Loose change

[bodkin]

I think the on-line static page and the paper page are broadly equivalent as regards the reading experience for poetry. Apart from the experience of actually holding the book...

Unlike for, say, novels, which are just too long to read on-line (IMHO).

I wouldn't suggest doing this sort of thing instead of paper poetry. I'd do it as well as the more-traditional approaches.

It is a bit of fun, but I would hope a bit more than a gimmick.

Ian

[clarabow]

Well, now you see it now you don't, but before it took itself off and left me a blank page to look at I thought wow! How did he do that. No don't tell me - technical things are not my bag, but I did feel I missed the poem because it kept changing. Maybe a slow down version, or howabout a static version of this in a post reply page that way, I can actually comment on the poem rather than the wonderous technology. But what I did read was very good but the trick is to keep the wow and the poem?

[bodkin]

I thought I posted the full text to this long ago, but it seems not. Here:

Loose change

I

Where does the future come from,
can we know? I will kick fallen leaves
when they blow around my ankles
in an rustle-russet tide,

but no-one can predict
when one leaf falls from the tree,
how many there will be,
whether I will stay to kick them thoroughly,
or wander on.

II

Why do those leaves fall? Do they shiver
in the summer's blaze, programmed
for an end to days? Or do they realise it late, rebel,
and get their Blade Runner moment:
we built you as best we could.

Perhaps it is so good, for trees,
that leaves don't even figure. Maybe
even when a tree falls
some other tree will say
it's for the good of the forest.

III

Can we see the forest for the trees? Thales thought
the whole world water, intransient, showering
past him all his raindrop days,

and Heraclitus saw it all
as change and only change.

Should he maroon me in this maelstrom,
how can I understand a thing?
How to arrange
a place for Archimedes
to stand and leverage the world?

IV

There is no future. It cannot be
in any way determined. Point at it.
You cannot. Thus for me,

said the blind man, scratching,

the future does not exist.

V

Draw the blinds in Plato's cave,
are we stuck here? If you were brave
you would turn away from the shadow play

(it's just a rock wall anyway,)

and go investigate
the fire.

VI

And do we burn? In one way it is true
we literally do. Metabolism charring sugars into lives
and chemistry a one way street.
Chew your meat. Swallow. You can only go downhill.

Cosmology will show the same thing,
on quite a different scale,
but you cannot fail to see
the analogy.

Death's most-favoured daughter --
Entropy -- she never winds the clock.

VII

The more it changes, the more fools say
la plus ça change as if by that they'd chain
the beast. Blind men with elephants

feel a trunk
run into a face, and think
they know how trunks all go,
until the elephant is replaced with a camel.

Trend analysis is always wrong
but the tree has less leaves
every morning.

[oranggunung]

Hi Ian

this was enormous fun to read when it first appeared and it is still fun now.

However, with the static form to contemplate, I wonder whether the penultimate line should contain the word "fewer".


og

[bodkin]

Hi Ian

this was enormous fun to read when it first appeared and it is still fun now.

However, with the static form to contemplate, I wonder whether the penultimate line should contain the word "fewer".


og

It should. It definitely should...

...unfortunately the way I edited this when I was finishing off makes it almost impossible to edit now.

so that particular grammar error will have to stand. I'll just have to accept that I have my underpants on over my trousers on this occasion.

Ian

[bodkin]

It has been a loooong time, but if anyone is interested I have updated this into an mp4 on youtube with me narrating as the sound track.

See my blog-post here: http://www.ianbadcoe.uk/2015/03/loose-change.html