safety mode (revision)

[riverrun]

beyond all those hilltops
something happened as it
always seems: an afterglow
brought clear skies and open
seas, while the sunset would
align with the random set of
imaginary lovers which by
whim and oversight barely
did what they're supposed to.
kisses and promises were
aimlessly given while the
clear sky under same sketches
would bless this hollow
inflow of arrows and vectors.

trees and boulders would detach
themselves from earth as if they
didn't want to partake again in
faint reverie of easygoing scenery.
seagulls becoming shapeless, (the disembodied flight of a body)
losing their outline because
the vacant urge for freedom
never had aught to go against
or maybe this fake gravity of
weightless bodies miss all
unimportant births and fates,
to maybe amass the bearable
lightness of being.

some children accompanied
by grandparents came from
nowhere; by the remaining
æther of unfulfilled deeds
or by the restraining fabric
of our very entangled guilt.
but alas, they don't seem to
mind for be unreal nor briefly
last without their last breath;
they have this vague wonder
of bystanders, this beautiful
glow of disappearance before
their imminent death.

the afternoon portrait would tire
itself after endless attempts of
landscape compression on daily
basis as sameness's overdose
seems each day less evident;
square rooted under memorabilia,
in wasted furniture and appliance,
attached to walls as that lost hope
to moving out to L.A. like catchers
in the rye.

dissolving marriages
feelings and forewords
births only anticipation
deaths, taxes and ratios
like a full explanation of
life as if these premature
yearnings and oncoming
days to spent under this
safety mode would suffice.

[bjondon]

I like it

[Macavity]

Riverrun your line breaks seem completely random. Is there any reason you snap your lines? Giving emphasis to unimportant words?

immaginary lovers which by
whim and oversight barely
did what they're supposed to.
kisses and promisses were

Typos?

best

mac

[riverrun]

Ty for the comments. Ops it was indeed a typo. Thanks again (bad habit of writing at night it's the cause of this sloppiness). about the break lines they are not random. It was on purpose. I wanted them in that way to break the physiological/logical componentes of speech (phonation, resonance, fluency, Intonation) because it varies from language to language. Latin roots languages have differents pauses, breaks and time to breathe as those from slavic roots for instance (vowels and consonants) and I wanted to mess this up a bit.

best

[Macavity]

about the break lines they are not random. It was on purpose. I wanted them in that way to break the physiological/logical componentes of speech (phonation, resonance, fluency, Intonation) because it varies from language to language. Latin roots languages have differents pauses, breaks and time to breathe as those from slavic roots for instance (vowels and consonants) and I wanted to mess this up a bit.

The outcome is no different from a page of prose.

[bjondon]

Yes, I was wondering about that too. We expect line breaks in a 'poem' to provide additional syntactical/psychological information, whereas here, as I understand, you're employing them more as a blanket device to deny the conventions of both prose and poetry. It is just a side play but an interesting approach. Having said that, I think this would function equally well as five paragraphs or blocks of prose-like text. One other idea I had was that if you could straighten up the right hand side (as in a newspaper column) the ambiguity might play better.
I like that sudden bracketed projection in S2L5
S5 - the lines are clearly shorter. Perhaps a more consistently formal device where each stanza becomes progressively narrower might work here.
The poem makes sense at times as a description of a painting or sequence of made images (ekphrasis?). I say 'at times' because that ground is not at all stable and I like this ambiguity as to whether we are watching 'life' or 'art'.
Jules

[riverrun]

I will respectfully disagree with you Mac. The outcome of prosaic and poetic mindset are completly different. Must be. If use prosaically any symbol (syn + ballein) you must establishes space and time (even when you choose to conceal them as 20th century writers often did - James Joyce, Marcel Proust). So grammatical rules (agreement or concord for instance) are much affected by prose than poetry exactly because of this. I can conceal or condense centuries, millenia even in few verses of a poem wich would be impossible in prose. Of course one could argue about anciente greek poetry, that one must be educated in that specificity as well other poetical canons but the barrier here it's the language itself not the space and time. Quoting George Steiner: "The writing down in prose of philosopic propositions and debates, of fictions and history is a specialized ramification. Conceivably, it is symptomatic of decay. Famously, Plato views it with distaste. Writing, he urges, subverts, enfeebles the primordial strengths and arts of memory, mother of the Muses. [...] Poetry exercises, nurtures memory as prose does not. Its universality is indeed that of music; many ethnic legacies have no other genre. In Hebrew scriptures the prosaic elements are instinct with the beat of verse. Read them aloud and they tend toward song. A good poem conveys the postulate of a new beginning, the vita nuova of the unprecedented. So much of prose is a creature of habit." (STEINER, in. Poésie de la pensée, 2011) Of course George Steiner isn't speaking badly about prose he's only talking about the everyday prose natural wastage. That's why also we can still read fragments of dead poets (Hölderlin or Sapho for instance) and still make some sense and nor only that -- the fragmented aspect became a major aspect of their poetry. Poetry absobs well fragmentation and concealing as prose usually do not.

About the spatial disposition of poem it's very difficult for me Jules after write something to re-write it for basic two reasons. 1st I'm not a native speaker (so the background I get for you guys it's a precious joy). 2nd as you noticed the poem could be written in prose, and many poets like Whitman wrote "prosaic" poems (without much criteria) because we have the feeling that classical forms (pentameter, hexameter, etc) doesn't make the central part of the poetry. I did the same but I placed spatially the verses as if they were in classical form, so it's just a deception really. So yes it could be more deceptively formal (but I'm out of ideas actually). Yes it's about ekphrasis but won't this be expanded to everything in art, even when writing silly poems to girlfriends, aren't we trying, attempting and developing something new (art in shakepeare's sense or even as con artist) to expand our lives?

Best

[Macavity]

The outcome of prosaic and poetic mindset are completly different.

The mindset notion is an interesting one, though prosaic and poetic are usually pejorative when applied in critique. You clearly have an aesthetic.

didn't want to partake again in a

I think we have to agree to disagree. The line is integral in contemporary English poetry from my viewpoint. The line I have quoted is typical of the chopped sentences found on a page of prose. There is always a false tension in a poem when meaning has to be looked for in the line following. It is an ugly device. Obviously taste is subjective: putting the emphasis on a is ridiculous.

Since you enjoy a google, a discussion that may interest:

http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?9958-Lines-and-Linebreaks&s=

best

mac

[riverrun]

Interesting post (+ link) Mac. Tha'ts why I'm posting here on beginners section. Now I understood what you spoke of. Some details and peculiarities are lost for those who aren't native speakers and obviously won't sound so well on native eyes/ears. I presume this is one of this moments. The "a" breaks the fluidity of that verse ("It is an ugly device"). I did read aloud but I didn't find any problem at time. Of course there is still the question of subjectivity, but again it's not what we are debating. Taste can be subjective but it's not without groundings. As a native speaker when you say that it's because you have daily experience on how words and sentences shoud work more properly. In poetry this goes even further. I liked the post I have some disagreement with some ideas ("Poetry is not primarily visual); some will argue (specially modernists after 1920) that poetry is also visual. The apprehension, the imagery, mental ideas are also main aspects of a poem. The synesthesia of art forms come from that. But then again it's not what we are debating. Thanks for the correction and patience.

[bjondon]

Hi river, just returning briefly I find some connections with both Kerouac and Hegel - it is a sort of tumbling significance given to the beatific, the necessity to keep chasing this combined with both an expectation and a surprise each time it is disappointed.
The imagined scene also made me think of the painter Paul Nash.
I see Penguin has recently published a supposedly tevelatory anthology of Prose Poetry. I hate huge heavy hardbacks, but it came out about a year ago so maybe they will give us a softback version. Authors that caught my eye - Anne Carson, Edgar Alan Poe, Margaret Atwood.
The criteria for this volume was writing clearly intended as poetry but without linebreaks . . . so your work would still manage to fall between the cracks!
Jules

[riverrun]

Thanks Jules. I'm sorry for delay the answer to your post. I was very busy this week. Interesting that I personally met Margaret Atwood in my country. She and others poets founded an important literary festival (FLIP / Paraty) where my parents live and I go every year. At that time she spoke exactly what you wrote. But then again the question of Mac really intrigued me. I'm particular fond of christian scholastic in late Antiquity and and early Medieval Age. One of those scholars that i'm studying is Isidore of Seville, probably the most important encyclopedist of his time (7th century). His main achievement was to abridge 1000 years of history (mostly fragmented and close to extinction because bad conditions of book preservation). So he decided to do so on his book Ethymologiae. One of his passages is important because of this: "XX. Combinations of words (De iuncturis verborum) We should be wary of faults in words, so that we don’t position words improperly, which the Greeks call acyrologia. Therefore propriety should be cherished, so that sometimes because of the meanness of a foul and nasty word one should use terms in a transferred sense, yet not fetched from far away, but such as seem neighbors and cognates to the true ones. Very far-fetched hyperbatons, which cannot be employed without confusion with other meanings, should be avoided. Ambiguity (ambiguitas) is also to be avoided, as well as that fault when, carried away by the excitement of oratory, some people conclude, in a long and roundabout rambling (ambages) with empty sounds interposed, what they could have expressed in one or two words. This fault is called perissologia. To this the opposite guilty fault is to rob the speech of even essential words in one’s zeal for brevity."

It's common to poets to hide and conceal, but in doing so, they also risk to the norms not only of poetry (as you said a lot of poets doing without follow the strict rules of line breaks) but also those of speech (rethoric and oratory). For those who are well versed and trained in a specific formalism (here there is no value judgment -- I am not discussing the merit -- because frankly it doesn't matter) it's important the propper use of vernacular exactly because classical tradition. So the question Mac brought about line breaks also brings the question about the combination of words. But we aren't exactly writing in the 18th century. The digital era makes pratically impossible to writers or poets to write very long paragraphs or stanzas as customary in 18th century. There's a new trend in combining words nowadays. I frankly do not know where it all goes. But I presume that must be something related with what Marshal Mcluhan wrote on his Gutenberg Galaxy.

Best