Poetry Forum

That's interesting, Terreson - might be a useful list to have here! Can you define your holy trinity - 'gestalt, its kinetic energy, and its organic unity' - do you mean the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, the way all the parts of the poem link together? Ros Well, Ros, I can give it ...

But isn't it the case that only a very few poems have that depth of physical reaction? I know a few that I return to that can make me feel like that. But I read lots of others that I consider good or clever poems that never affect me that much. I suppose when they do it's a mixture of a) the poem b...

I hope the discussion has not gone moribund. A bunch of years ago A.E. Housman enabled me to effect a paradigm shift when it comes to this perennial debate. I was led to him, and to his famous 1933 lecture at Cambridge, through reading Robert Graves. I wish I could have been there. Report has it tha...

Well, Ros and all, I can only speak for my side of the pond. But here the current primer of poetics and prosody is "The New Book of Forms: a handbook of poetics," by Lewis Turco. It treats with the materials involved in technique. But Turco's approach is slightly different. He focuses on h...

The poem's lines put to good use running rhythm. Metrical construction makes it possible to read the poem through without falter. I particularly like the poem's conception, it being hard to make a love song with originality to it, which this has. There are a couple of word-concepts I myself would ha...

Salome She said once she was badly used by her mother. Memory is an image moment as involuntary as a shiver underneath a thunderstorm when the atmosphere, charged, pulls on, makes skip the electric bolt in your body. Sometimes sweet. Her breath in a dream, her cedar scent, her moist encounter, and t...

This is a seriously good poem. I don't know if this will make sense, but I am all the more inclined to trust my sense of the poem as it is not something I could do or would even think to do. It comes across as an entirely different species of poetry. (Actually I did make a drinking song poem once, b...

Talk about synchronicity. I just chanced on this link. If you look very quickly, very quickly, in the first frame of this video you will see Cohen's Suzanne. She is the lady sitting to the left of him. They are in a nightclub. http://video.aol.com/video-detail/leonard-cohen-leonard-cohen-im-your-man...

Metrical construction could not be cleaner. Line rhythm, running the way it does, leads me easily to the next line and the next. The notion of Isis light, by the way, strikes a responsive chord. I confess that, at first, the language comes across as a bit too generalized, bordering on the abstract, ...

I've always associated this particular Cohen song with his sixties novel, "Beautiful Losers." And with a story about Cohen's wife from those years who, if the story is not apocryphal, killed herself. "Yes and thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes. I thought it was there for go...

Thanks for the welcome, David. The name has been with me since '91 or so when I registered material with the U.S. L of C. Shoot it has become more natural to me than my street-name. I'll look for the board's IBPC discussions. While I've never had direct dealings with the association I am a great fan...

This is good stuff and solid. The honesty of the portrait is what strikes me the most, both unapologetic and clinical. Relationship between dog and hunter comes through. As does the self-portrait, what is especially well conveyed in the poem's last line. The poem says essentialy what Ortega Y Gasset...

Good stuff. The poem tickles on the brain, especially with how the punch line comes in clues before it gets delivered. And I notice how line control gives the poem momentum, even drive, which is something I always look for in a poem, the kinetics of the thing.

Terreson

The poem works well for me. I am a sucker for what I guess you could call submersion poems, since, viewed as metaphor, they can be layered and evokative. They bring to mind a range of images from an Innuit shaman diving down to the bottom of the sea and coming back with a curative for a sick patient...

Dated perhaps, going back to '82, but I am still partial to Richard Howard's translation.

Terreson

Hello all. I've been looking for a new poetry board, new to me that is, and a friend recently reminded me that your board is associated with the IBPC consortium. (Over the years I've come to admire Rus Bowden tremendously. If he says a board is good to go it is good to go.) So I figure to see how ev...