Hehe. 'Cummings'. Heh.

Grey Ghost

Uh, Rane?
Why are you suddenly on my ignore list?

Oh shit did you hit 100k?

Crashmo

GG try to pay attention

The Lovely Bastard

quick everyone ignore gg

Metzger Meister

seriously though poetry is great.

except for i cannot for the fucking life of me focus on really long poems.

it makes me itch.

mensch-o-matic

short poems own

"Crow, Scarecrow"
Leonard Gontarek

A crow sits on the head
of a scarecrow. I see myself in that.
Which part of fuck off don't I understand.

Metzger Meister

i think poetry excels most when the author is succinct and concise with what they mean to say or what emotions they're trying to convey. at some point there is no more need for any further lily-gilding.


edit: haha, holy shit, you could have a porn star named Lily and she could be in a porn about facials called "Gilding the Lily"

someone call hollywood.

Lost Salient

The truth I do not stretch or shove
When I state that the dog is full of love.
I've also found, by actual test,
A wet dog is the lovingest.

I really like Ogden Nash. I had an illustrated book of his animal poems as a kid and I wish I could find his poem to the lamprey; it was my favourite.

This is his poem 'Very Like a Whale' which is also awesome.

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have
to go out
of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot
of Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus
hinder longevity,
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming
in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf
on
the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there
are
a great many things,
But I don't imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple
and gold
cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually
like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and
big white teeth and did he say Woof woof?
Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the
very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts
about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had
to
invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate
them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to
people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot
of wolves dressed
up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer
to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a
winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket
of snow and
I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and
we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly,
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

I Win Swordfights

Speaking of the thread title

Today in AP Government

I gave someone something, they said thank you, I said you're welcome but they couldn't hear me

So they said "I thanked you!" and I said "I welcomed!"

And Mr. Wenderoff says, "Yeah but she didn't"

I love my teachers

Okay story time that is interesting to no one but me is over now.

AMP'd

Speaking of of poetry, today in English I tried to lay down some Tennyson to a beat

It didn't work as poorly as you would think

Hobnail

Here lies Les Moore

Four slugs from a .44

No less, no more

Butler For Life #1

AMP'd wrote: »

Speaking of of poetry, today in English I tried to lay down some Tennyson to a beat

It didn't work as poorly as you would think

Did I mention the Emily Dickison-Gilligan's Island thing in this thread? Because it works really, really well.

Grey Ghost

I really like Eliot's "The Waste Land," though a lot of it goes entirely over my head

I think my favorite part though is

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

It's delightfully spooky

AMP'd

The Waste Land is the most amazing commentary on the 20th century

Fuck, I need to go reread it

Green Dream

I was once going to write a thesis - it was going to be awesome. It was on the relationship in language between divine law, natural law, and civil law, with a view to explaining how the fundamental disconnect between our primitive and highly general conceptual/linguistic tools and brutely particular nature leaves us with a host of apparently insoluble philosophical probelms that consume our best thinkers, but are, at base, meaningless logical traps that divert our attention from the world itself. And then I read this:


when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

— e.e.cummings


Well, shit, Mr. cummings. Way to put me out of a job. I mean, I'd use that as an epigraph, but then you could just read the epigraph and throw the book away.

Having devoted so much time to meaningless problems without solutions, and now being left without the heart to pursue an academic career, I knew I only had one option for employment.

At least government pays well.


Too erudite, don't want to read: THIS THREAD NEEDS MORE cummings UP INS.