Poetry Forum

I quite liked this, and thought it could go a couple of ways: the recollective fumblings of an elderly gent, or even someone trying to offer an eyewitness account to a police officer.

Line 14, I thought, could have been ended with "aways."

Cheers,

Gene

'Suppose the priest, instead of evil, for Lord, you are with me; your rod, and your staff... as the fair sun attends the sad and soar, is saying, Well, I guess he was a twat. is saying, Well, he always was a bit daft. True, "daft" is not as rude a word as "twat," but we're talki...

If you mean the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, you might need to correct the spelling of "Azimov."

That last line had a contorted syntax that didn't quite work for me. I kept thinking:

I’ll stick to an order that's alphabetical.

"Teacher" for "pilot?" Lord love the man for holding in his hands the tender minds of young Japanese students (not unlike yours truly, though mine have left high school—not that it's easy to tell, in Japan :D ). "Encroaching snow?" That is perhaps me trying to find down...

oranggunung wrote:Elph...

leave me/through with warmer veins

the ‘leave’ was meant as in interleave/interleaf
og

"Weave" would be a fine substitution for "leave."

I quite liked this. At the moment, the biggest difficulty I encountered was your curious use of commas: about dying for love, another in white on, emerald about a son killed by cosmic reaction. There's a scratch in the arm of the man holding, a camera, alive in the wind, hair pierced with the, mood ...

It is supposed to be very bleak. It is actually a poem imbedded as a plot device in an as yet unpublished science fiction novelette, composed by one of two starship pilots who have been plugged into an AI system for 15 years. One pilot is human, the other is a construct created to keep the human fro...

F'narg, whadda, must compute, brain wang, spliff needed, at ease, nope it's dope, floodgate massacre. OK-Computer. By means of reciprocation. Can one moan down telephones making gronal noises from the scrotal sackage, though? Sorry Gene, just couldn't help it! :D Off to the temple stoop. A set of f...

Thanks Barrie, Elphin, and dog. If it requires explaining, then it hasn't done it's job in the first place, so I have some things to think about here. Overall, it's a generational piece, growth, death, rebirth; and individual, in that relationships fall apart and people start new ones that also fall...

barrie wrote:.......but you can kick a ball about in your backyard - not just a koan.

And if you catch the right monk at the right time as he smiles mysteriously, he may reply, "Will koans never cease?"

Everyone seems to wax poetic about Ryôan Temple's stone garden. I went. I saw. The monks have a great cash cow. No wonder they smile mysteriously when you see it and ask, "That's it?"

Ryôanji? Really?
Dirt, gravel, mossy rock piles?
Just like my back yard.

(Just couldn't help it... )

Thanks Gene and Tom for your suggestions - I think my best bet would be to just omit the last verse and leave it at that. It's taking a long time to land this one, but don't cut your line yet. - I'll give it a lot of slack and use the rod rest while I eat me butties. There is a balance with that la...

How about moving that line as suggested below?

My mother was told
in the hospital ward
that she must rest.
She just grew cold
and never got dressed.

I see the changing in our distances, of winter differences, encroaching snow: there great abandon takes us, deserts us like a momentary wind lost in starry deep immensities. In distance like a mirror we are tied and what’s between us we are not until we touch, and see our watermarks in surface tensi...

There's nothing wrong with writing poetry about the dullness of certain situations, especially when they're dull. The trick is to capture the dullness without being dull. That's why I said I think you have something to work with. Some of your lines work well while others don't take off. If it were a...

I was thinking of something Tolstoy said. Allegories are for good news. Bad news makes for stories. Something like that eeling through my cortical synapses. A sloppy morning. Woke at half-past eight to a recumbent sun drearily haul The second line was awkward and looked like it was missing a verb li...

A tribute to the election of Boris Johnson as LM of L? Probably not; that's just on my mind because I happened to notice the London mayoral election. I liked the sparse language here, the sense that the "real" king of England could be somebody else or actually be the real king just as disc...

There seemed to be a lot going on here, and it didn't seem to hang together for me. There were some nice lines I liked. The May evening: humid, still, like lovers sleeping in late; While I like this, I think it could do without the "in". It did strike me as a little odd, but perhaps it's j...

I second Barrie's comments. You're onto something, but need to draw back from the portions that tend to sound like you're expounding in an essay—something of a poetic "expository lump"—and let the reader do the work of understanding the sense of wonder that we often describe as being magic...

I very much liked that you avoided the kind of "Orientalism" that often creeps into poems written about China (and Japan) by Westerners. You pretty much captured Pound's mindset—what of it I could gather from his own brief essays—when Pound sought to translated his own versions of Li Po an...

How funny. I could not help but think "Y' what?" stood out a bit awkwardly, unrhymed among all the other lines. Also, the end became rather burdened by rhymes with "bones," which left me with a feeling that you were running out of momentum. Those last seven lines, though, were pr...

Just "Aqua Fortis" for the title, as suggested above. I agree with ending on "I savored his innards, instead." The lines following this are anticlimactic.

Even so, this had a lot of punch.

I think you mean "ecstasy" in the final line. I couldn't connect with "frozen poultry." Likewise, I wondered why the two phrases were italicized. Were you suggesting some kind of desperate act committed with the poultry? There are some nice lines—the opening two and the last four...

Thanks, Barrie. I take your point. Prose poetry is a debatable overlap. My generalized conception is that the rhythm of the language parses like poetry, and the language calls attention to itself through imagery and metaphor. Likewise, internal rhyme, assonance, and consonance may be a factor. Scrim...

For an ice-cold beer
I mose certainly do rave—
Pause for Burma Shave...