Off season Poetry appreciation.

[ism22]

A masterpiece that I wrote in another thread...etc...etc...etc

Yeah the beret/scarf combo sounds good but anyone who describes a poem as being "cool" has no place in my poetry class.

I'm a commie but shhhh... don't say it too loud!
...
Don't care if Abe's dead, I'm gonna randomly attack him anyway.
...
Albo's from the far-right and is just a puppet of Murdoch

Those who can't do...

[Noting that I can quote properly and write high quality poetry]

Y'know... I reckon there's some sorta poem in your whacky reasoning! Hang, lemme get myself a beret, scarf and a fat Dannemann-sized blunt.

[Coughs]

Hello I'm Jizzy and I write poems about my experiences floating through cyberspace... the metaverse... and everything in between. My words are a product of many 1's and 0's that float around in a stream of endless information. Occasionally I reach out my hand and a drop of pure, heavenly water becomes stuck to my finger. This poem is one such drop and I feel privileged to have been chosen to share it with you.

[The quiet sound of a man sucking on a Dannemann blunt is heard passing through the breeze, followed by a weak but authoritative cough]

A rabbit hops rapidly through the dark, murky clutches of of the web, leaving dropping where he goes.

Stalin's elephant tusk pipe can be seen floating by. A small but valuable gift of the bunny falls into its depth... the rich fragrance is reminiscent of an old library, but disappointingly the thick must obfuscates the a sad tale of blood, pain and suffering.

A hint of Chinese allspice can be tasted deep within. However it has a sweet aftertaste... one that is salty and fares from the east. The exact region is not evident but the Good Lord thanklessly steers it through the dark web.

Finally a wise, wigged rooster is left dismayed for nothing is left. Not even the old meatball, which the cyber tsunami has somehow 'left' stranded in Ukraine

[tic]

[hears somebody moving a glass, followed by a knowing 'mmmmmm!']

[Paddo Colt 61]

Needless to say, a poor effort - "a weak but authoritative cough" - wtf? Doesn't make sense and you don't make double figures sonny. Give the craft beers a rest.

[mightyrooster]

Paddo I’m not sure I’d be a very effective class monitor. I think the guys in this thread would run rings around me and I also do find it interesting watching each of them express their poetic sides, which I know is not supposed to be the purpose of this thread, but…. Well actually ism’s last contribution almost blew my mind. I haven’t the faintest idea what that was about! You’re right about my latest one being a bit on the sweet and sentimental side though, but I think I was just looking for something positive on the day I posted. I’ll try and be more depressing and doom and gloom next time.

[eddie]

I got a plaque up on the wall
And an office in the sky
I give birth to major deals
Lookin' down on the passersby
I pass the torch, I follow the code
I'm steerin' straight ahead
No, I don't stray the road
To be a warrior with a king
To put your hand in the flame
Without burning
And go to sleep at night
John Wayne was always bald
And he had a woman's name
Valentino was a momma's boy
I cried in my tent all night long
And Harry Truman finally dropped the bomb
So I could go to sleep at night
Now...go to sleep...

[mightyrooster]

Simple but complex and hopefully enough doom and gloom..

Fire and Ice
BY ROBERT FROST

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

[Paddo Colt 61]

Frost is good MR though I don't know that this one is one of his best. Interesting though, he could be talking about Issy and the King.

Eddie seems to have turned a corner. There is that hint of cynicism in his latest contribution or is it alienation? We all have every right to feel both - whistling in the dark.

Andy is correct, there is a deep disappointment regarding this thread. Apart from the unearthing of a prodigious young talent who mixes banality and profundity with such ease, I doubt that there is much point in carrying things on. Pretty much a case of pearls before swine - no offence, just sayin' is all.

[mightyrooster]

So are you declaring the thread is dead and beyond repair Paddo?

[Paddo Colt 61]

I'm sorry to say that that might be the case Rooster Mighty. It brings back too many bad memories. Students complaining insistently that The Ancient Mariner was irrelevant to their future life as a tiler, butcher, economist etc. It pained me having to produce the stick on such occasions and I drew no pleasure from seeing the welling tears, the desperate clutching of bruised fingers and the impotent rage on display. After all who ever heard of artistic inspiration at the point of a cane rod?
Foolishly, I hoped that this thread might redeem me somewhat and put an end to the nightmares but apart from that nugget, that pearl whom I've mentioned previously, the exercise has been unrewarding to say the least.

[mightyrooster]

I'm sorry to say that that might be the case Rooster Mighty. It brings back too many bad memories. Students complaining insistently that The Ancient Mariner was irrelevant to their future life as a tiler, butcher, economist etc. It pained me having to produce the stick on such occasions and I drew no pleasure from seeing the welling tears, the desperate clutching of bruised fingers and the impotent rage on display. After all who ever heard of artistic inspiration at the point of a cane rod?
Foolishly, I hoped that this thread might redeem me somewhat and put an end to the nightmares but apart from that nugget, that pearl whom I've mentioned previously, the exercise has been unrewarding to say the least.

Well most disappointing. I was so looking forward to more Coleridge and tales of the albatross! Not to mention more outstanding limericks.

[A Country Member]

After all who ever heard of artistic inspiration at the point of a cane rod?

Maybe Mister Mayakovsky did?


Vladimir Mayakovsky 1925
Back Home

Thoughts, go your way home.
Embrace,
depths of the soul and the sea.
In my view, it is stupid
to be always serene.
My cabin is the worst of all cabins -
All night above me
Thuds a smithy of feet.
All night, stirring the ceiling’s calm,
dancers stampede to a moaning motif:
“Marquita, Marquita,
Marquita my darling,
why won’t you, Marquita,
why won’t you love me …”
But why
Should marquita love me?!
I have no francs to spare.
And Marquita (at the slightest wink!)
for a hundred francs
she’d be brought to your room.
The sum’s not large -
just live for show -
No,
you highbrow,
ruffling your matted hair,
you would thrust upon her
a sewing machine,
in stitches
scribbling
the silk of verse.
Proletarians
arrive at communism
from below -
by the low way of mines,
sickles,
and pitchforks -
But I, from poetry’s skies,
plunge into communism,
because without it I feel no love.
Whether I’m self-exiled
or sent to mamma -
the steel of words corrodes,
the brass of the brass tarnishes.
Why,
beneath foreign rains,
must I soak,
rot,
and rust?
Here I recline,
having gone oversea,
in my idleness
barely moving
my machine parts.
I myself feel like a Soviet factory,
manufacturing happiness.
I object to being torn up,
like a flower of the fields,
after a long day’s work.
I want
the Gosplan to sweat in debate,
assigning me goals a year ahead.
I want
a commissar
with a decree
to lean over the thought of the age.
I want
the heart to earn
its love wage
at a specialist’s rate.
I want
the factory committee
to lock
My lips when the work is done.
I want
the pen to be on a par
with the bayonet;
and Stalin
to deliver his Politbureau reports
about verse in the making
as he would about pig iron
and the smelting of steel.
“That’s how it is, the way it goes …
We’ve attained the topmost level,
climbing from the workers’ bunks:
in the Union of Republics
the understanding of verse
now tops the prewar norm
I want understanding of my country, nothing more.
And what
if understanding fails to come?
Then I pass in vain
its territory
just like the rain
passes over slanting!

[Paddo Colt 61]

Well done Count you come to the rescue like SKD's try in extra time V The Tigers in the 2010 QF. You have eclectic taste in Poetry indeed although linking me with Stalin has echoes of other threads. I might now have regained the strength to press on.

He was a good communist, Vlad. Stalin has a lot to answer for no doubt but the situation from 1919 was tricky and needed a resolute response. Unfortunately, the paranoia (maybe justified to some extent given the circumstances) prevailed all too often.

[Paddo Colt 61]

[QUOTE=mightyrooster;

Well most disappointing. I was so looking forward to more Coleridge and tales of the albatross! Not to mention more outstanding limericks.

The thread remains MR, bravely weathering the dross (not yours of course).

[eddie]

Call of the West

He got the high sign so he jumped a bus
And along the roads that wind on through
The hot Mojave and the Jericho
He'd start his whole life anew
And what he'd left behind he hadn't valued
Half as much as some things
He never knew

He got dropped off on a street in town
Where a grey old man looked him up and down and said
"Son this ain't no western movie matinee
And you're a long way off from yippee yi yay
Cause I can tell at a glance
You're not from 'round these parts
Got a green look about ya
And that's a gringo for starts
Sometimes the only thing a western savage understands
Are whiskey and rifles and an unarmed man like you."
"So you gotta keep on the move
And don't let that fancy paint fool you."

And then the old-timer pulled him close and said,
"You've come a long way, I know
You got a longer drive ahead
Through the bones of a buffalo
Through the claims of the western dead
And just like the spokes of a wheel
You'll spin 'round with the rest,
You'll hear the drums and the brush of steel,
You'll hear the call of the west."
Call of the west

Harshly awakened by the sound of six rounds
Of light caliber rifle fire followed minutes
Later by the booming of nine rounds from a
Heavier rifle
But you can't close off the wilderness
He heard the snick of a rifle bolt and found
Himself peering down the muzzle of a weapon
Held by a drunken liquor store owner
"There's a conflict, " he said.
"There's a conflict between land and people
The people have to go.
They've come all the way out here to make mining
Claims, to do automobile body work, to gamble.
To take pictures, to not have to do laundry, to
Own a mini-bike, to have their own cb radios and
Air conditioning, good plumbing for sure, and to
Sell time life books and to work in a deli, to
Have some chili every morning and maybe, maybe
To own their own gas stations again and to take
Drugs and have some crazy sex, but above all,
Above all to have a fair shake, to get a piece of the
Rock and a slice of the pie and to spit out
The window of your car and not have the wind blow
It back in your face."

Now from the high timber line to the deserts dry
Who'll risk dangling on some hangman's tree
To stake their claims on these prairie plains
While they say this lunch is not had for free?
Just like the spokes of a wheel
Who'll spin 'round with the rest?
They'll hear the drums and the brush of steel
And I'll hear the call of the west
Call of the west

[Andrew Walker]

This needs to remain on page 1

[mightyrooster]

Iremember studying this one at school too. I always found it fascinating. I interpret it as Dawe alluding to how our upbringing and parents’ influence have a huge bearing on how our identity is formed from a young age. Yes it refers to that other game but it’s the message that’s important.

Life Cycle by Bruce Dawe

When children are born in Victoria
they are wrapped in club-colours, laid in beribboned cots,
having already begun a lifetime’s barracking.

Carn, they cry, Carn … feebly at first
while parents playfully tussle with them
for possession of a rusk: Ah, he’s a little Tiger! (And they are …)

Hoisted shoulder-high at their first League game
they are like innocent monsters who have been years swimming
towards the daylight’s roaring empyrean

Until, now, hearts shrapnelled with rapture,
they break surface and are forever lost,
their minds rippling out like streamers

In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice
like the voice of God booms from the stands
Ooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed.

Hot pies and potato-crisps they will eat,
they will forswear the Demons, cling to the Saints
and behold their team going up the ladder into Heaven,

And the tides of life will be the tides of the home-team’s fortunes
– the reckless proposal after the one-point win,
the wedding and honeymoon after the grand final …

They will not grow old as those from the more northern states grow old,
for them it will always be three-quarter time
with the scores level and the wind advantage in the final term,

That passion persisting, like a race-memory, through the welter of seasons,
enabling old-timers by boundary fences to dream of resurgent lions
and centaur-figures from the past to replenish continually the present,

So that mythology may be perpetually renewed
and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god
in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing

But the dance forever the same – the elderly still
loyally crying Carn … Carn … (if feebly) unto the very end,
having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of salvation