[New-Poetry] What is Poetry?

Mon Jul 2 12:29:43 EDT 2007

I'd be honored.

Hal

"[News is] what somebody doesn't want you to know.
  All the rest is advertising."
                       --Dan Rather

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html

On Jul 2, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Mccall, Steven NAVAIR wrote:

> Georgia O'Keeffe loved flowers.  I've visited her residence in  
> Abiquiu a
> couple of times, and she grew a lot of flowers there.  Just outside  
> her
> studio door she grew Datura, which she highly valued as both a flower
> and subject matter.  However she'd probably hate this poem.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Halvard  
> Johnson
> Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 11:52
> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] What is Poetry?
>
> Here's a real poem then:
>
> ATM in Lobby
>
>                          "Lobby Girl sits on the fat man's knee-e,
>                           fat man happy as he can be-e."
>
> He picked up the heavy lamp from the table and began to explore
> the hips tight with her leg, his genuine and less guilty wealth.
> Shampooing her lips, swimming and casting round his eye to delve
> with some companions what men began to loosen.
>
> Her vagina clamped down upon his cock, and he sends Eurylochus
> to explore, to feel it pulsate to her body, shimmer into a herald of
> new dreaming.
> We think we cannot, so then we must investigate this as she became  
> lost
> in the throes of her orgasm. This struck dead their hearts,
>
> The end of this counsel being to persuade his soldiers he had actually
> done it with a woman. Those parts which he knew would prove a most,
> to them, unpleasing motion, to take his cock with her hands and close
> her mouth about the head, and therefore I advise thee to explore.
>
> I now am bound, in purpose, to seek by this device of travel
> to slowly tighten on it, sucking it until she had about half of it in
> her mouth,
> to earn by her deep explorings, to satiate him, sucking on it like
> a popsicle, eyes glued to mine, savoring my every reaction.
>
> And thoughts of sacred Sparta, up and down the coastline of my
> straining cock,
> of our land, its cultivation of the soil and of the mind, exploring
> the interior
> regions of her mouth, preparing by scientific means problems that
> will unite
> us instead of belaboring those problems which invoke the wonders
>
> of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars,
> conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean until finally  
> all
> of my cock was buried in her mouth. As we plumb the vastnesses
> of space, let us go to the new worlds together. She ground
>
> her face against my stomach ere I could explore its wildernesses.
> All forms and substances twisting her head back and forth,
> then returning to fucking my cock with her mouth. At Oxford, I found
> the liberty and seclusion best fitted for my active and exploring  
> mind.
>
> No safer place than college for a youth whose mind wasn't going
> to take anything too roundly. Nothing in my previous experience had
> prepared
> me for the great daring and venture of sailors on new voyages of
> discovery.
> I could feel my balls swelling, getting ready to expel my fluids.
>
> Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me.
>
>
> --HJ
>
>
>
>
>
> "I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're
>   cheaper than models and they don't move."
> 			--Georgia O'Keefe
>
> Halvard Johnson
> ================
> halvard at earthlink.net
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html
>
>
> On Jul 2, 2007, at 9:45 AM, Mccall, Steven NAVAIR wrote:
>
>> Yes, "real poems" would feature an ATM machine.  Marianne Moore said,
>> "Poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them."  ATM machines
>> qualify as toads in my mind.
>>
>> "In good art there is almost always a mystery which remains beyond
>> explanation."
>> ~ Dana Gioia
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Jeff  
>> Newberry
>> Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 10:33
>> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp,Views
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] What is Poetry?
>>
>> Jim,
>>
>> I hadn't considered Jeffers' relationship to mystery.  Thanks for
>> pointing that out.
>>
>> Jeffers is an interesting case.  Here are a couple of quotes from
>> Jeffers' scant prose (from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,
>> Tim
>> Hunt, ed.):
>>
>> " . . . poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent
>> things
>> and the permanent aspects of life [ . . . ] poetry must deal with
>> things
>> that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved
>> by."
>>
>>
>> This quote skirts close to Faulkner's "old verities."   Jeffers
>> goes to
>> to clarify his meaning:
>>
>> "This [emphasis on the permanent] excludes much of the
>> circumstances of
>> modern life, especially in cities.  Fashions, forms of machinery, the
>> more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so
>> forth, are
>> all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again.
>> Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things.  These
>> have poetic value; the ephemeral have only news-value."
>>
>> I'm reminded, of course, of Pound's pithy dictum:  "Poetry is news
>> that
>> stays news."  However, I don't know that Jeffers really means what he
>> says:  hasn't human society always had "complex social, financial,
>> [and]
>> political adjustments?" (not sure what adjustments means in this
>> context, btw).  Is Jeffers arguing that a "real poem" (my loaded  
>> term)
>> would never feature an airplane, say?  Or an ATM machine?
>>
>> Just a few thoughts.
>>
>> Jeff Newberry
>>
>>
>> On 7/2/07, jforjames at aol.com < jforjames at aol.com
>> <mailto:jforjames at aol.com> > wrote:
>>
>> 	Jackson's quote is a good one...though it's like so many quotes
>> that have some "certainty" in their saying.
>> 	He's framing the battle for poetry's soul as 'either/or' or
>> 'zero sum' matter. That poetry can live with unceartainty
>> 	and indeterminancy should be pretty well established by now. It
>> seems to me that's much the fashion
>> 	of poetry these days, particular post-avant poetry. Personally,
>> I wouldn't want to avoid a poetry strove,
>> 	at times, for fixity and exactness. I think a poet is capable of
>> finding the stil-point amid the welter.
>> 	
>> 	It's curious that Jackson uses the verb 'illumine'...which means
>> to shed light, and more generally, to show cleary.
>> 	So we 'illumine' what is obscure (mysterious, inscrutable,
>> etc.). The 'walls of mystery' made me think of Plato's wall
>> 	within the cave. And living with 'doubt and uncertainty' is a
>> notion close to Socrates' notion of 'aphoria'. Then
>> 	Jackson seems to veer off at end this quote with almost a nod to
>> someone like Robinson Jeffers (or eco-poetics),
>> 	'with a return to elemental awe and wonder'. (Jeffers' sonnet
>> "Return, e.g.).
>> 	
>> 	No answers here...only observations.
>> 	Finnegan
>> 	
>> 	
>> 	
>>
>> 		It's the Negative Capability letter. To his brothers.
>> 		
>> 		*several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it
>> struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement,
>> especially in
>> Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean
>> Negative Capability, that is, /when a man is capable of being in
>> uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching  
>> after
>> fact and reason/-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine
>> isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from
>> being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. *
>> 		
>> 		The thing is, poetry is kinda different from life. In
>> life, we probably have to reach after fact and reason pretty early  
>> on.
>> In poetry, we allow ourselves a little more time. We can be of three
>> minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds.
>> 		
>> 		I've asked this before, but since we're back to it
>> again...what is Keats saying about Coleridge? The conventional wisdom
>> seems to be that he's criticizing for a limitation -- I think he's
>> praising him for a superior quality. I suppose that to try and answer
>> this question might constitute an */irritable reaching after fact and
>> reason/, *but what the hey.
>> 		
>> 		Jeff Newberry wrote:
>> 		> It's funny that you mention Keats, Mole. I've been
>> reading through > his letters. I'll try to track down the passage you
>> reference. I'm > pretty sure that I know what you're talking about.
>> 		>
>> 		> Jeff Newberry
>> 		>
>> 		> On 7/1/07, *TheOldMole* <Opus40-01 at opus40.org > <
>> mailto:Opus40-01 at opus40.org <mailto:Opus40-01 at opus40.org?> >> wrote:
>> 		>
>> 		> Keats kinda said the same thing.
>> 		>
>> 		> Jeff Newberry wrote:
>> 		> > " . . . one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine
>> the walls of
>> 		> > mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think
>> poetry ought to be
>> 		> > taught not as an engine of meaning but as an
>> opportunity to learn to
>> 		> > live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of
>> claiming indeterminacy.
>> 		> > Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of
>> reason, but I
>> 		> > think it high time we return to elemental awe and
>> wonder."
>> 		> >
>> 		> > --Major Jackson, "Does Poetry Have a Social
>> Function," Poetry,
>> 		> January
>> 		> > 2007
>> 		
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than
>> recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
>> -William Faulkner, Light in August
>>
>>
>> http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com
>>
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