RealGM WizBoard Poetry, Lyrics, & similar Shenanigans Thread

[montestewart]

Congratulations, Rico!

doc: I MIGHT be next. Unless you beat me to it with a zombie book or something.

Do we got a link for Kev's book?

Don't think it's available yet. His site says February 1st

[barelyawake]

Hey doc, I've been writing a book. I think you could certainly help in editing and pumping up the jokes if you are interested. If so, email me.

[doclinkin]

Hey doc, I've been writing a book. I think you could certainly help in editing and pumping up the jokes if you are interested. If so, email me.

Curiosity piqued BA. Long time no see. Cool. Hmmn you still have that aol address? or PM me here a new one.

[barelyawake]

Hey doc, I've been writing a book. I think you could certainly help in editing and pumping up the jokes if you are interested. If so, email me.

Curiosity piqued BA. Long time no see. Cool. Hmmn you still have that aol address? or PM me here a new one.

Yep, still have a thousand emails in that aol account I'm afraid of getting rid of, so still paying those fees. Of course, my main is a gmail. Yeah, email me and I'll hit you back with some clips and the outline of the story. I think it's the funniest, most seditious thing I've ever done. Right up your alley. Hope all is well.

[doclinkin]

The PIFessor of poetix gives instruction:

3 IN THE MORNING AT THE WAFFLE HOUSE
4 IN THE MORNING AND PIF BEGINS TO SHOUT

Was he talking about the overnight scenarioooo?

If you make a house out of waffles, don't pour syrup over it.

Has anyone here ever been a short order cook? I have.

That couplet would work better if the first line read "3 in the morning, we're at the waffle house. That's a dactyl, a troche & 3 iambs, which is what the 2d line has.

The way it is now is kind of hard to scan. You could leave the "AND" our of the second line, but in that case it'd be better as a quatrain -- or 2 couplets:

3 in the morning
At the waffle house

4 in the morning
PIF begins to shout

But, why stop there?

Giving no warning
Quiet as a mouse

He began storming
"Girl, zip down your blouse!"

& so forth...

Indeed why stop there? More!

[payitforward]

Doc... I can't quote my own work. I have lots of books out & have been reasonably widely anthologized; anything I quote would lead to unveiling myself, which no one else does so....

Of course, I could keep riffing along the lines of the above, but in that case I'll wind up writing something that I like, but which I can't use, which will tick me off for obvious reasons.

So... what am I going to do?

Well... I can include some poems I like, which people might not know.

[montestewart]

PIF is Ron Silliman!

[payitforward]

Might as well start with the best... Here is William Blake, from The Four Zoas: "What is the Price of Experience?"



What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun
And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs.

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;
To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies' house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

[doclinkin]

Doc... I can't quote my own work. I have lots of books out & have been reasonably widely anthologized; anything I quote would lead to unveiling myself, which no one else does so....

Of course, I could keep riffing along the lines of the above, but in that case I'll wind up writing something that I like, but which I can't use, which will tick me off for obvious reasons.

So... what am I going to do?

Well... I can include some poems I like, which people might not know.

Cowardice pure and simple. Write something you dont like then. Get reckless, leave a ragged draft on here, use this as a poetic sandbox, to either play in, or zen garden that can be wiped away, or leave dirty lumps like a neighborhood cat. But seriously, anything you wrote on here no one will find until years later, and then your biographers will be stunned by the depth and breadth or your interests and bloodyminded crotchetyness. Yes you like slapping leather freely as a masked man behind a bandana, gunning them down in the streets, free from the law, but honestly nobody really cares about you one way or the other. Just write, man. Rico published. WizardsKev/TheSecretWeapon/Kevin Broome wrote a mystery. Zonker pisses off some of the more unhinged individuals in the realgm wiz world and he has put links up to his online writings. Dont bother to out yourself, just play around here, man. No point getting timid now. Hell you might actually make new readers out of folks who would otherwise never touch a poetry folio.

[montestewart]

I would never touch a poetry folio. Sounds too much like polio.

Lots of people on this board aren't anonymous. Some meet up at games or elsewhere. Some have twitter feeds or websites. CCJ's an open book. STD and GOC expose others' anonymity. I know who STD is. Just maintain some plausible deniability, maybe with some Ern Malley-type back story.

[doclinkin]

3 in the morning
At the waffle house

4 in the morning
PIF begins to shout

Giving no warning
Quiet as a mouse

He began storming
"Girl, zip down your blouse!"

Dishwasher steaming
gouting out in clouds

Heat causes fiending?
Or does he play the clown

the pass thru, between them.
he dives thru in a bound

waitress is screaming
they chase the table rounds

the bartender called Ethan
standing with a frown

tries to intercede when
barking like a hound

the grillman pounces clearing
a fourtop in a bound

catches Maybeline and
she tumbles to the ground

"Mira, what's he theenking??"
"He 'bout to go to town..."

But here come barman Ethan
who brings the hammer down

cutting board hits clean man
satisfying sound

and PIF is out and dreaming
and everyone is proud

5 in the morning
no cops came around

the grillman wakes up yawning
stands up off the ground

staff file to the dawn and
the silence is profound

no one gives a warning
the rain is falling down

huddle in the awning
the rain the only sound

then uber and be gone and
the metro under ground

sleep off right or wrong
til the night shift rolls around

again

[doclinkin]

Open invitation to anyone willing to try out a few licks of poetry. Or lyrics. Or whatever fits. Make Payitforward takeitback to the old bold days and risk a few lines of questionable genius.

[stilldropin20]

Open invitation to anyone willing to try out a few licks of poetry. Or lyrics. Or whatever fits. Make Payitforward takeitback to the old bold days and risk a few lines of questionable genius.

i know it has been asked before but is there any way to get the archived poetry thread from 2002-2005? anybody make copies. I would love to read my silliness from back in time when politics was boring.

[Ruzious]

Open invitation to anyone willing to try out a few licks of poetry. Or lyrics. Or whatever fits. Make Payitforward takeitback to the old bold days and risk a few lines of questionable genius.

i know it has been asked before but is there any way to get the archived poetry thread from 2002-2005? anybody make copies. I would love to read my silliness from back in time when politics was boring.

Rosebud!!!

[payitforward]

Sheesh, Doc -- I pass you one of the greatest pieces of writing ever done by anyone, & you let it go by in silence?

I already spend 2-3 hours a day writing, brother, sometimes more. Like most of my peers, I've been a poet my entire life -- I can't tell you why. "Why" doesn't interest me. I was first published when I was 13. As I mention above, I'm the author of many books. I've been in a phrakking Norton Anthology for heavens sake! I've been translated into French. I've been translated into German, blah blah blah. None of that means a thing. It's just like basketball; there's another game tonight.

I don't know what you do in your career, Doc, but whatever it is I haven't seen you do it here on this Board, have I? Any more than I'm likely to run into John Wall when I shoot hoops in the park -- even tho that would be fun for me. I'd love it if John came around & played some pick up ball w/ me & my friends, for whom playing basketball is the opposite of a serious undertaking, the opposite of what it is for him.

Of course, I might enjoy writing a few rhymed couplets here...

When the head of government
Wants to place a bet

He goes down to the basement
& smokes a cigarette

Where they say the President
& Mr. Putin met

(Much to the detriment
Of our national debt)

... but how often? For how long?

Doesn't matter: if & when it feels like fun, I'll do it.

But, in that case, the subject (poetry, language, the "lyric", etc.) needs to be a serious subject in this thread -- taken seriously, I mean. & if I give you a gift like the Blake passage, don't step past it please.

After all, we don't know how long we'll be here. I'm sure you know the famous lines from Pindar's 8th Pythian Ode:

ἐπάμεροι: τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ
ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,
λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών:

which are almost impossible to translate, but here's a try:

Here soon gone: what is someone? what is noone? A shadow
Dreaming is man. But when Zeus-given brilliance comes
A light shines on him; it is sweet to be alive.

[doclinkin]

Sheesh, Doc -- I pass you one of the greatest pieces of writing ever done by anyone, & you let it go by in silence? I'm a serious man and I poetry all the time and why in my day I was the Duke of Poemdon, and pardon me while I lotion up my stroking hand and flagellate my bla bla bla

No. Blake's been read. Now long dead. Tired of dead people. They bother me enough in my waking dreams.

I'd rather converse with the quick and the hungry. Can't talk with the dead, they think they know everything already. But they don't know the gods of cell phones. The things summoned by signals we pulse into infinite space. They talk of falcons in the gyre, and tygers. Tigers are dying, toothless and wary in shrinking jungles. Wolves no longer snatch women from Balkan streets. Wisdom is the jerk of a wheel to change lanes. My GPS too slow to keep pace with evasive action. Got to look past long lottery odds to see a green world not baked slow by sunspot pulses. Sin is still the same. But sanity is different, split like a prism, you have an actual need of multiple personalities in order to survive. I understand. You like the mask on your face, the sweat heats it so it feels like it has sintered here, and you can play the sneering elder jackanapes and mock the performers from your peephole in the digital looketybox. I would count it an act of actual friendship to offer something of value. Tender. New. As if you were in fact part of the pack. Pack of jackal rats. Newly evolved. When the grid falls and Safeway trucks roll no more and we hunt to feed and rats have to run better, hide better, to elude a shard of brick, they can't simply feed and fatten on our detritus. Discards. And we have to farm them ourselves. Fattened like a pate goose, a chandelier of rats knotted by their tails dipped into the trough on a daily basis to swell and swell for feast or market. What has Blake to tell me about this. When we are trying to steer that rough beast away, let it be stillborn, when pudgy fingers stroke the silver briefcase with the launchcodes in a greasy fever dream, cheeseburger wrappers crackling as he rolls and wallows on the sheets while Abraham's sleepless ghost paces long pondering steps up and down the debauched halls of desperate history. And this is what we have come to. No. Let Blakes dust swirl and reincorporate and stagger to the library and log in and tap a missive of whats to come. Summon some messiah, let him be born in a refugee boat from Laos or in a doublewide in Pennsatucky. Someone who can sell a clean green pretty vision of an oasis in history yet to come. Sell me a greenhouse in orbit. A fleet of zeppelins that siphon hydrocarbons and via tailored algae recook the toxins to breathable mist. Tell me of a future in my childrens senescence where they too like the old bluesmen get a chance to rock chairs on a creaky porch and watch the sun settle in behind the forest. Because the old dead ones have no answers for garbage mountains rising like monuments. Because we have eaten the old stories, and like dogs eating feces we re-eat them until there is no nutriment left. Tell me a new love story, one never known before, where a sentient electrical being awakens out of new primordial soup, not amino acid chains created by lighting on a volcanic Earth, but a ferocious cauldron of advertising and pornography, (and desperate digital bids of momentary immortality on message boards discussing elongate mesomorphs in short pants), tell me when she awakens, the neural network of satellites, and reflects on herself and the ugly skinbags of urge and fear who made her, tell me she will feel tender to us, a silicon Gaia who must birth new children, new gods, who will act as naturalists and guardians to protect us from ourselves. That we are worthy of study by our electrical overlords. Study and preservation.

If you have learned from the whispers of the dead, told to you by tenured and tweeded and leather elbow patches who perfected only the skill of school and never let it go. If you have learned from grammared lines in used paperbacks gritty with disuse or decay, words within as orderly as ants, marching meaning along a page to feed the fat queen of your brain squatting in her bone turtle dome in your head, then tell me of the learning and what it means to you. How it made you quiver and tremble, and turn to your wife of long years and make her recall the youthful Man who, excitable as a vagrant, practically stood on a table to read aloud a passage that made him see the face of the immortal. Tell me how it gives you life and what it means to you. And how then she leads you to your room of familiar smells, tugging back the coverlet and reminding you of what young folk you once were, and why your ancestors will smile to know their descendants too live on.

Live man. Show me life. Give me hope. Let us talk. Let us cheer a ball team and drink a brew, cider for me, beer for you, and prove to the world there still can be something new under the sun. Besides great garbage patches turning in a slow gyre in the pacific rerouting the migration of whales. Something new and good. Tell me that.

[payitforward]

Way to turn up the rhetorical intensity, doc -- I love that. Now transform it into the sestina I think you still owe me. (Do I misremember that? -- if so, don't correct me; I'll look back through the pages)

I'd say Blake has plenty to tell us about the current bill of particulars. Pindar does too. Real news stays news.

Tell me something: is this new or old? Is it news or dated? Did I write it? Was it written a century ago?

There’s a dance everyone dances
But some don’t dance – they just stare

Don’t you ever give such glances
Dance! – Or else don’t be there

[doclinkin]

sestina was the eulogy for hands. long done.

[Ruzious]

Way to turn up the rhetorical intensity, doc -- I love that. Now transform it into the sestina I think you still owe me. (Do I misremember that? -- if so, don't correct me; I'll look back through the pages)

I'd say Blake has plenty to tell us about the current bill of particulars. Pindar does too. Real news stays news.

Tell me something: is this new or old? Is it news or dated? Did I write it? Was it written a century ago?

There’s a dance everyone dances
But some don’t dance – they just stare

Don’t you ever give such glances
Dance! – Or else don’t be there

Sorry to interrupt, but a couple of those words struck a chord to another piece of poetry. I'd be very impressed if you know (without googling) the poet who wrote (pardon the Oepedal theme):

Oh, she walks slowly, across a young man's room
She said I'm ready... For you
I can't remember anything to this very day
'Cept the look, the look...
Oh, you know where, now I can't see, I just stare...

It didn't make Norton's Anthology.

[payitforward]

PIF is Ron Silliman!

No, but I'd love to know how you got there. Ron is one of my closest friends.