The Focal Point

ok, this is how it reads to me.

it's all about the sounds that create the backdrop of music for the imagery to stand against.

e OY OH
o a A e eNT
i oo I ent aPP inn...


that sort of thing. there are waves of movement, ups and downs in the scale. to my mind this is probably done instinctively by the author as they visualise the movements of water and (as i read this as a dual-poem) the lapping/waves/motion of tongue/hips. I think this is an incredibly erotic poem. perhaps that's just me... i see the 'groyne' and 'the groin'; the 'grey descent' both as the physical image of the groyne/sea and as the grey-haired head of the lover moving down the body to the partners 'groin'.

those two lines:

a silent lapping
ripples on possible glass

are some of the most sensual i have read in a long long time, conjuring (for me) as they do the the overlaying of imagery - the groyne/sea and the oral pleasuring. above all that line 'ripples on possible glass' speaks to me of the sensations, the emotional and physical responses felt by the receiver of the 'lapping'.

take that sensual imagery, set it against a backdrop of grey sea, the scent of the sea, its primal nature, and the rest falls easily into place: the breeze eased... a cadence of waves... the waves being the sensations building in her body leading to orgasm and the release of the 'sound'... the firm attention of the 'uniform posts' is as good a phallic reference as can be found, 'waiting for orders' = waiting till she's reaching climax, and when 'the groyne spoke' is the 'yes i'm cumming, now now now' being the order for firm posts to dive into her sea.


if i have completely misread this poem, then perhaps i should offer an apology to its author, but i enjoyed it so much this way that i want to believe it was intentionally written for us to read it so. :eek:
you must be a riot with Rorschach
but it does clear up the mystery of the anomalous line
stood firm attention
This has to be a better poem than I thought, and I thought it was one of the best I've seen.

The, "problems", more the possibilities of a good poem is it places you there, even if the you are there is a completely different place, than the next person's.

The other being, is returning to find out if you were really there. I feel I misread it.
 
Very interesting and helpful thoughts, twelvie. I've always thought when I read a poem that one way (maybe the main way) I can tell it's a good poem is that it has a "heart," one place, usually one line you can identify that is central to what the poet is trying to say.

And yes, repetitions are important imo, if only to add a sonic, echoey quality as are the counter-intuitive things. It's always more interesting to me to break a line and then have the next line go somewhere unexpected. It gives a reader more options for how to interpret what they read (and if you do it right it doesn't sound at all jarring, just new and different).

Hope you're faring well. Me, I still got a pinched nerve in my neck. It is seriously screwing with my keyboard/writing time. And my doctor tells me I am very not ergonomic. Oh well...

:rose:
Sorry to hear about your pinched nerve, I'm doing well, except for your "Still Life", which is sending me into loops. I find it amazing, I have to keep going back to it. I think I've come to a conclusion. Will post it here. The ending is truly amazing, I had to view it and listen; "echoes" may have been the key. There seems to be a very curious pattern you set up. Following the eyes and ears.
 
you must be a riot with Rorschach
but it does clear up the mystery of the anomalous line
stood firm attention
This has to be a better poem than I thought, and I thought it was one of the best I've seen.

The, "problems", more the possibilities of a good poem is it places you there, even if the you are there is a completely different place, than the next person's.

The other being, is returning to find out if you were really there. I feel I misread it.

i'd love to be analysed :D the blot pic on the upper right of the screen when i open that link looks just like two pikachu's with a little owly-type pokémon inbetween them!

i think this is a wonderful, quiet poem.

perhaps you didn't. but i showed you what it showed me, and having seen it i couldn't unsee it. :cool:
 
i'd love to be analysed :D the blot pic on the upper right of the screen when i open that link looks just like two pikachu's with a little owly-type pokémon inbetween them!

i think this is a wonderful, quiet poem.

perhaps you didn't. but i showed you what it showed me, and having seen it i couldn't unsee it. :cool:

that link is false, you were close, but that link was from a Godzilla porno movie, it was Mothra's vagina, and having seen it i couldn't unsee it.:eek:

TV Digest
The towering spermo
CH, 12 11:30pm
(1974 B&W)
Starring Akio Crotchishima
Man in horrible rubber suit fucks giant bug woman, saves the earth.
(which I have seen in new poems, more than once:rolleyes:)





My guess is Kaishaku will never show up and tell us exactly what he was thinking with his.
 
i'd love to be analysed :D the blot pic on the upper right of the screen when i open that link looks just like two pikachu's with a little owly-type pokémon inbetween them!

i think this is a wonderful, quiet poem.

perhaps you didn't. but i showed you what it showed me, and having seen it i couldn't unsee it. :cool:

I see a headless angel, make what you will from that!
 
At the risk of being totally wrong

Still Life
byAngeline

I had real problems with finding the focal point of this. At one point I even thought it was at "nothing", I'm still not sure it isn't. This poem bothers me, I think I have a handle on it now..

To get to this, I had to go through one of mine. This is an easy example of "Follow the eyes" and an example of an existential crisis. Here a man looks up between two dead branches to an empty sky, and then looks down a deserted street only fo find statues of Mary facing "green eternities" and looks up again to a fat incomprehensible noun phrase so heavy that it falls on him. A stuttering I surrounded by choking shadows, barely escaping, a shade shorn. Mine was about two people I miss very much that were here at Literotica. Two deaths that shook me.

Angeline's is a bit more complex.This strikes me as an experiment on her part, a new direction for her. And she has been reading Wallance Stevens. Some of it looks like more thought should go into it. I get the feeling that she wrote what felt right, more so than planning it out. With good writers half of what they write is instinct and intuition anyway. And as an experiment, the instincts are not quite as sure. So I'll deal with what is.

Still Life

The title, things are moving in the poem, so what does it mean? A life that has been stilled? Or (It is) Still Life? Still is one of the most ambidextrous words in the English language. An enigma.

It’s past noontime

A time when shadows lengthen, this could be symbolic of a crisis that she got though..She also gives another time indicator, in that the trees are spare of leaves. This is also tricky, late autumn, winter, or early spring. She mentions robins singing, this would place it most likely in early spring. Spring could be symbolic of rebirth. Crows could be symbolic of death. Or none of these are symbols, they just are?

and birds
speak a welter of whistle
warble honk and tweet.
Robins chirp mellifluous,
jays shrill and shriek,
crows jeer, squawking
at the shallow fields.


The first stanza are three named birds with their calls. The primary sense is auditory. Now the second stanza, she does an interesting thing with "echoes" a word repeated three times, a bit of deception. She specifically mentions only birds, but the echoes are not theirs, in shallow fields what is there for an echo to bounce off of? Echos dispossessed and removed. Again the sense is primarily auditory, although largely by association.

There are no human voices
only birds and echoes
on the wind, unclear echoes
dispossessed of breath and skin,
carried in the breeze, echoes
of some remove.

The trees are spare of leaves,
traffic a distant hushing past

The third stanza, a broken stanza, visual begins to take over, auditory is hushed. There appears to be some play in the phrase "distant hushing past" implying something both somber and final.

The two wheels bother me, my first thought was a motorcycle, but the sound would overpower the sound of tires on gravel, a bicycle, the front tires of car (the ones that actually turn), a metaphor "two wheels turning in the lane crack" two lives lived and something happened? Breaking rock like scattered bone, echoes dispossessed of breath and skin. A death? At "as scattered bone" the sound stops. The poem becomes visual. An apprehension, then near resolution.

though two wheels turning
in the lane crack loud
like breaking rock
and gravel patters jaggedly
as scattered bone.
The birds retreat then stop,
their small heads cocked.
Dust almost settles.

Up to this point for what is seen, the head would be in a level or near level position. Look what happens next. She even forces it, down to the ground.

The stones repose in intermittent
rows unkempt and leaning slightly
down as if impatient with
the ground and this vast
matinee of sky.

And then the eyes rise, with one of those phrases that either mean nothing, or mean too much, that make poetry what it is.
this vast matinee of sky
What she does here is take a cinematic cliche, plays it, transforms it, transcends it into something heavenly.

Even if the matinee of the sky is merely the birds taking off, even if the stones in the last stanza, are merely gravel kicked up by the wheels, I find this poem to be powerfully evocative of a loss. If it is about a death, (stones, bone, dispossessed of breath and skin) it doesn't ask for sympathy, she doesn't use the "I", she allows the reader to assume it. I have trouble reading Paul Celan for the very same reason.
 
Still Life

I can say some things about that poem that I was not willing to get into at the time because it was still too painful. I think the focal point is the title. The "I" is implied because somebody, the narrator (aka me) is observing a world that felt dead and alive, simultaneously. The poem was written about two months after my mother died. I was "still" grieving, my relationship with my mother was "stilled" and yet I "still" had a life (and an inner life of memories of her), and so the poem was trying to get all that in perspective. And at the time I wrote it I was sitting on my deck which faces a mountain with a lot of bird and wind song but empty of most other noises, save for the occasional car turning into our gravel road. Usually sitting back there is very soothing to me, but given the circumstances it took on a different meaning to me that day.

I never really went back and reworked it because it was painful and, at the time, I was more trying to come to terms with my feelings than write the best poem I could. But I think I could do more with it now that I have some emotional distance from it.

:rose:
 
I can say some things about that poem that I was not willing to get into at the time because it was still too painful. I think the focal point is the title. The "I" is implied because somebody, the narrator (aka me) is observing a world that felt dead and alive, simultaneously. The poem was written about two months after my mother died. I was "still" grieving, my relationship with my mother was "stilled" and yet I "still" had a life (and an inner life of memories of her), and so the poem was trying to get all that in perspective. And at the time I wrote it I was sitting on my deck which faces a mountain with a lot of bird and wind song but empty of most other noises, save for the occasional car turning into our gravel road. Usually sitting back there is very soothing to me, but given the circumstances it took on a different meaning to me that day.

I never really went back and reworked it because it was painful and, at the time, I was more trying to come to terms with my feelings than write the best poem I could. But I think I could do more with it now that I have some emotional distance from it.

:rose:

Thanks for the clarification on that, that must of been hard to write :(

I was interested in this because of 1201's comments regarding internal alignment
 
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