Sasha
replying on As Catullus Said (Updated and Revised) by Sasha
4 May 2004, 5:37 PM
Here's a rough draft of the first verse. See how you like it.
Don't you leave me now,
Now we must forget
All we can forget
All that's left us now;
To forget about
All the times we fought
And the time we lost
Trying to figure out
How we might forget
When attacks of "why?"
Helped our hearts kill time,
How it thrills me yet!
(then) Don't you leave me now... (etc.)
I know the last line could use more work
"Just give me a beat that I can dance to!"
-zodiac's ace band, The Brotherhood of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist
LET'S SEE YOU DAAAAAANCE SUCKA YOU GOT NOTHIN ON ME
Perhaps you could change "with spears" to "his rear", and so on.
Be as liberal with it as you want, especially around the part about the volcano - and the refrain, which I can't think of any way to say that's not ridiculous in English. If you will do this for me, I promise not to make fun of you for at least one post.
Cipote,
Do you do requests? I'm looking for an English translation for Jacques Brel's "Ne Me Quite Pas" that goes with the melody and doesn't sound utterly gay, unlike my French.
Was the baby stillborn? The rhymes are mostly forced and do not add to the cadance. It's a good rhythm and a good story, but unless you can make the rhymes flow easily without attracting to themselves, I think it's best to do without.
Could it be possible that zodiac was not on drugs when he wrote this but rather you were on drugs when you read it?
very good, your best vilanelle yet
Yes. Small nits. Stogies-dump'em. Cigar even works better. Lose (quite) add comma.
The bloody morning-suggesting a bloody mary, excellent.
Over all 01.
However, I might add, it doesen't make a lot of sense; it doesen't have to though to be good.
I enjoy the first line especially. The moody internal M's throughout the piece make it feel somewhat surreal.
It is an essay with line breaks, but you make some good points.
You may have set a record on number of revisions in one day. This, I think is better, clearer, assuming I remember correctly what it said before. However, I think you've lost some of the mystique the poem originally had.
I hope the poem is deeper than you imply. Please see my comment above. It seems to get at the issue of whethjer meaning in a poem is more or less important than its prose, which includes the things you are saying.
but i just made this coz i felt like it...
'bloomsday'--that's pretty hot.
and you didn't cop out at the end <<appreciation>> although 'they' did.
It would probably be better if it made a bit of sense, whatever form it's in. If this poem is, as I imagine it is, about how some vaguely-defined (read 'nonexistent') INSTITUTION forces everyone to write in rhyme and prettily-formed phrases exactly like the 'Masters', and how much of a rebel you and a few other daring souls are who take poetry out for wild formless spins at night, then it's utter crap.
In school (and I imagine you're thinking largely of some high-school-type setting) you're taught a bunch of stuffy carefully-metered rhyming poems and very few daring non-careful poems because you are being taught much of the best that poetry has done from its beginnings (in English at least), meaning 1200 years of rhyme and meter and pretty much only 150 years of not. And because in the lower-grades teachers are more likely to teach the rhymed and metered ones (like "My lady's eyes are nothing like the sun") because it gives them a whole lot of easy things to talk about which aren't closely related to its content, while such mostly non-rhymed, non-metered later poems as "The Waste Land" don't. If you have a problem with that, talk to your teacher, who, if he/she is anything like most American teachers, is hugely undertrained and liable to stick with what's easy. Or stick your head out a window and see what's going on everywhere else in the world, where non-rhyme non-meter has UTTERLY DOMINATED THINGS so long that many people are bored with it and looking for other things to do, such as write some kind of rhyme/meter again. Thank you.
I find it less readable now. Well, less clear.
awww, very sad.