Just another damn rant from a disgruntled lout

You bastards mutter lyric, formless, freeee.
And delve the vastly richer veins of ore
Within yourselves---that's hardly fair to me.

My bland existence, too, has human core.

Vanilla songs alone can I compose
Unless I fabricate, construct a lie
That makes of me a hero, wear the clothes
That scream "A POET!", or sacrifice an eye.

(The common cost of wisdom, by the way:
An eye pitched down into the Well of Souls.
The standard price the wise god has to pay.
A metaphor that's really full of holes.)

Excuse digression, I'll get to the point:
The gritty-pretty poet's view of things,
The observation that is out of joint
With six-pack life will put no useful wings
On six-pack thought, nor move complacent minds
Toward those needs your poet's vision finds.

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Comments

Ink Dragon

16 years 9 months ago

Perry,

I am laughing really hard after having read this, so you will have to wait for a detailed critique. I'll be back. Yours, ~Nina

weirdelf

16 years 9 months ago

a contradiction in terms,

your form is well too crafted for your loutish profession, I just got that in before gigling like Nina. I have not truly appreciated your wicked side before, Perry, my loss. oh, a small complaint, the "afterthought" either detracted from or became part of the poem. Decide. Cheers, Jess

Jonathan Moore

16 years 9 months ago

Line 8

I'm hitting 11 syllables on line 8. P'raps it's me assigning an errant syllable to the wrong word. Aside from that, great visions but line 9 and 11 really say the same thing and I found myself going back to line 9 when I hit 11 to see if I'd made a mistake. I like the structure and the message, just a couple stumbles at this point. --Jonathan Annoying the world, one person at a time (Group discounts available)

Skumpfsklub

16 years 9 months ago

That was a last minute adjustment, Jonathan. Your count's right

I had the ten syllable line originally, but I decided that I would post it in the 'oral presentation' form, rather than in 'the scaffolded form' in which I composed it. You see that I started with a sonnet scaffolding, I'm sure. I decided to add another quatrain during composition. On posting, I also made a quick decision to include the 'or' that messes up the ten syllable count in L8. In front of the mike, I'd always gotten away with the formal deviance, probably because of the distraction caused by the shift from my 'whiny old man' persona to my (parenthesized) 'unfocused scatterbrain' persona (the voices (I use three in this one) are quite different in presentation). The argument for deviance in performance rests on that the deviant L8 isn't so jerky on the tongue as the formally correct L8 was. I should have identified it as 'oral script' in the 'joke box.' (Hm. There's something kinda like a Russell's Paradox in this. Contextually sensitive presentation of contextually sensitive presentation. No, drop that line of thought. Too Ludwig.) ------------ Your interpretation of L9 and L11 intrigues me. And I believe that most will find with you that the lines are semantically identical. Thanks for pointing to that; I, like, totally missed that possibility. They are not identical in meaning to me, but, as I did not make it plain how their meanings differ, I now have a problem to solve---and probably also the problem of how to stitch in the explanatory quatrain (or two) without screwing up the act. (I know. I've said I wouldn't perform again, and why---but I'm hardly ever resolute after a few glasses of wine. I'll probably do this one again, if some testosterone-laden dipstick annoys me enough with his faux-gritty warrior-king poetry.) Perry

Jonathan Moore

16 years 9 months ago

Faux gritty - that is great

Because I know the people you mean, I endure them around camp fires at SCA events. You make an important distinction between performance and presentation. I try to speak out all of my work to make certain actually forming the words does not cause problems. Sometimes I am more successful than others. Looking forward to the updates. --Jonathan Annoying the world, one person at a time (Group discounts available)

orgami

16 years 9 months ago

thought perhaps "six pack was grammatical error"

re read your poem and see its part of your poem mmm personaly I think maybe the useage Once is good here Twice makes it almost seem like an error I feel you are really holding back in some places I know when I used to drink that feelings rise which some of the poets post and modern use for muse Creatively sparking some very great poems Like the influence for the great poem "Kublak Kahn" until the insurance salesman knocked on the door or something like that and disrupted the poets thoughts The beginning is humourus and of course its well placed the "six pack" use twice is jarring that is all!

Skumpfsklub

16 years 3 months ago

I’m just indulging myself:

I'm just indulging myself: I aim to have all of my work get a hundred hits. This one falls short of that number, but it has had fair review, by competent critics. Feel free to let this one go unremarked.

Skumpfsklub

16 years 3 months ago

Why write another faux

Why write another faux comment, you ask? Because the poems I'm doin' that for today have not been visited a hundred times yet---and their 'visits' include a substantial number of 'visits' engendered by my returns to the pieces, and some spurious 'visits' that appear to be artifacts of bugs in the program. So, get used it: I keep recommenting until I feel that the poem has had enough exposure to lend value to the numbers.