Sure it can be:Originally Posted by Abbey
A yellow bird
with a yellow bill
landed on
my windowsill
I lured him in
with crumbs of bread
and then I crushed
his f-ing head.
Just Me
Sure it can be:
A yellow bird
with a yellow bill
landed on
my windowsill
I lured him in
with crumbs of bread
and then I crushed
his f-ing head.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Tyr-Ziu Saxnot thanked this post
Life, Love, Truth, 3 gems
just for rev., my attempt to imitate him, as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.-tyr
this piece is about 25 printed pages long.
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peter middleton
the longing of the long poem
1
modernist long poems resist the support institutions of poetry. Expensive to print; tricky to handle digitally; too long to be read in their entirety at poetry readings; too big for anthologies; much too big for little magazines to be able to publish anything but short sections; almost always too long to teach within the constraints of a timetable; exorbitantly demanding of a reader’s time; and sometimes barely readable until extended scholarly labours have provided guides and critical readings. And yet the long poem continues to represent the peak of poetic achievement just as early epics did. What accounts for the persistence of the modern long poem given its apparent drawbacks? To try to answer this question we would need to gain some idea of what makes for a long poem and one place to start is with endings.
2
most long poems end badly. Writers of long poems may wish they could say, like hugh macdiarmid at the end of ‘in memoriam james joyce,’ ‘and so i come to the end of this poem’, but for reasons internal to the working of the composition the end is more usually an awkward, offhand parting, and suprisingly inarticulate compared to what has gone before. [1] the conclusive wrap of wallace stevens’s ‘notes toward a supreme fiction’ — ‘you will have stopped revolving except in crystal’ — is the exception, perhaps because ‘notes’ is short for a long poem, and even then it spoils the perfection of its finale by adding an apologetic afterthought, justifying poetry in the face of social crisis with an implausible image of ‘the soldier’ living or dying with ‘proper words.’ [2] the cantos also has two endings, both unsatisfactory. The penultimate quasi-ending is given the unpromising provisional title ‘notes for cxvii et seq.’ and finishes with an orphaned line — ‘to be men not destroyers’ — a worthy enough sentiment, similar in spirit to stevens’s second ending, but not a compelling resolution to either the canto or the entire long poem. [3] following this ending is a short piece entitled ‘fragment (1966)’, a brief celebration of olga rudge, that concludes: ‘these lines are for the / ultimate canto // whatever i may write / in the interim.’ the ultimate canto — what a wonderful idea! Zukofsky’s “a” also has two endings: ‘a 23’ ends with a suitably self-reflexive line — ‘z-sited path are but us’; and its effect is then immediately swept aside by celia zukofsky’s mash-up of zukofsky’s own writings, a 24, which itself ends in bathos, with two overlaid voices saying ‘new gloves, mother?’, and ‘i wonder that makes thee so loved /’. [4] the maximus poems also has two endings whose combined effect after the vast intellectual claims made for the poet’s heroic researches into gloucester and the founding of america, is at best pathos : ‘mother earth alone,’ and then on a separate page, ‘my wife my car my color and myself’ (a pathos verging on bathos when he alludes to the loss of his car). [5] however exhausted the poet and the form, these poems don’t want to end. They long for more.
3
more recent long poems are wary of anything that might hint at a gesture like macdiarmid’s, let alone leave the reader with a crystalline qed, and so end with as little conclusivity as possible. The dominant impression is that the poem could have been even longer. Ron silliman’s tjanting ends: ‘what then?’. Allen fisher’s extremely long poem ‘gravity as a consequence of shape’ ends: ‘prospect of the feeling that should be left / been protected for its inaccessability.’ lyn hejinian’s a border comedy ends: ‘and the teller’s intention — believe it or not / is fortune given / living always.’ the ending of bruce andrews’s lip service — ‘let’s start all over stars’ — conveys the general spirit of these endings. [6]
4
if you tell me a novel or a film is long, i know you mean long for a novel or long for a film, and that their actual respective lengths are likely to be of different orders of magnitude, and i also know that you are not referring to the number of pages or the length of the reel of film, although these might be indicative of what you are measuring, which is relative duration of the time required for reception of either (with this in mind i measure the cantos as about 116 metres long, compared with tjanting at only 38 metres.). A long sentence like the previous one only takes seconds to read; a long film might mean sitting for longer than is comfortable but the likelihood is that you would watch it in one sitting in a cinema; and a long novel (think of proust or joyce) is likely to take weeks rather than days, and to be fitted around other activities. Proust’s brother is reported to have said: ‘the sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read in search of lost time.’ [7] what does it take to read the cantos, and other very long poems (vlps) such as the maximus poems, in memoriam james joyce, a border comedy, flow chart, eunoia, gravity as a consequence of shape, or day? A bout of flu, a vacation at the beach, a grant for research leave, or just a lot of free evenings?
5
what might it require to read kenneth goldsmith’s day, one of the most controversial recent vlps? Molly schwartzberg is honest: ‘stephen cain says what many likely think: That in day, “the gesture is perhaps more enjoyable as a concept than as a reading experience.”’ she demurs in an interesting extended reflection on the experience of reading day in which she equates the long poem with difficulty and boredom, qualities that she transvalues:
6
i find day to be utterly compelling, but not for the reasons i expected to when i first received my copy. When i first opened it, i assumed that all my years of reading contemporary poetry that is densely linguistic, often affectless, and frequently long, would help me; we readers of contemporary poetic practice know hard reading, we know intentional boredom. But it turns out that it’s not my avant-garde training that came in handy. My own willingness/drive/capacity to read all of goldsmith’s books straight through has at least as much to do with my traditional literary background; as i reread the books this spring, i was most helped by just having finished a year of teaching a “great books” curriculum. After nine months of classics like inferno, don quixote, capital and the plague, goldsmith’s books are familiar — both in their physical size, and in the kind of sustained attention — concentration upon multiple layers of plot, language, and argument over hundreds of pages — that they require. Certainly my eyes glazed over as i worked through day’s stock quotes, but not much more than they did as i attempted to follow the denser bits of marx’s complex economic theories. A number of critics have noted that goldsmith’s books have the heft of reference books. But when i look on my own bookshelves, i see that they are closer in size to my copies of magic mountain, moby dick, and remembrance of things past. [8]
7
we might note that goldsmith himself is aware of the problems of the reader, and warns drily that ‘there is no reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual writer is out to bore the reader.’ [9] schwartzberg captures one of the key features of the experience of reading the long poem, the saturation of the reader’s cognitive space with an abstract repetitive form whose content is an ever varying semantic field. As andrea brady says of raworth’s long poems, ‘the long sequences also test our ability to hold the poem’s apparently limitless relational capabilities in our head.’ [10] managing limitless relations has been understood to be a self-conscious feature of the modern novel at least since henry james, who wrote in the preface to roderick hudson: ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ [11] one can almost hear the invitation to later writers to experiment by extending the circle until unhappiness appears.
8
what significance does the adjective ‘long’ carry when we talk about the long poem? Is it literal or metaphorical, or a more or less implicit proper name (a disavowed categorisation that really means ‘modernist’ or ‘world-encompassing’); and whichever of these best describes the work of this measure, is it then a value (never mind the length feel the quality), or a category (a capacious genre perhaps subsuming epics, narratives, sequences, and oulipian behemoths), or a metonym for some extended poetic theory (having semantic parallels with the adjectives in terms such as ‘action painting’ or ‘minimalist music’, adjectives whose everyday usage is only an oblique guide to these aesthetic practices)? Or maybe scale does directly result in aesthetic consequence, so that the long poem is as it were orchestral to the chamber scale of the lyric poem? Only a vlp will keep the warriors occupied during the feasting; or to translate this into contemporary idioms, only a vlp can be apotropaic towards the dangers of subject-based, expressive, or confessional verse.
9
it turns out that the short poem, the lyric, also has definitional issues. The january 2008 issue of pmla reveals a widespread concern about the inadequacy of our concepts and definitions of the lyric. Jonathan culler reminds us that rene wellek once wrote that it is impossible to define the lyric because ‘nothing beyond generalities of the tritest kind can result from it.’ [12] does the same fate await anyone attempting to define the long poem? Might we find ourselves merely describing a normative cultural ideal as virginia jackson warns: ‘when the stipulative functions of particular genres are collapsed into one big idea of poems as lyrics, then the only function poems can perform in our culture is to become individual or communal ideals.’ [13]
10
in the same issue, robert kaufman offers a reading of benjamin and adorno on lyric poetry, in which he argues that the use of language in lyric poetry enables it ‘to subjectivize it, affectively to stretch conceptuality’s bounds in order to make something that seems formally like a concept but that does something that ordinary, “objective” concepts generally do not do: Sing’. [14] accepting for a moment the insight based on adorno’s essay on lyric, what by analogy might the long poem be doing? Could we argue that the modern long poem makes the extended discursivity of written modes such as argument and narrative (as myth, story or history), sing too? Does ‘language’s chimerical yearning for the impossible’ that adorno hears in stefan george have a counterpart longing in long poems? If, as adorno believes, the ‘lyric poem is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism’ (45) and ‘in the lyric poem the subject, through its identification with language negates both its opposition to society as something merely monadological and its mere functioning within a wholly socialized society’(44), what happens in the long poem? Where, we might say, does the subject go? Who or what is doing the singing?
11
lyric poems are not usually called ‘short poems.’ the two literary genres most commonly defined by their length are the short story and the long poem, and in both cases the adjectival measure appears to indicate that this is only a genre in the sense that some texts fail to qualify for inclusion in the properly constituted genres of the novel and the lyric. Brevity prevents the short story from achieving the narrative scale necessary to achieve the exit velocity of a novel; excessive length prevents the long poem from sustaining the lyric intensity of a short poem (and hence achieving those very different special possibilities that adorno — and edgar allen poe — espoused in the lyric). Long poems, apart from epics, which are arguably a historical form only practised in partially oral cultures, are like short stories, excess to requirements, a wilderness of weeds outside the garden, a heterogeneous field that does not lend itself to definition, and frequently take advantage of this absence of expectation of any defining characteristic, whether through unconventional prosody, theme, structure, form of address, performativity, or visual appearance.
12
is this the point, that the interest of the long poem lies in its visible display of non-conformity because there are no rules comparable to those for sonnets, lyrics, ballads, quatrains and sestinas? Are long poems wild poems that transcend precedent and convention, and are not condemned to repeat history? In the pmla collection, rei terada cautions against this type of enthusiasm as far as the lyric is concerned: ‘although the critique of lyric is necessary as long as we need to be convinced that its construction has been a problem, we may be past that moment in lyric studies — at a point at which, no longer approaching lyric ontologically or defensively, we should be able to do something besides talk about how other people believe in its ontology.’ [15] is the same true of long poem studies? Can we talk about something other than the ontology or cultural ideals of the long poem?
13
if anything can happen in a long poem, reading may require induction into the peculiar practices of a specific long poem. ‘begin ephebe, by perceiving the idea / of this invention, this invented world’, as stevens starts his own long poem, notes toward a supreme fiction. Perhaps we are all ephebes when we start reading an unfamiliar long poem; certainly the close kinship between long poems and the academy might suggest this. It can be hard work to gain our credentials as a competent reader, which points to a wider issue, the question of just what vlps require as their conditions of existence.
14
to understand the importance of considering the entire context of creation and reception of long poems it is helpful to compare long poems to toasters. Harvey molotch, the great sociologist of consumer goods, uses the toaster as an example of what he calls ‘stuff’, this ‘vast blanket of things — coffeepots and laptops, window fittings, lamps and fence finials, cars, hat pins, and hand trucks — that make up economies, mobilize desire, and so stir controversy.’ [16] where do these things th
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Just Me
Hold your breath til I read that crap.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Tyr-Ziu Saxnot thanked this post
Life, Love, Truth, 3 gems
you are a bit slow hoss, the rev already read it and is prepping his very in depth reply on it now as we speak!!-hold your breath til i read that crap.-tyr
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Just Me
Trash day tomorrow. I'm consolidating between posts.you are a bit slow hoss, the rev already read it and is prepping his very in depth reply on it now as we speak!!-
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Tyr-Ziu Saxnot thanked this post
Just Me
Since the name of this thread is "I Take My Stand", I think I will.
Unless anyone's been living in a cave, I don't like Trump and I'm not going to. I've already made it clear I'll hold my nose and vote for the GOP candidate, even in a losing cause, to try and keep a Dem out of the WH. Questioning me on it and who I'm going to vote for is stupid. You can remember some innocuous BS but you don't ever seem to remember the basic stance. I can't stand McCain nor "Flip-flop" Romney, but I held my nose and voted for them.
The issue here is people trying to force others to like Trump. And Ill tell you the same thing I told my first 1stSgt ... you can bray all you want, but when you're fucking me in the ass, don't expect a smile out of me.
But I will NOT support people who are acting like the very thing they've been bitching about for 15 years. But you better find someone else to bully around while you're playing victim to 2-3 people on the board who disagree with your "you better act happy while you're taking it" BS.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Educate man, Liberate man
Gunny. The only ONE making any demands of you is....YOU. Constantly reminding us you were in uniform and talking to us like we are Fresh out of BOOT...doesn't impress us at all. You should know by now. YOU are no longer on active duty. So you should try and catch up with the rest of us...who have become civilians just like you. As for the Bitching. YOU seem to be the one DOING THE MOST, while threatening doesn't work anymore.
I love to make Liberals Cry, and Whine.
So, this is for them.
GOD BLESS AMERICA - IN GOD WE TRUST !
LongTermGuy thanked this post
Just Me
Dude, if you're going to be passive aggressive, try to be good at it, huh? I'd have to stop and have chic=ken fried steak for lunch and a nap to let you catch up with me.
Where do you keep coming up with this threatening bullshit? Get real.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Life, Love, Truth, 3 gems
Not sure who this is addressed to but if it is addressed to me then best check your facts.
I play victim to nobody . Most posts I made here tonight between you and rev were all in good humor.
As to my bullying others , never have but always always went out of my way to defend others and stomp bullies asses out in the real world.
If not addressed to me then perhaps name some names and give some quotes .. -Tyr
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Just Me
I addressed ir to the topic. No one. I'm just tired of all this crap. Apparently, if you aren't a Trump kiss ass you aren't welcome here. About time to dump the boards again. I'm sick of being attacked. I don't have the time. I don't care who likes who and I've never made an issue of it until people started acting like Nazis about who you're supposed to support. It seems you're entitled to you opinion only if your opinion goes along along to get along.
That ain't me and never has been. If I won't take shit off a LtGen in the Corps, I sure ain't taking it off a bunch of jerks on a message board.
And you know me. I'm a southern boy. Come in my yard and talk your trash. Words on a a screen mean nothing.
And the so called right that's sold out ? Ain't worth it to me. I got a granddaughter that needs some time.
Last edited by Gunny; 01-26-2016 at 12:06 AM.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Tyr-Ziu Saxnot thanked this post
Life, Love, Truth, 3 gems
Well Trump certainly gets strong reactions from folks. I myself do not care that much if its him or Cruz but do think he has the balls to stick it to the right bastards in D.C.
ANYBODY AS LONG AS ITS NOT ANOTHER STINKING DEM.
I do not think I've sold out at all.
We southern boys of the older generation generally have our heads on straight.
Not claiming perfection, not by a long shot.
Could be we all need to settle down a bit and concentrate on the real enemy- the dems/the muzzies/ the leftists and the globalists.....
This ole world bez a tough old hag that spits in yo eye and tries to kill ya.
We that survived over 60 years in bad places around bad people know a thing or two.
I can not say that about very many of the younger generation unless they've been military and in combat.--Tyr
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Gunny thanked this post
Senior Member
Talking politics gets folks pissed of sometimes, so don't anyone here pay any mind if someone gets pissed off about candidates and such. Just brush it off your shoulders and move on. Soon the voting will be over, and there will be other things to get pissed off about.
Tyr-Ziu Saxnot thanked this post
Senior Member
My daughter says I have been kinda foul lately. I think the state of our country is having an effect on me. Things are sooo bad.
Senior Member
When things get so bad, I am always reminded that there is still hope. It is written in the book of Nehemiah, in the Bible, that Ezra, the scribe, had assembled the Israelites in the square in front of the Water Gate and read to them from the Book of the Law of Moses; and they wept at how far they had strayed from this. If we would just recall our foundational documents, and remind ourselves of our heritage, we can still salvage what has been lost.My daughter says I have been kinda foul lately. I think the state of our country is having an effect on me. Things are sooo bad.
Life, Love, Truth, 3 gems
Myself, I am not mad at any member here , not even fj....
Being irritated is not being mad. And my being mad, people tend to see it plainly, opening and boldly. Just as they could read my poetry to see that I am now a much kinder and far more gentle soul.
Yet one that always has the foundation to call up the old me in an instant when its needed.
Truth is after all these years here, I like every member here even the ones that I strongly disagree with.
As all my life I 've went by the creed when I truly dislike a person I will not speak or have conversations with that person on any level or in any way.--Tyr
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
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