Wallace Stevens posted:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

quote:

I set a jar upon a hill
Presumably it sits there still

Ronald Reagan posted:

These visitors to Tennessee do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still . . . a plain gray jar upon a hill.

William Butler Yeats posted:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

bacalou posted:

sublime is a pretty good band

""Wrong Way" by Sublime posted:

pre:

twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once
-over. Fiftythree(and one would see if it could)

say the breasts look very good:
 
firmlysquirmly with a slight jounce;

thirteen pants have a hunch

admit in threedimensional distress
these hips were made for Horizontal Business
(set on big legs nice to pinch

assiduously which justgraze
each other). As the lady lazily struts
                               (her
thickish flesh superior to the genuine daze
of unmarketable excitation,

whose careless movements carefully scatter

pink propaganda of annihilation

quote:

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Android Blues posted:

thats a really interesting read too. in my own seminar on the subject the prof saw it as a very transcendalist-type piece so my read was instinctively critical because, as you mention, i feel its hard to miss that this is a little bit of a sad fantasy.

also i drew what i think yeats might look like in his bird form

quote:

113.

I know that he exists
Somewhere, in silence.
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

'Tis an instant's play,
'Tis a fond ambush,
Just to make bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But should the play
Prove piercing earnest,
Should the glee glaze
In death's stiff stare,

Would not the fun
Look too expensive?
Would not the jest
Have crawled too far?

quote:

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
The mate was fixed by the bos'n's pike,
The bos'n brained with a marlin spike,
And Cookey's throat was marked belike
It had been gripped
By fingers ten;
And there they lay,
All good dead men
Like break-o'-day in a boozing-ken
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men of the whole ship's list
Dead and be damned and the rest gone whist!
The skipper lay with his nob in gore
Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore
And the scullion he was stabbed times four.
And there they lay,
And the soggy skies
Dripped all day long
In upstaring eyes
In murk sunset and at foul sunrise
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men of 'em stiff and stark
Ten of the crew had the Murder mark
'Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead,
Or a yawing hole in a battered head
And the scuppers glut with a rotting red
And there they lay
Aye, drat my eyes
All lookouts clapped
On paradise
All souls bound just contrariwise
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

Fifteen men of 'em good and true
Every man jack could ha' sailed with Old Pew
There was chest on chest full of Spanish gold,
With a ton of plate in the middle hold,
And the cabins riot of stuff untold,
And they lay there,
That had took the plum,
With sightless glare
And their lips struck dumb,
While we shared all by the rule of thumb
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

More was seen through the stern light screen
Chartings no doubt where a woman had been!
A flimsy shift on a bunker cot,
With a thin dirk slot through the bosom spot
And the lace stiff dry in a purplish blot.
Oh was she wench
Or some shuddering maid?
That dared the knife
And took the blade!
By God! she was stuff for a plucky jade
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
We wrapped 'em all in a mains'l tight
With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight
And we heaved 'em over and out of sight
With a Yo-Heave-Ho!
And a fare-you-well!
And a sullen plunge
In the sullen swell,
Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell!
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

Manifisto posted:

what do you think she means by the play "prov[ing] piercing earnest"? that God does not in fact exist? that he exists but is something wholly different from what we expect? that the narrator may find herself banished to hell instead of the anticipated "bliss"? something else?

but I agree, the light touch is very effective.

here is a quickie of skele-dickinson waiting for the big reveal:

Android Blues posted:

thats excellent. youve captured her essence

i think that is a deeply interesting question that i had not fully considered before. because there is that word "earnest" - which implies at face value some agency, because for the trick to BE earnest, someone does still have to be playing it.

"piercing earnest" of course has a sense of the shatteringly real as well, the idea that reality might somehow seep in on god and obviate him, but thats actually a little ephemeral if you want to sit an atheist reading on top of it. one now imagines dickinson considering some non-divine power, or a limited god, capable only of telling you that he is of no use to you

Gene Hackman Fan posted:

young ewing allison was a newspaper editor and columnist who took a couple of lines to a fictional sea shanty that robert louis stevenson made up for treasure island, and made a whole poem out of it called 'derelict'

the first time i ever read it, i was really knocked back by how graphic it was:


the first time i read through that i was just absentmindedly thumbing through a book of poems in the school library, acting like a shithead. i took poetry a little more seriously as an artform that can affect people ever since reading that poem.

(i mean, i'm still a shithead to this day, but at least i'm conscious of the problem)

quote:

The mocking Danish maidens
Carved useless anchors
Out of their crumbling cheeses;
Norway's king was angry.
Today these very maidens
Can see the iron anchors
Holding his eager warships;
And none is laughing now.

cda posted:

cda posted:

Let's get goofy with Gertrude Stein:

"Astrid Lorange posted:

By [Mark's] account, in Lifting Belly Stein "births" a queer aesthetic: in composing the work, she is "heavy with the weight lying in her . . . She is heavy and full with love with the desire to express her love. She is excited and she is pregnant" and "must create a place where she can make love and give birth." For Mark, this queer aesthetic reimagines maternity as a kind of feminine creativity, not defined by or restricted to (heteronormative forms of) reproduction.

Historical Wizards posted:

This is a poem is featured in Heimskringla, which is a history of the Kings of Norway written in the early 13th century.
This is how it is translated in my copy of "King Harald's Saga", which is mealy the section about King Harald 'Hard Ruler' Sigurdsson. (Note: this is the only part of Heimskringla I have read)
Its author is unknown


Interesting fact about Heimskringla's author Snorri Sturlusson who was also the author of the 'Prose Edda' which acted as a guide or instructional text on skaldic poetry of the time.
He was assassinated at the age of 61, his killers found him hiding in his basement, his last words translate to "Do not strike."

Luvcow posted:

this is an amazing thread



i always loved the idea that we sang before we spoke, and from song and sounds we made words to pass on stories and ideas. It's quicker and more efficient to speak in metaphors but the inevitable journey of understanding leads to language and the ability to clarify the metaphors so that we can understand, debate and discuss what they mean. poetry is just a deconstruction of the clutter of ordered words and a step back to the unconscious where less is more.

Manifisto posted:

that's a really cool way of looking at it.

it may be impossible to generalize this, but do you think lyrics add to music or detract (or none of the above)?

I always sort of liked Frank Black (of the Pixies)'s approach to at least some of his songs. one quote of his is "I'm less concerned with making sense than making the lyrics pop out of the speaker when people are listening to the music." there's a certain appeal to making lyrics that are evocative but don't burden the listener too much with trying to extract meaning, which could distract from listening to and appreciating the sound

I saw Sigur Rós in concert the other day and I sort of liked the fact that the lyrics were in Icelandic. while I knew something meaningful was being conveyed, I had to approach the songs based on the way they were being performed and sung, not the words.

Manifisto posted:

cool, thanks for the contribution!

as an aside, it's great that you've included such a substantial passage, but I wonder if there's a way to format it so that people reading the thread don't have to scroll so much? I guess SA doesn't support a "collapse" tag, that would be handy.

Manifisto posted:

as to the poem itself, "goofy" is a great way to describe it, in a sort of giddy upbeat way. I did have to look up what it was about, and was interested to learn that my initial take--pregnancy--wasn't entirely right, but also wasn't necessarily entirely wrong. I unfortunately have this only secondhand, but apparently one critic (Rebecca Mark) sees the poem in the following way:


For the record, Lorange has a different take, which is set forth in the linked work.

quote:

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.
...
There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual.
...

A sound, a whole sound is not separation, a whole sound is in an order.
...
A sentence of a vagueness that is violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also certainly also a prison. Calmness, calm is beside the plate and in way in. There is no turn in terror. There is no volume in sound.

Manifisto posted:

to me this seems pertinent to the poem I opened the thread with, "Anecdote of the Jar." in one reading, the jar is the poem, and instead of Keats' fancily decorated Grecian urn it is gray and featureless and defined by its shaped (round, tall, open) central void. the void itself, or perhaps the delineation between void and non-void, wilderness and non-wilderness, the natural world and the world of artifice, somehow both reflects and defines the world around it - and perhaps ultimately overwhelms it while simultaneously failing to contain it.

Luvcow posted:

theres a lot out there on the idea, here's a quick and easy link to an NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129155123