Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do when you are fallen

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

Swenson does the best poetry of the body. I love the enjambment in "Body my good / bright dog is dead." It’s like the speaker loves life so much that she actually breaks off in the middle of the thought before getting to "dead" because she’s so stuck on the goodness and brightness of being an embodied being. I also like the phrase "wind for an eye" because it implicitly continues the house metaphor by subtly recalling the etymology of "window," from Old Norse "vindauga," or "wind’s eye."

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…which is A Christmas Tree, which I think somehow cheapens the whole thing by making it some trite, pallid God metaphor.

A Christmas Tree
by William Burford

I like the personification of the astronomical body, the begging of warmth across the chill of space, the abject genuflection of the insignificant people [who are so insignificant that they can’t buy another vowel for "Huddld"]. It’s a desperate and rather hopeless plea.

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The dude generally pisses me off with his fucking stupid misogyny and gender essentialism, not to mention racism, but I do love this poem:

Death Is Not Evil, Evil Is Mechanical

And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego
a grey void thing that goes without wandering
a machine that in itself is nothing
a centre of the evil world.

Frankly, I ignore the fact that someone’s been reading too much Freud and return to this poem for the middle part: the quintessence of glorious, vacillating humanity. "A calling column of blood" — what a perfect evocation of our physicality and our longing for emotional connection.

D.H. Lawrence really hates machines… He especially has it out for electric wheelchairs [ref. Clifford Chatterley]. Fuck off, D.H. Lawrence!

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1490624.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.

A word sticks in the wind’s throat;
A wind-launch drifts in the wells of rye;
Sometimes, in broad silence,
The hanging apples distill their darkness.

You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair,
Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say
Softly, forgive me love if also I call you
Wind’s word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.

I love the language here, especially the "wind-launch," with its connotations of air caught in the depths of long grasses. And the apples, "distill[ing] their darkness" — what does that mean? I think of tangy fermentation, cider, fall, secrecy, something somber, witnessing and slightly menacing.

And that enjambment in the second stanze — "whose name I say / Softly " — wow! A word sticks in the speaker’s throat as a word sticks in the wind’s throat. It’s such a regretful poem, a melancholy evocation of thwarted feeling.

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1490396.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.

Alfred de Musset’s La Nuit de Mai is an extended poetic dialog between the Poet and the Muse. The Muse urges the poet to sing/write in the efflorescence of spring. The Poet keeps moping, saying his sadness is too intense to be spoken. The Muse hits some seductive, sexual raptures, but the Poet, too busy immured in his melancholy, seems not to notice. Idiot.

In La Nuit d’Aout and La Nuit d’Octobre, the relationship between le Poete et la Muse continues with erotic charge, but I won’t go into those parts now. I’m just happy that I have rediscovered La Nuit de Mai, especially now that I’m thinking about Anneka and Will’s muses, who probably use de Musset’s Nuits cycle for their own devices.

A warm, dense poem, like going to sleep after reading, and then dreaming about oneself in another body. Smells like a villanelle, though it ain’t one. Gives new meaning to the term body language. Also, think of the bookbinding terms that take human metaphors, like “spine” and “jacket” and “joint” and “head” and “tail.”

Working exhaustedly with the online Poet supply of words from Magnetic Poetry’s Web site.

It’s hard to concentrate at work. [No, really??] Forthwith, some spew from the online Romantic selection of Magnetic Poetry [TM]. I like the sharpened tongue the best…it’s the little inhuman touches that are most effective… :p I notice that all of my fridge poetry appears to be about death, disturbance and violence. Or sex. Or several of the above. WOOOOO HOOOOOO!

 I was just messing with Magnetic Poetry’s online Garden suite of words. I was trying to see how much I could pervert it. I think I succeeded. This one is for all you vampires out there….

I checked out a fridge poetry community, but all the entries were too serious and/or pretentious, so I left for Magnetic Poetry, which has a Web site where you can futz with some of the kits. I used the Genius edition, which is more like the Regular Vocabulary edition for me. I like “tinged with galling language” and “tantamount to temerity” the best. They just speak trippingly on the tongue, you know. Tantamount and temerity are good words to eject contemptuously and if you get them both together you just have a veritable mortar spray of plosives!

Figured out the peculiarity of Magnetic Poetry. With its preponderance of adjectives, it has no association with workaday language, so it all but requires a) endless concatenations of nouns and adjectives or b) strings of adjectives that you would not expect to go together. Case in point is today’s effort. Also I swear that I didn’t set out to write about cunnilingus. I just realized after that the last clause could be interpreted that way.

I recall repulsive
white love & the
giftless juice of a
screaming symphony
beneath the thousand
smooth tongues
of girls

…Continuing the tradition of complete and grammatically correct sentences created with Magnetic Poetry [TM]. Not particularly inspired by anything, except we had all the adjectives collected together, so fast, true and black were nearby.

We have long had magnetic alphabets on our fridge, but those have only so much entertainment value because we quickly reach the limit of 52 letters [2 alphabets]. When we moved into our new apartment, I bought some magnetic poetry. I enjoy using it, but then I want to preserve my stupid creations for all eternity, which prevents me from raping them for recombination. So I’ve decided to photograph the results of my magnetic maundering. As you can see, it’s all in character: long sentences that take unexpected turns as they tell fantastic stories burbling with unusual conflict.