She bent, once more in a dim light of the evening
Half watching a movie that she’d seen before
A thousand times, along her strings, knotted now
Into an impossible concoction of eye hurting colours
The warmth spread across the treads she touched with care,
She’s not going to be sick this winter
She casts it as a spell onto an ashen, spidery plot
We are blind, but she can see it all within the pattern
The movie is over, credits race through the dark screen,
The clock on the wall calls twelve, the hour of endings
But she doesn’t stop, giving herself five more minutes of love
Weaved into the shawl that not even Moirae can touch
Sunday 20 November 2011
7. Blank verse
The major problem I had with both blank verse and ballad is that according to the rules that were laid out for those forms of poetry ages ago - when the world was younger and more frivolous - they both ought to be written in an iambic pentameter. It is possible that one day I wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll shout ‘Eureka! The gods finally decided that it is the time to let me understand iambic pentameter. At last!’ And then I sit in my chair – as I am in fact doing right now – and instead of explaining that am a complete moron and making up excuses, I will actually become a proper descendent of Shakespeare and produce tons of stuff that will make future generations of kids smash their virtual, laser pens and break up in tears. Unless that happens, I don’t think I will ever be able to produce anything close to iambic pentameter.
At the end of the day I decided to go with blank verse and represent contemporary epic speech; which could be also viewed as a conversation on the phone. I am sure that the epic speech today can be as epic on the phone or on skype; the medium is always secondary to the content. I am not going to argue that the ‘I’ in the poem delivers an actual dramatic speech in a sense it was understood hundreds of years ago. Although under the surface of humour there is quite sad and subversive undertone. Wherever you go, whatever you do, being truly faithful to yourself is yet another obstacle in a way of communication. Especially on the first date.
I think the whole idea of speech in poetry is quite fascinating. The poem is always a voice. Creating speeches within the poems is therefore a little bit like putting two cotes on. If it’s really cold then it’s perfectly justified but when the weather gets warmer you’ll feel terribly sweaty; not even mentioning the fact that two coats will make you walk like a disabled penguin. I guess the key to the successful speech within the frame of the poem is to accentuate the deliberation in which it is represented, just enough to highlight the specific elements of the spoken language, but not as much as to make it an actual spoken language (does it make sense? It does for me). I am a little bit afraid that I overdid on that last thing and that my poem is a bit too realistic.
At the end of the day I decided to go with blank verse and represent contemporary epic speech; which could be also viewed as a conversation on the phone. I am sure that the epic speech today can be as epic on the phone or on skype; the medium is always secondary to the content. I am not going to argue that the ‘I’ in the poem delivers an actual dramatic speech in a sense it was understood hundreds of years ago. Although under the surface of humour there is quite sad and subversive undertone. Wherever you go, whatever you do, being truly faithful to yourself is yet another obstacle in a way of communication. Especially on the first date.
I think the whole idea of speech in poetry is quite fascinating. The poem is always a voice. Creating speeches within the poems is therefore a little bit like putting two cotes on. If it’s really cold then it’s perfectly justified but when the weather gets warmer you’ll feel terribly sweaty; not even mentioning the fact that two coats will make you walk like a disabled penguin. I guess the key to the successful speech within the frame of the poem is to accentuate the deliberation in which it is represented, just enough to highlight the specific elements of the spoken language, but not as much as to make it an actual spoken language (does it make sense? It does for me). I am a little bit afraid that I overdid on that last thing and that my poem is a bit too realistic.
I tell you
I tell you –
I called him about ten thousand times,
he doesn’t answer.
What do you mean he doesn’t want to talk to me?
What have I done? Again? No…
I don’t think I talk too much.
Definitely. Not.
I was just trying to explain that, no matter
how much you learn, you can never know the truth.
The omniscience does not exist,
we never know all the facts.
Because. What do you mean? Just because.
That stuff with calculating the entropy of black holes,
oh, that was just an example. I was just simply,
yes simply, pointing out that everything is relative.
Relative to what?
Well, for example time can be relative to speed,
Although we can never know that for su…
So what? Can’t a humanist talk about physics?
Is it my problem that not everyone finds it interesting?
And then? Oh, yeah and then I explained to him
how Wankel’s Engine works, and why in art
women are often portrayed as lack.
What do you mean?
I do not intimidate. Damn it.
I called him about ten thousand times,
he doesn’t answer.
What do you mean he doesn’t want to talk to me?
What have I done? Again? No…
I don’t think I talk too much.
Definitely. Not.
I was just trying to explain that, no matter
how much you learn, you can never know the truth.
The omniscience does not exist,
we never know all the facts.
Because. What do you mean? Just because.
That stuff with calculating the entropy of black holes,
oh, that was just an example. I was just simply,
yes simply, pointing out that everything is relative.
Relative to what?
Well, for example time can be relative to speed,
Although we can never know that for su…
So what? Can’t a humanist talk about physics?
Is it my problem that not everyone finds it interesting?
And then? Oh, yeah and then I explained to him
how Wankel’s Engine works, and why in art
women are often portrayed as lack.
What do you mean?
I do not intimidate. Damn it.
Saturday 5 November 2011
6. Open forms
Straight away comes the apology for the fact that I didn't upload my thoughts on sonnet. As all of you know I went to Scotland and although it was a productive trip it was also quite disturbing in some way. I will still come back to sonnet but first I want to share with you my recent poem which is an expression of precisely the kind of thing I want to write. All the references in the text are used self consciously and with determination. Because most of the times you find real poems lying inside of other people and the only thing you as a writer has to do, is to channel that voice. I could supply here the list of references but I think it is quite pointless, since everyone probably would like to discover them for themselves. Let me just say thanks to Roisin for 'rooms spread across the city' because that idea had never left me since. I also have a photo which shows the real World's End Close in Edinburgh. The poem is called 'sometimes'
It was The Day
Rooms spread across the city
Contagious, white, dangerous, pure
We leaped the time
Today, its twentieth first century
Today we don’t talk
No more
We guess each other
According to the transmission,
Appropriation and development
It’s not contextual
We game
Do not unplug
Unfeel, pause, connected, reach
Grab, open, share, I am you
We don’t sleep
This time is fake and upsetting
Let us progress, from frame into frame
The war of mind and window
We watch
But no one sees the video
Meet me at the World’s End Close
I will unravel you
In a way, I am all the people
I morph into you
A being with no self
Understanding follows recognition
Form follows function
In your case, you deserve
An invitation, at least
Your life is upsetting
Do it for the sake of humanity
Fuck you man
It was The Day
Rooms spread across the city
Contagious, white, dangerous, pure
We leaped the time
Today, its twentieth first century
Today we don’t talk
No more
We guess each other
According to the transmission,
Appropriation and development
It’s not contextual
We game
Do not unplug
Unfeel, pause, connected, reach
Grab, open, share, I am you
We don’t sleep
This time is fake and upsetting
Let us progress, from frame into frame
The war of mind and window
We watch
But no one sees the video
Meet me at the World’s End Close
I will unravel you
In a way, I am all the people
I morph into you
A being with no self
Understanding follows recognition
Form follows function
In your case, you deserve
An invitation, at least
Your life is upsetting
Do it for the sake of humanity
Fuck you man
journal
Going after Paul’s advice I did my daily log of one specific thing. Since I was travelling last week – and as we all know during travels strange things happen easier – I decided to do the log of wounds I suffered every day for six days. I have to actually say that it works, because I already wrote poem about it too. And that is the stuff (some of them are kind of disturbing):
Day 1. A knife cut on my right thumb; I got it while cutting the cheese.
Day 2. A paper cut on the same thumb, that one I’ve got while opening the notebook.
Day 3. Hit my left thumb with my luggage and scrape it to blood with a handle; that one was done on the airport.
Day 4. Someone squeezed my upper arm between the door and the door frame. I can’t even remember who exactly did that so there is no one to really blame for spoiling my arm with two gigantic bruises.
Day 5. I have bruised my derriere. And that one I have no idea how I’ve got. I think the defence mechanism is preventing me from remembering. However it is fairly possible that it happened when I was trying to get into the house through window wearing heels…
Day 6. I have bite marks on my right palm and left hand.
Day 1. A knife cut on my right thumb; I got it while cutting the cheese.
Day 2. A paper cut on the same thumb, that one I’ve got while opening the notebook.
Day 3. Hit my left thumb with my luggage and scrape it to blood with a handle; that one was done on the airport.
Day 4. Someone squeezed my upper arm between the door and the door frame. I can’t even remember who exactly did that so there is no one to really blame for spoiling my arm with two gigantic bruises.
Day 5. I have bruised my derriere. And that one I have no idea how I’ve got. I think the defence mechanism is preventing me from remembering. However it is fairly possible that it happened when I was trying to get into the house through window wearing heels…
Day 6. I have bite marks on my right palm and left hand.
Friday 28 October 2011
5. Sonnet
Sonnet 1
You are a guilty mark upon my soul
That came to me tonight. Once upon a dream
I want to seal a kiss, and not to foul,
But I am forced to surrendering scream.
I put my mind away, to follow you
Into the sweaty nightmare of sly lust.
How would you like to swim into the blue?
Watching the skies with mask of right and just...
I lick your hand and watch you smile and bloom
Like flower, that sings only once and dies.
We meet again, before the morning gloom
To spread rainbow thread upon the morning skies.
The world is a shallow and dirty place,
I run towards when my dreams win that race.
________
We
are
perfect –
strong,
beautiful,
alive,
too
stupid
to
know
the
value
of
it.
________
Ability
It is clearly the matter of abilities –
One can argue that wishing for someone's face is incongruous, and it points
towards malfunction of personality, in certain aspects I agree, nevertheless
this runs deeper than any explanation I am able to provide, at this point.
Michaelangelo could base his sculptures on you, and if daVinci saw your
enigmatic smile he surely would not paint Mona Lisa.
As for me
(I could hang you on the wall as painting, I could chop of your head dip it in
formaldehyde stick into a jar and put it on my desk)
it is clearly the matter of abilities; therefore I compose, I word paint with caution,
a portrait that is like a charming spell.
(To make all your clothes fall off)
From miles away my hands slide through the same darkness that falls upon
the flower of your lips. My eyes reach towards stars that you can name.
Your lungs are filled with heavy, sticky breath of life that understands the
love of loneliness as do I,
and although we have nothing in common I know we feel pain in the same way.
(unless you are a psychopath)
+ coming soon (hopefully) 'all the stuff you don't want to know about when you are writing a sonnet'
You are a guilty mark upon my soul
That came to me tonight. Once upon a dream
I want to seal a kiss, and not to foul,
But I am forced to surrendering scream.
I put my mind away, to follow you
Into the sweaty nightmare of sly lust.
How would you like to swim into the blue?
Watching the skies with mask of right and just...
I lick your hand and watch you smile and bloom
Like flower, that sings only once and dies.
We meet again, before the morning gloom
To spread rainbow thread upon the morning skies.
The world is a shallow and dirty place,
I run towards when my dreams win that race.
________
We
are
perfect –
strong,
beautiful,
alive,
too
stupid
to
know
the
value
of
it.
________
Ability
It is clearly the matter of abilities –
One can argue that wishing for someone's face is incongruous, and it points
towards malfunction of personality, in certain aspects I agree, nevertheless
this runs deeper than any explanation I am able to provide, at this point.
Michaelangelo could base his sculptures on you, and if daVinci saw your
enigmatic smile he surely would not paint Mona Lisa.
As for me
(I could hang you on the wall as painting, I could chop of your head dip it in
formaldehyde stick into a jar and put it on my desk)
it is clearly the matter of abilities; therefore I compose, I word paint with caution,
a portrait that is like a charming spell.
(To make all your clothes fall off)
From miles away my hands slide through the same darkness that falls upon
the flower of your lips. My eyes reach towards stars that you can name.
Your lungs are filled with heavy, sticky breath of life that understands the
love of loneliness as do I,
and although we have nothing in common I know we feel pain in the same way.
(unless you are a psychopath)
+ coming soon (hopefully) 'all the stuff you don't want to know about when you are writing a sonnet'
4. Villanelle
All the poems we concern ourselves about in this semester are quite heavily structured. Villanelle seems to be one of these particularly difficult and yet it is not really. You buckle up, count the lines, divide into stanzas and make up two lines that you think are particularly cool so they can bear the repetitions and do not make the whole sound like a children song about the bunny rabbits. Then there is the rhyming scheme. I am usually not particularly friendly with rhymes, let’s just say that most of the times we give ourselves a friendly understanding nod, when we see each other, but we wouldn't really engage in prolonged evening conversations over a glass of red. In this case however, I decided to follow the rhyming structure precisely for that reason. It is interesting to do something outside a comfort zone once in a while. As for the actual poem and the theme, it wasn’t very difficult once I established my key lines:
I will always be in pain with you
But when I give up; promise to see me through
As to that first line it might seem quite weird to use the word ‘pain’ instead of ‘love’. You may burn me on the stake but I cannot determine if in this context love is used as noun or a verb. At the same time it doesn’t really matter, because the phrase is so well established in the common language, that one substitution does not create the sense of misunderstanding, but a slight ambiguity that is necessary in this case. Saying ‘I will always be in love with you’ in a poem? I don’t know if someone could really pull it off but if they do, I kneel. I can’t, and I don’t really know if I want to. In this context the message is clear (or at least I hope it is). The second line is a plead and I thought if anything can bear repetition in the quasi-love poem it is going to be a helpless appeal to other person, that cannot be explained or justified. Why do I say quasi-love poem? I wanted to write a poem about love in friendship not about a romantic love as I find that subject far more compelling and worth of exploration. I am a strong fan of the turn in poems and in this one it comes in the second line of the last stanza:
On the road from here to forever; you and my knight
It introduces the third person and shifts the meaning. I am not quite sure about the word ‘knight’, it is somewhat clunky, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would do the job and sustain the rhyming scheme. At the end of the day, this whole line is surely the one for revision. But what to do to keep ‘road from here to forever’ and the rhyming scheme in place? This is not a job for a writer but for a mathematician. I surrender. (only until my grand come back with some kick-ass idea)
(oh and) PS. I am sorry Paul that it took so long. I am a victim of managers who think that ‘part time’ is a synonym of ‘full time, plus, can do all the shit hours’.
I will always be in pain with you
But when I give up; promise to see me through
As to that first line it might seem quite weird to use the word ‘pain’ instead of ‘love’. You may burn me on the stake but I cannot determine if in this context love is used as noun or a verb. At the same time it doesn’t really matter, because the phrase is so well established in the common language, that one substitution does not create the sense of misunderstanding, but a slight ambiguity that is necessary in this case. Saying ‘I will always be in love with you’ in a poem? I don’t know if someone could really pull it off but if they do, I kneel. I can’t, and I don’t really know if I want to. In this context the message is clear (or at least I hope it is). The second line is a plead and I thought if anything can bear repetition in the quasi-love poem it is going to be a helpless appeal to other person, that cannot be explained or justified. Why do I say quasi-love poem? I wanted to write a poem about love in friendship not about a romantic love as I find that subject far more compelling and worth of exploration. I am a strong fan of the turn in poems and in this one it comes in the second line of the last stanza:
On the road from here to forever; you and my knight
It introduces the third person and shifts the meaning. I am not quite sure about the word ‘knight’, it is somewhat clunky, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would do the job and sustain the rhyming scheme. At the end of the day, this whole line is surely the one for revision. But what to do to keep ‘road from here to forever’ and the rhyming scheme in place? This is not a job for a writer but for a mathematician. I surrender. (only until my grand come back with some kick-ass idea)
(oh and) PS. I am sorry Paul that it took so long. I am a victim of managers who think that ‘part time’ is a synonym of ‘full time, plus, can do all the shit hours’.
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