in Hopkin's poem it is meant to show exuberance (def 2), while Swinburne's is not? Is it possible Swinburne wrote deliberately in a non transparent way?
And how can you make that assessment of Hopkins and not come up with the same regarding Swinburne? These are rhetorical questions, i.e. ask yourself.
 
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