GENIUS FORUMS

Kevin said something like poetry is written because one doesn't wish to think. True enough.

But some poetry is about what people don't wish to think about. So not too bad.

This thread is only for poems of that ilk. End it with a one-line summary, to say what it is about.


born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the elevators break
as political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

born into this
walking and living through this
dying because of this
muted because of this
castrated
debauched
disinherited
because of this
fooled by this
used by this
pissed on by this
made crazy and sick by this
made violent
made inhuman
by this

the heart is blackened
the fingers reach for the throat
the gun
the knife
the bomb
the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

the fingers reach for the bottle
the pill
the powder

we are born into this sorrowful deadliness
we are born into a government 60 years in debt
that soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
and the banks will burn
money will be useless
there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
it will be guns and roving mobs
land will be useless
food will become a diminishing return
nuclear power will be taken over by the many
explosions will continually shake the earth
radiated robot men will stalk each other
the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground

the sun will not be seen and it will always be night
trees will die
all vegetation will die
radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
the sea will be poisoned
the lakes and rivers will vanish
rain will be the new gold

the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases

and the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
the petering out of supplies
the natural effect of general decay

and there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
born out of that.

the sun still hidden there
awaiting the next chapter.


- Charles Bukowski


Stupidity creates a lot of mess, and enormous suffering. The mess burgeons but cannot be sustained. It ends. Something else happens. There is no conscious learning from mistakes where consciousness is destroyed.

I think that's just prose split onto different lines.

I think what you were getting at, is obfuscation.

Symbolising symbols is obfuscation.
Straightforward symbols are truth-getting.

I think if the language is enjoyed, and the writing is polished for the sake of being pleasing, then it becomes poetry.

When it becomes enjoyment of an emotion, and the poet turns into a vampire, sucking the reader's spirit.

If Bukowski really enjoyed being a slob, ugly, alcoholic, criticising the world to feed his self-hatred, then it would be poetry.

Kevin Solway wrote:I think that's just prose split onto different lines.

Poetry is supposed to be able to be read prosaically. When there's no consistent meter or rhyme it's called free verse.

Only a fool! Only a poet!...


(Friedrich Nietzsche)

I always found that pretty good as far as translated poetry goes although it has its problems. For example the original of 'only a fool' is nur nar which has obviously more internal rhyme to it. Adding hurt to injury is the fact that the word 'nar' is an old word mainly used for jester or a king's fool and way less, if at all, for an ordinary, ignorant, fool which the translation might suggest to some. Best translation would be "just jester" I suppose.

Philosopher's Drinking Song

Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable.
Heideggar, Heideggar was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nieizsche couldn't teach 'ya 'bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stewart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shanty was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am."
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.

It's Monty Python. The poem's not really saying anything, but it sounds good around a campfire.

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955
________________________________________

According to Mistress---er, Master Kelly, I am supposed to offer some comments?

Seems to me it touches on the issue of 'identification', that if you are forced to stare at something long enough you can end up becoming it, so whereas Bukowski's poem is apocalyptic and dark and pessimist and offers no hope, Sunflower Sutra expresses hope, a way out of the grime.

The Poet's Fool

Everyone everyone, here ye, hear ye

Who is really the Fool, ye fools

Not her, she is far to clever to be anyone's fool
but, she was fool enough to be lured into this foolish
parade of verbal longwindedness, so she is a fool too and
is even enjoying being a fool.

But the biggest fool is the Poet's Fool!

She has them running to her beckon call, to her every whim,
but are they really her fools,

No they are not!

They are her tools

Fools tools

The Poets Fool

is also the Poet's Tool!

Since Donna hasn't offered her thoughts on what her poetry is about, I'll do it for her.

I am narcissistic, meaning, I exist only in relation to others.

Bukowski's poetry may seem pessimistic, Alex. I think he's describing life accurately, as he has experienced it in Los Angeles.

If a situation is appalling, one can describe it with a pure mind. The extinction of the human species can be spoken of with deep understanding, and yet no depression.

Animals may need animal warmth and attachment, to motivate them to survive, but that's because they haven't reason.

Aldous Huxley said that if really decided to directly look at just how horrid humans can be to each other, one'd either root for their extermination---or facilitate it---or kill oneself.

The Ginsbergs and the Kerouaks represent a child-like spirit, filled with all kinds of love and hope. They seem inspired by the Christian message (the Kingdom of Heaven is spread over the Earth but no one chooses to see it) and it is their predilection to see that way and to keep on seeing that way, despite the uglier truths. Hope is perennial as the grass, isn't that the way the saying goes?

"If a situation is appalling, one can describe it with a pure mind."

But to be truthful---and 'wise'---Bukowski went off on hallucinatory tangents, and that places him in the apocalyptic tradition, but it's a a warning without a call for repentance. Pretty squarely in the Christian tradition though.

"I think he's describing life accurately..."

Life has brutal elements, to be sure. But very little in my life matches any of that. Yours? The closest I have been to any of that is a neighborhood in Cali, Colombia called La Olla (the Cauldron) where the most miserable humans I have ever seen live, images of the walking dead, human cannibals, crack heads, thieves, murderers.

Alex,

The closest I have been to any of that is a neighborhood in Cali, Colombia called La Olla (the Cauldron) where the most miserable humans I have ever seen live, images of the walking dead, human cannibals, crack heads, thieves, murderers.

What part of Cali is it in (N, S, E or W)? I ask just to make sure I stay away from that area, as I go there often. Was there this week.

-

Cali, Wikipedia

http://maps.google.com/maps?sourceid=na ... 1&ct=title

I can find La Iglesia Santa Rosa on this map if I zoom in. Santa Rosa is right in El Centro almost right next to the Hotel Aristi. Carrera 1o con Calle 11 mas o menos. The whole 5-6 block area just south of there is notorious. They call it the Bermuda Triange since what goes in doesn't come out...

Damn it, Alex, now you tell me. I used to stay in Hotel Aristi a lot, and once went walking around the bad area you're talking about. I saw two guys dueling with knives, and totally freaked out, as I had no place to run (it was a closed corridor). Dangerous zone indeed.

Why the hell did you use to frequent that area? Just bad judgment?

-

I like the idea behind this thread, Kelly. It does, however, have the potential to bring out the best and the worst! I offer two of the best from one of the classics, Edgar Allan Poe, for contemplation. I'll comment during my next work-life hiatus:

ALONE
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then - in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life - was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

TO MY MOTHER
Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you -
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia's spirit free.
My mother - my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

This thread just shows that 'poetry' means nothing at all.

I think the only way one can learn what people mean by poetry is to become the Universe, and to become all things: the sordid as well as the pure. Then poetry is dead.

Frankly, it's not easy to become the Universe. To become the Universe means to touch the disease in everyone, to be their diseases. It means to be nothing in oneself, no boundaries of protection. That is an awful feeling. I don't know if I can have the patience to let myself become ridden with spiritual cancer, and know that it is all empty. I'd much rather abandon the human race and just die out in a peaceful corner of deluded existence. That's what I'd really prefer to do. But that path means I'll be as ridden with cancers as if I hadn't bothered. No way out of this bushfire. What a pain to be forced to do something rationality tells you to do; God really wants the death of the ego, and there's no glory in it.

Anyway, I'm going to take a small holiday. Suffering is suffering, can't run away from it. But one can try not to succumb to the wrong perspective.

Sayonara, fools of God.

Kelly Jones wrote:This thread just shows that 'poetry' means nothing at all.

Were you actually expecting a different outcome, Kelly?

Poetry has as much meaning, or lack of it, as the person reading it; the better the mind, the better the judgement. No different to prose, really, except in style and execution.

Take, for instance, the Bible. Certain pearls of wisdom the wise claim to glean from it are more often than not anathema to them in another’s interpretation!

In To My Mother, I see a frighteningly perfect image of “Woman.” I do not read it solely as autobiographic in nature, but rather read into it the very extent and depth to which my own mind goes, regardless of what the poet intended.

Through this expression of infinite love for his mother-in-law, a love which he divines from the death of his wife (who was 13 at the time of their marriage, incidentally, and who became ill several years after that and died of the same disease as his biological mother), I see the attachment that binds men so thoroughly to the ideal Mother and causes him madness for the rest of his life! And what, I ask you, did it have to do with her in the first place?

Kelly wrote:I think the only way one can learn what people mean by poetry is to become the Universe, and to become all things: the sordid as well as the pure. Then poetry is dead.

This is, in fact, a whole lot of meaning for something that means nothing at all…

Dan, yes, and no. Yes, I've had a strong attachment to creative writing for ages, so I did start the thread without really thinking what poetry really is. And no, I've been exploring language a lot to understand better how it tricks the mind, so I did expect to meet up with emptiness again.

I think language plays the trick by seeming to reveal a more secure, more real reality. The clarity of ideas - the increasing of consciousness - seem to promise entrance into a new world. Problems, solutions; old, new. Illusions. The change isn't real; nevertheless, the ideas help to show that.

I'm just doing the same old stuff, don't mind me.

Kelly


I did notice a post by Foresta Gump explaining what poetry meant to her, yet it has been deleted, just wondering why, as it did seem to make sense.

Does administration usually delete reasonable posts?

There are many posts which shouldn't merit credibility into the genius forum

Mike

Hi Mike,

I doubt the administrators (Kevin Solway, Dan Rowden, or David Quinn) deleted Donna's post. They all have a strong policy about not deleting posts, because it is a secretive, destructive sort of thing to do. Sometimes people delete their own posts just after posting them, having rethought the matter. I think that's alright.

Or maybe there was a server problem. Also, Kevin apparently deletes things sometimes when replying, by accident, but usually says so.

I'm interested to know why you're asking me, though.

Can you remember what the point was, that Donna made?

Michael Nesbitt wrote:Kelly


I did notice a post by Foresta Gump explaining what poetry meant to her, yet it has been deleted, just wondering why, as it did seem to make sense.

Does administration usually delete reasonable posts?

There are many posts which shouldn't merit credibility into the genius forum

Mike

Donna has a poem in this thread. It's the 10th post in this thread. Something about Poet's Fool/tool whatever.

She goes by foresta, donna, creativegal, among others.

You will notice that her name (Foresta in this case) appears in black, which means she has been banned (for a while) or - she is either removing herself or one of the admins is removing her status to post at Genius Forums.

When she starts talking about some alien being/creature taking her to some spaceship whatever, she is definitely losing control of (a part of) her senses :-(

Also, she lost her only child, a son (I think about aged-22) some years ago. She hasn't gotten over it, which is probably a normal thing, to go before a parent that is.

She's on on serious meds.


As far as what passes muster on Genius Forums .. we'll be checking out your future posts as to whether they are credible :-\



.

I've read many posts by Foresta Gump, I'd have never guessed, she certainly does sound convincing, even down-right influencing, sorta.

Tomas, the alien thing she speaks of, I've read Gumps work in other places where she speaks of her experiences. She recites it like it happened yesterday. There's one thing that I find interesting about Gump, and I've never spoken to her, but she said in regards to her alien visits, something I found to be most truthful and I recite her words, "the truth never changes, only the words do"

It seems people are more ready to shut her up, then allow for freedom of speech, perhaps, it's a hush hush thing.

I believe I'm going to write Foresta Gump's biography

Mike