The faint anticipation of a clown arisen from of a small car on stilt legs
Obsessively compulsively imagining the unraveling
A virtually soft fish hook unspools
He elevates his dirt above the dirt
gagging on that Saint Christopher medal like dry swallowing a mega B vitamin for the first time
it's the fear that is the pep erasing the ignorance of the outcome that will happen like it's happening again
this banquet of perpetual surprise already an open book
He unknowingly brings a copy of his receipt to the doctors office
An electronic alimentary device reveals the sharp outline of a shampoo bottle
Don't tell me you're surprised
Your eyes betray you
Whisked out the back door like a celebrity hidden from the paparazzi
Someone has already given a nickname to this minor operation
The repressed memory is the one remembered best
Fished from his being like ambergris from a whale skull
Picture the water connoisseur wrinkling his nose at its mythic unremarkableness
Somewhere, the back seat of a ford tempo is overflowing with broken plastic laundry baskets
Obsessively compulsively imagining the unraveling
A virtually soft fish hook unspools
He elevates his dirt above the dirt
gagging on that Saint Christopher medal like dry swallowing a mega B vitamin for the first time
it's the fear that is the pep erasing the ignorance of the outcome that will happen like it's happening again
this banquet of perpetual surprise already an open book
He unknowingly brings a copy of his receipt to the doctors office
An electronic alimentary device reveals the sharp outline of a shampoo bottle
Don't tell me you're surprised
Your eyes betray you
Whisked out the back door like a celebrity hidden from the paparazzi
Someone has already given a nickname to this minor operation
The repressed memory is the one remembered best
Fished from his being like ambergris from a whale skull
Picture the water connoisseur wrinkling his nose at its mythic unremarkableness
Somewhere, the back seat of a ford tempo is overflowing with broken plastic laundry baskets
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Sun, May 4, 2008 - 10:39 AMIf you hadn't already proved yourself as a bad poet, I might have considered kicking you out for posting this thing.
I call 'good poetry' on this one, you fucker.
Anyone else? -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Mon, May 5, 2008 - 1:08 AMWell, if you categorize "good" as poetry most of us can't make any sense of, gee, I'd have to agree with you. Personally, it kind of reminded me of those random poetry generators...although a rather good one...uh, I mean...okay, maybe I'll shut up and think about writing bad poetry.
Of course, it could be good...with years and years of education in poetry...I mean, I wouldn't know. I certainly would appreciate the moderator's reasoning for why it is a good poem...I mean so one suddenly find one's self booted from the forum with little notice. So, yeah, let's discuss this one a bit. Why do you say it's good? Is it damned good? Or damn good? I couldn't really say...yet. -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Mon, May 5, 2008 - 11:47 AMSense can easily be made of it, provided we abandon the assumption that readers must make the same sense of it that the writer does.
It's what I call an 'opaque narrative'. Consider that when someone writes the word 'sexy', we can all agree that we have some idea what is sexy and what isn't sexy, but when we start comparing what is sexy, we then find that we much disagree. A good writer only uses such a word when something is deliberately left up to the reader, even though the writer has a very clear idea of what such a word means to himself or to herself. With an opaque narrative, the majority of the 'real content' of the text is similarly left up to the reader. I like to think of it like hitting someone in the face with an object wrapped in something that conceals the object identity; even if the nose breaks and everyone agrees that hitting has occurred, there can continue to be disagreement and doubt about what struck the nose. In the case of opaque narratives, the object of uncertainty is a hard and heavy subtext. -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Mon, May 5, 2008 - 3:49 PMYeah, but what if you don't even know or care that someone thinks they broke your nose? I mean, if you can't even give someone a love slap with your prose it isn't very good, right? I mean, walking around going, "Gee, I really knocked that guy out!" while the guy is still wandering around ignoring the fact that he's been "knocked for a loop" and society doesn't seem to notice or care about an alleged knocking about then what is the point? It's worthless. And, hence, bad poetry. -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Mon, May 5, 2008 - 7:37 PMBad poems tend to have an opaque narrative anyway. This one is built to have an opaque narrative lead into bad content. Whether or not you think this is obvious is what decides how you evaluate this poem.
The only reason you can say this is a good poem is because it's submitted where bad poetry is obvious. Evaluated anywhere poetry is held to high literary standards and it would be the gaggingly terrible poem it is because of the degree of literacy involved in describing the process of insertion and extraction of a bottle of Selsen Blue from some guy's ass. Paired with the obvious and then compared against the obvious later; the meaning of these high-sounding words within the poem and even their definition outside of the poem become altogether awful by design. The hard object you feel the opaque narrative wraps itself around is the poor use of the English language made uberpoor by its correct usage.
Or in metaphor, the English language is this guy's asshole wrapped around a bottle of Selsen Blue.
Really, the only reason you think it's a good poem is because despite all that; it's still a bad poem. -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Tue, May 6, 2008 - 1:54 AMNow, see, if you'd just tacked that all on to the end--if you'll pardon the expression there--then, maybe, it would have been considered bad to begin with...er, well, I really wouldn't know...being only a dilettante...
Hey, how about change the title to something more interesting like "Selsen Blooze"? -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Tue, May 6, 2008 - 8:44 AMWhether you even understand or care to understand is not best criterion of good poetry, since modern people, at least, care so little even for the world's very best poetry. What matters is whether someone who reads it all the way through once will bother to do so again. If they generally will, it's a good poem. -
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Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Tue, May 6, 2008 - 1:58 PMSo does that mean my "Die, chigger, die!" poem was actually a good poem? (If interested, search the tribe on the term "chigger" to find it.) -
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This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: Bagging the Cat's Hands
Tue, May 6, 2008 - 2:25 PMI'll have to get back to you on that.
Before I do, though, I should probably explain that re-reading poems merely in order to do produce pathology reports on them does not satisfy the basic re-reading criterion I have mentioned.
People re-reading a poem for pathological reasons makes it a good example of a bad poem, not a good poem as such.
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