Re: a comment on Ending by Dovina	4-Nov-04/12:17 AM
How do you know the "you" in my comments was really you - Dovina - and not a purely rhetorical "you", maybe even a character I've created named "you", to whom, in the interest of indirectness and otherwise poetickal abstractness I direct all my comments? That aside (and probably utterly untrue and irrelevant - who knows?) the points of my earlier comment were that: 1) you answered richa's comment that your poems tend to make unsupportable assertions by making a bunch of unsupportable assertions and saying "so there"; 2) a useful trick for making unsupportable assertions in a poem is to place a character in the poem who makes the assertions; 3) your poems are self-righteous and doubt-free. The last bit, I'll admit now, was a little over the top. I'm sorry. But, seriously, I was thinking about the last poem of yours I'd read, "A Better God", and just kind of connecting it with a vague idea I've gotten about you from earlier poems. I might have better said, "You might consider being careful to make sure your poems don't sound self-righteous. The feeling I get from your poems of a rather childish and naive certainty, for me inseparable from the sense I get of you, Dovina, whether or not it's some elaborately constructed narrative voice, is actually painful to me." Better? Anyways, your response was a general, unsupportable and laughably wrong attack on my person, having practically nothing to do with my comment. After reading it, I checked the last half-dozen times I'd made useful and practical suggestions on your poems, and saw you'd regularly ignored the point of my comments and just said something irrelevant or insulting. So I guess my saying, "As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment" isn't so far off the mark. PS-You just think it's "childishly thought out" because I said "fucking" - twice. Anyhoo my characterization of you didn't have anything to do with your narratorial voice or whatever the rest of your comment's on about. Good catch!!!
Re: My Poison ( Vodka ) by Brittanyy	3-Nov-04/12:58 AM
I'm with richa. By the time you're vomiting, you're not ashamed of much of anything.
Re: Butterflies by Caducus	3-Nov-04/12:56 AM
In all seriousness, I would spend less time worrying if I'd included enough polysyllables and more time fixing hack, overwrought and ungrammatical sentence structures. Like the repeated subjectless past tenses in the first stanza (including bonus mispunctuated last two lines!) Like "from... to" in the second stanza. Like the incomplete present-participled sentence in the third (and, bonus! more incorrect and missing punctuation!!!) Like "saying goodbye... to meet again", which sounds trite AND is hard grammar. Like comma-bound non sequitors throughout. PS-Do you think there are seasons in the afterlife?
Re: Ash by horus8	3-Nov-04/12:49 AM
Dickenson.
Re: a comment on Bird (Yang) by <{Baba^Yaga}>	3-Nov-04/12:46 AM
Don't be so surprised. And horus is more woman than you are.
Re: a comment on Poems for devolution by richa	3-Nov-04/12:39 AM
I disagree. It's not necessarily for their farming, just that it would be ridiculously dark for them during a lot of the traditional workday, whatever they're doing. Living now in a mainly agriculutal sector (not to mention a desert which is only growable two or three months out of the year) I'd say they're probably still doing a lot. Dropping haggis-eaters (or adding more) would make it better.
Re: a comment on Ending by Dovina	3-Nov-04/12:24 AM
Hey, ace characterization! And right on the nose, too! Here's mine for you: As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment.
Re: a comment on Who is deserving of all my love by zodiac	1-Nov-04/12:41 AM
This poem is just a longer and not-as-good version of my ace poem, "Blinking" (http://poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=94210). It's also about the tenth time I've rhymed 'among' on this site. Compare and discuss.
Re: a comment on Call upon the wrath of god on ye by Imago	1-Nov-04/12:37 AM
It's stupid anyway. In any event, you're calling on the name of God so that God will witness your oath. And such statements are utterly bum. Congratulations on grouping yourself with them in a spectacularly dim fashion!
Re: a comment on Call upon the wrath of god on ye by Imago	1-Nov-04/12:30 AM
Please, for the love of God, stop cutting and pasting internet tidbits here. Not a single one of them has helped your case at all. Try... just TRY to understand: "he would call the wrath of God down upon them" is completely correct. The line in your poem, "Call upon the wrath of God on ye", is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. For one thing, the internet line has only one prepositional phrase, "down upon them"; yours has two, "upon", and "on ye," which combine to cause a kind of completely bumming reaction. THIS IS THE POINT WE'VE BEEN TRYING TO MAKE ALL WEEK. THIS IS MOSTLY WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE FUCKING POEM. For another thing, the internet quote has a subject, "he", which is doing the calling. Yours does not. No one knows who's doing the calling, or who is being called. THIS IS THE OTHER THING THAT'S MAINLY WRONG WITH YOUR POEM. ARE YOU THAT FUCKING DIM??!? SHEESH! GET A LIFE, BUDDY!!!!1!
Re: a comment on Ending by Dovina	1-Nov-04/12:21 AM
You're not answering richa's point, which is a decent one. Or your answering it in a singularly American fashion - something like the following conversation I recently heard between an American tourist and an Austrian: AUSTRIAN: Your smell is practically unbearable. AMERICAN: *Fart* If you're bent on overloading your poems with unsupportable self-righteous assertions, why don't you do what any writer with sense would do and just insert a character into the poem to speak the self-righteous lines? That way your poem's not self-righteous, you're just describing some guy who might or might not be self-righteous (cf. any of the dozens of unsupportable statements in any of richa's poems.) And while you're at it, why don't you try to not be so self-righteous? You're so proud of yourself and doubt-free in your poems it actually hurts.
Re: a comment on Call upon the wrath of god on ye by Imago	31-Oct-04/12:48 AM
Please... listen very carefully: Take a look at your example, "called on our friends to help". Do you see anything there even halfway grammatically similar to the line in your poem, "Call upon the wrath of god on ye", other than the phrase "call upon"? There isn't anything. Your friends are people; wrath is a thing. To make your comment example even slightly correspond to your poem, you'd have to say, "Call upon the help of our friends on us." That, of course, is gobble. On the other hand, to make the poem line similar to your comment, you'd have to say "called upon God to bring his wrath upon ye." This is just fine. THAT'S HALF OF THE FUCKING POINT. But it still doesn't take care of -=Dark_Angel=-,P.I.'s point that you don't know who's calling or where God is. If you're telling the abuser, or whatever, to call the wrath of God upon themselves - well, that doesn't make sense, does it? All they'd have to do is pretend they didn't hear or understand you, and there'd be no wrath, would there? Or maybe you meant, "[I] call the wrath of God upon ye". Then why didn't you just say so? Oh, because it sounded deeper this way. Well, I hope you see what kind of mess that's gotten you in. But I bet you just didn't know what the fuck you were saying. You thought, in some dim highschool English lit fashion, that the way you get wrath to fall on someone is to tell it, the wrath, "Call upon the wrath of God etc. etc." It's as if I called you on the phone (which I wouldn't) and said to you, "Find yourself and tell you to come over for videogames and cornchips." Am I right? Sheesh! Even the Jameses weren't that dim.
Re: a comment on Call upon the wrath of god on ye by Imago	31-Oct-04/12:31 AM
Ace call again, you dim! The word "whilst" isn't archaic in England - where richa lives!!!@!1!@! "to state these arguments with little if nothing to back them up seems somewhat arrogant."
Re: a comment on Call upon the wrath of god on ye by Imago	31-Oct-04/12:28 AM
No, you idiot! That wouldn't make it any better! For one thing, "May God have shame on you," is not at all what the expression "shame on you" means, so, Great work! God doesn't get ashamed, since he makes all rules regarding shame and normalcy anyways, and, as any schoolchild knows, spends most of his time Gloriously Nude. God BRINGS shame upon people. Excellent use of the language, man!!!!! For another thing, "may god have shame on you" isn't the same kind of phrase as "Call upon the wrath of god on ye" is. In order to be structured the same way, it would have to be, "Call upon the shame of God on ye," which doesn't make any more sense than your original. For another thing, you've totally missed the point! All you have to do, you fucking clod, is "Call the wrath of God upon ye/thee/you/whateverthefuck." That's how you do it. And here's an interesting sideline: The Bible wasn't written in King James English, you fucking moron!!!!! It was just re-written in King James for people using it during King James's time, and after awhile everyone thought it made them sound kind of cool and powerful, when really it just made them all sound like dolts and hopeless anachronisms. In short: forget all this Biblical reference gobble; you just thought it made you sound intelligent and poetic. I hope you're feeling horribly horribly wrong about that now.
Re: a comment on Ash by horus8	31-Oct-04/12:14 AM
re: "Seems the poem is a metaphor for something lost." You are the dimmest person ever! Congratulations!
Re: a comment on Who is deserving of all my love by zodiac	28-Oct-04/10:41 AM
I actually meant him to sound like the Devill in the Charlie Daniels Band song "The Devil Went Down on Georgie," which I don't actually recall ever having heard.
Re: a comment on Summer nights alone and their affect on the psyche by oneglove	28-Oct-04/10:34 AM
A real Master wouldn't have used "affect" as a nown. He would have used "effect". Nice catch!
Re: Alone by rrashi	27-Oct-04/1:18 AM
Great@!!1
Re: a comment on A Better God by Dovina	27-Oct-04/1:01 AM
Yes, I think it would be a good idea for you to replace a grammatically-correct and stupid-sounding line with one that is, at least, correct. The only reasons I can think of that you wouldn't change it is that you think "discover" is an especially exciting and evocative word and you have a poet's somewhat illfounded aversion to the word "thing". As far as discover goes, it's not. You just think so because it's long and you think long words, inappropriately used, are better than short words, appropriately used. If your point is to evoke some feeling for the reader, discover does nothing. Who the fuck has ever discovered anything and then said, oh, what I'm doing now is "discovering"? Hereafter, whenever I hear the word "discover" it will recall for me that dizzying bowel-loosening feeling I have now! No one, that's who. "Thing" is probably a poor word choice, but not nearly as bad as an ungrammatical, botched-metered line for the sake of using "discover". Why don't you use "everything" in the place of "all the things"? Or figure something out yourself. I'm not going to write your fucking poem for you, JEEZ!!!!
Re: a comment on Who is deserving of all my love by zodiac	26-Oct-04/6:04 AM
I meant flinch. But now I'm considering using felch, which I find works just as well.