Nocturne

[Mark A. Murphy]

Greg, your arguements against my poem are pedantry of the highest order. I do not aim or wish to give an exact representation of what happens in nature, this poem is a fantasy, except for the last line. You have failed to understand the simili in the first stanza, which sets the tone for the rest of the poem. You are blinded by your own sense of righteousness, the desire to be right, above all else. You therefore fall into the same trap as Manna, namely, the inability to use your imagination to get a real sense of what is going on. Need I spell it out for you? Why don't you ask me what I mean by the opening lines, instead of telling me that I have put a comma in the wrong place, or again enlightening me that birds are not indeed garrulous in the early evening, but anxious about the going down of the sun. In my dictionary (the Oxford English Reference Dictionary) garrulous can also be taken to mean loquacious, talkative, chattering, babbling. In this poem, the birds and the moon are vehicles for expressing the idea that love is possible, even an ocean and a continent away. These are the things that unite and and untie us, bind us together and estrange us from one other. This is about the dialectic of love, not formal logic. Furthermore, you seem to be scoffing at the use of 'poetic license', in my humble opinion, poetry would be a poor and unimaginative place without it. Need I say more?

I take great offence that you see my inability to answer Manna's criticism as immaturity, I just don't agree with what she is saying. Like you, she is confused. It is the height of arrogance to tell the author of a piece what they meant to say or should have said. I have no time for such posturing. If you don't like my poem, or my logic, write your own poem, but don't you dare accuse me of lying. You are mistaken.

Once more, your impeccable use of formal logic to back up your absolute truths about the world holds no attraction for me. I think it may well be counter-productive in trying to understand the processes of writing poetry.

[Mark A. Murphy]

Manna, it is not my intention to insult the reader, quite the opposite. I believe the reader has more than enough 'poetic' imagination not to need too much or any of my assistance. Why can't the poem be daydream and reality at one and the same time? I have never been quite certain about what is fact and what is fiction, the two are forever uniting and then negating the other producing new facts and new fictions.

Ok let's deal once and for all with the feasting nightingale. For a start, this could be any bird. The feasting nightingale is a metaphor for the sexual act. Men and women are hungry for sex, voracious in their appetites, sometimes feasting when they are making love. The nightingale feasting merely sign-posts what is to come.

The moon is garrulous, as I have already pointed out, because it unites and connects the lovers. What I see on this side of the world is what you see some hours later on your side of the world. It is the 'same' moon, to all intents and purposes, although it has undergone dramatic transformations in its journey around the earth. I have never seen the moon in Africa or Americay, but I'm told that the experience is wholly different from seeing it over England by those who have seen it. The moon is garrulous because it symbolises different things to different individuals. Some of us worship it. Some of us wish upon it. Some of us (if we are lucky) make love in the moonlight. I think it is probably a universal romantic symbol.

Finally, poetry is magic of a kind. If the author of a piece is to give all his tricks away, some or maybe all of the magic is lost. The trick remains magical because we don't know how it is done.

[~greg]

Manna,
I knew a bird once who could say
"hail to thee blithe spirit bird thou never wert".

(However, since it was taught this by my former wife,
it might have thought it was saying "Wanna screw?")

Mark,
It's clear from your writing that you never felt loved by your mother.


~greg

[Jimmy O'Connell]

"I predict a riot"
Franz Ferdinand (??)

Lads, easy there.

Mark, you have absolute right to maintain the integrity of your poem. Any comment from us poster-ers (imposters, if you so wish...) are meant to be taken in the spirit of seriousness and sincerity.
M_o and G tend to be a little on the abrasive side, to my way of cognating, but, for you own sanity its best to place their well meant criticisms where they belong... and that is wherever you have in your head/heart for "later consideration after much consideration"...

Most of us here don't mean to offend... if offence is taken, then its best to put it in a cyber folder and delete....

Keep truckin'

Jimmy

PS I think yourself and jimbo should set up a new section: Erotic Poetry by Passionate Members.

[Mark A. Murphy]

Greg, I have no desire to exchange insults with you. I think I have explained most, if not all of yours and Manna's confusion away. Go and bait some other unfortunate poster, if you must. This thread ends here for me.

[Red Poppy]

"The moon hanging low in the sky
does not relate to the early evening.

At the full moon, the moon is visible low on the horizon at twilight time.
But on any other day of the month, at twilight, the moon is
in every possible position in the sky, in roughly 360/28 ~ 12 degree steps,
called "the houses of the moon",
and in different states of visibility, called phases.

Your correlation is not some kind of poetic leap
above everybody else's mundane logic.
It is simply a pedestrian mistake. "

Well, greg, if ever you wanted to take the poetry out of a poem, you've done it.
Killed the effort STONE COLD DEAD, KAPUT, DONE, TRUSSED AND BURIED.

And then, greg, you write:

"I knew a bird once who could say
"hail to thee blithe spirit bird thou never wert".
(However, since it was taught this by my former wife,
it might have thought it was saying "Wanna screw?")
Mark,
It's clear from your writing that you never felt loved by your mother."

What in the name of anything is that about?
Mark, I liked the piece - things I didn't like in there but there are things in Shakespeare that I don't like, too and I'm sure Willie doesn't worry about that.


greg, I think your post is a prime example of a "pedestrian mistake."
Pop psychology about family relationships is not only dangerous, it's insulting.
Does the use of the lower case g in greg tell us something about your self-perception. Such a claim would be just about as logical as your claim about Mark.

[Joney]

This whole conversation has got me thinking about something and apologies to Mark about going off topic but it's not completely off topic.

Anyway the whole "never apologise, never explain" concept. Is there a danger in over analysis that meaning can be distorted by the views of other people? One example of this is the song 'Dance me to the end of love', before I came on the Leonard Cohen forum I thought of it as a love song. All of a sudden I am confronted by holocaust connections and discussions about abortion, all valid I'm sure but jarring with my original interpretation.

I realise however that this arguement can't be used when people submit their poetry for comment or nobody would ever comment!

It is a very brave thing indeed for an artist to show their work and rarer still for their work to be honest. Hats off to people who post their poems here, I could never do that.

[~greg]

"I knew a bird once who could say
"hail to thee blithe spirit bird thou never wert".
(However, since it was taught this by my former wife,
it might have thought it was saying "Wanna screw?")
Mark,
It's clear from your writing that you never felt loved by your mother."

What in the name of anything is that about?

So everything must be s-p-e-l-t o-u-t?
(Would Mark agree?)

Just one page back, in this very thread

From what we humans can tell,
birds have about four or five things they say:
1. Yoohoo, or here I am; where are you?
2. Wanna screw?
3. This is mine, it is not yours.
4. HELP!!!
5. (baby birds) FEED ME NOW!!!

but that's beside the point.

And I was responding to that, with
"I knew a bird who could say 'hail to thee blithe spirit bird thou never wert' "

And by doing that I was making the point that Mark's comment to me

Why don't you ask me what I mean by the opening lines, instead of telling me ...

was beside the point.

Because poems have to stand on their own.

Presumably Mark believes that any smart person
would get his poem on its own. Only stupid people,
like me, require footnotes.

But I am not so sure if he thinks he has now added them.
Most of his retort to me is pure ad hominem.
It's only these lines in it that have any substance

In this poem, the birds and the moon
are vehicles for expressing the idea that love is possible,
even an ocean and a continent away.
These are the things that unite and and untie us,
bind us together and estrange us from one other.
This is about the dialectic of love, not formal logic.

But when

In this poem, the birds and the moon are vehicles
for expressing the idea that love is possible,
even an ocean and a continent away.

he is talking about something that just isn't in the poem.

In the poem the birds and moon might be said to be vehicles
for expressing points in time, not ideas.
They express the "when" Mark wants someone
to "think again of what divides and what connects" {us}.

There is no way they can be said to be
"vehicles for expressing the idea that love is possible".

But judge for yourself.
This is what he wrote

When the moon comes, low
in the evening sky, garrulous as birds
on wires above the town,

think again of what divides
and what connects
an ocean and a continent away,

And when

These are the things that unite and and untie us,
bind us together and estrange us from one other.
This is about the dialectic of love, not formal logic.

what does he mean by the "things that unite and untie us"?
Where are they in the poem?
The moon? The sky? The birds?

They can only mean one thing:
the "wires above the town".

Communication, after all, is possible over wires,
(even "an ocean and a continent away".)

So, this is what the poem is really about? Wires?
This is what I missed?

(im getting a deja vu feeling here for some reason)

And what does he mean by the "dialectic of love" ?
Where is that in the poem?

I think that anyone who uses expressions like "dialectic of love"
(and quotes Denise Levertov, etc)
has no right to be critical of any kind of criticism.

~~

But then

It's clear from your writing that you never felt loved by your mother.

Well, Mark is a difficult person.
I think we would all agree on that.
And I was thinking of other poets who had difficult personalities,
to help me better understand Mark.

I was thinking of Rimbaud

...
It is evident through his writing that he never felt loved by his mother.
...
He may have been raped by drunken Communard soldiers
(as his poem Le cœur supplicié (The Tortured Heart) perhaps suggests).
...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimbaud

Follow me. . .

A couple of hours before I posted my last humble comments here,
Mark had posted his "School Of Dust" poem. And I'd read it.

In it he wrote

We humans who would haul the dead from the gas chambers
lest it should be us swallowing the dreaded Zyclon B.

which reminded me that being forced to do that kind of thing
(the "sonderkommandos") is what supposedly drove Sal Mineo's
character, "Dov Landau", in Otto Preminger's movie "Exodus"
to want to become a terrorist for the Irgun. Or that's what
he said did it to him.

However, in a wrenching scene (that apparently many people
simply blanked on, the first time they saw the movie)
the Irgun systematically force Dov Landau to finally confess
that the real reason for his incredible bitterness is that
he was raped in the camps.
(- as he put it: "they used me, like a woman.")

So. Mark's bitter poem "School Of Dust" reminded me of Exodus, and Sal Mineo.
And that reminded me of Rimbaud, when I was trying to think of another
difficult poet to help better understand Mark.

And that's why I commented the way I did.

[Manna]

I wondered where that came from. I couldn't convince myself that you were talking about Mark. You're very entertaining, Greg, but sometimes the way you connect things seems like you throw out a line, but not necessarily into water. Maybe into water, but only if water is handy. If no lake is handy, you throw your line into the grass. You don't catch many fish in grass.

Mark is difficult.
Rimbaud was difficult.
Rimbaud didn't feel loved by his mother.
--------------------------------------------------
if A→B, and B→C, then A→C, right?

Haa hah ah ah aha ha ha hahahaha hah ah ah aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[Christine]

Unless he's a bass man, Manna. Very odd.

Locating Bass in Grass
by North Alabama Guide Troy Jens
Bass can always be found in grass. Grass is one of the most beneficial types of cover for bass. Grass is not only a perfect addition to the cover bass utilize, it is also a great source of shade, oxygen and food supply as well. Much of the food supply for bass lives, breeds and thrives in grass cover and bass can always be found in the grass

[Manna]

bass in the grass my ass
(ooooooooooooh, crass!)

[mickey_one]

bass in the grass my ass
(ooooooooooooh, crass!)

but all things come to pass

[lizzytysh]

If a bass can be in the grass your ass,
and all things come to pass...
Then Leonard's words can become a morass,
when they get turned over to Philip Glass.

(ooooooooooooh, really crass!)


~ Lizzy


Sorry to hijack your thread with this silliness, Mark .

[Kush]

Hi Lizzytysh,

What have you been smoking recently?

[lizzytysh]

Hi Kush ~

Why?? < blink-blink > ??


~ Lizzy