Re: Anodyne by wilco	8-May-04/4:47 PM
I find myself inclined to critique this seriously, who knows why, so here goes: 1) Drop the comma after "sway" in the first stanza. 2) Change "swiftly moving" to something else. 3) Say what color, pattern, etc. the bedcloth is, rather than simply saying it's tacky. 4) "as" in line 2 of stanza 2 should be "like" or nothing. 5) "nightstand new" is awkward; why didn't you say it in a way that made sense? 6) "it's" should be "its", and that whole clause is worded completely awfully. 7) "upward" is bad; stare at a water-stain in the shape of a beautiful woman, a light-fixture, or almost anything else. 8) The ellipses in the penultimate line are terrible. When people do that, it makes me feel like the last line is supposed to be a punchline, which is a ridiculous thing to put in a poem and a ridiculous way to set it up. I find that a comma, appositive or some interjection works a lot better to pause the poem a bit before the end; something like: but the truth, I think now, is that it just etc etc. That's awful, I know, but you get the idea. 9) I wish you'd kept up the soft rhyme from the first stanza; it was nice.
Re: The follies befalling an unfledged street poet. by SupremeDreamer	8-May-04/5:20 AM
I graduate from Poetry School with my Master's in Poetry today. This is a general announcement and has nothing to do with this poem, which I find is almost unreadable and totally, unsurprisingly about SupremeDreamer. -10-
Re: a comment on California triolets by zodiac	8-May-04/3:50 AM
Yes.
Re: sunrise at kofa by unknown^user	8-May-04/3:43 AM
"if the hills sing and the valleys mourn" seems to me to have no meaning whatsoever. What do you think?
Re: a comment on The Influence of Anxiety by Nicholas Jones	7-May-04/4:35 PM
No, I'm afraid the actual "poem" was: Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?) [rougly centered] "Jacobs was explicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a figure for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students told me, the means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose or rosenbaum. This was seen as an obvious reference to the Virgin Mary, who was often characterized as a rose without thorns, itself an emblem of the Immaculate Conception." - Is There a Text in This Class, Fish, 1980
Re: a comment on The Influence of Anxiety by Nicholas Jones	7-May-04/2:19 PM
In 1971, SUNY-Buffalo professor Stanley Fish performed an experiment on his poetry class where he left a list of 5 authors on his blackboard from another class and told them it was a religious poem. The poetry students critiqued it surprisingly well, considering it was RANDOM and UTTERLY MEANINGLESS. He wrote about the incident, "My students did not proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a poem: rather, it was the act of recognition that came first - they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem - and the distinguishing features then followed" (326). Fish claims to have performed this same experiment thousands of times on lecture audiences with the same result, even though he is now hideously famous for it.
Re: a comment on love.term by ggawrysi	7-May-04/8:38 AM
It is, but it would be better in BASIC or if it happened to produce filthy ASCII art when you ran it.
Re: a comment on California triolets by zodiac	7-May-04/8:20 AM
You should have seen the version where she was reading Henry Miller. Talk about morally bankrupt; I nearly exhausted my prostrate in the writing of it.
Re: a comment on Epitaph by philn	7-May-04/7:08 AM
What a load of crap. And anyway, he doesn't say the middle class is ashamed, he says it's downtrodden. This is also crap.
Re: a comment on California triolets by zodiac	7-May-04/7:03 AM
Are you being ironical?
Re: Epitaph by philn	7-May-04/5:23 AM
If ever a poem was in need of a good smacking, it's this one.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	6-May-04/11:44 AM
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooOOOOOOO!!!!!! Weren't you even listening in the Clubhouse?! You nod your head with some serious expression on your face so I think you're paying attention, but you're really humming "witchy woman" endlessly in your head while idly wondering if other people's earwax tastes the same as yours (it does). Then I find out you haven't heard a word I've said. Jesus, this unending guff-trap is never going to be over this way.
Re: a comment on Beard my Homemade Negro Jesus (Improved! With AIDS!) by Everyone	6-May-04/4:47 AM
It has now.
Re: a comment on Everglades parkway by INTRANSIT	5-May-04/7:09 PM
You need something more Florida-specific; it doesn't necessarily have to be where you were. "Volusia" is that empty stretch south of Daytona. Or "Lakeland" on I-4. Or "Oceola" on 192 between Melbourne and Orlando. If you asked me, I'd say "Everglades Parkway," whether it happened there or not.
Re: a comment on Lorca's Terrible Presence (Edit) by Sasha	5-May-04/5:53 PM
You still need commas or periods at the end of each line.
Re: a comment on Everglades parkway by INTRANSIT	5-May-04/5:11 PM
My serious cheat suggestion: Just give it the name of a small Florida-sounding town or county just off the interstate -"Ocalacala" or something, but not made-up.
Re: Lorca's Terrible Presence (Edit) by Sasha	5-May-04/5:07 PM
You'd do Lorca's rhythm better if you wrote something more like: I want the white water to rest with no bed I want for the wind to be left without dells You might at least go 12-syllabic. I see you've (roughly) done it later on, but the first two lines are glaringly off-beat. And the trick of expanding the english line with _____ and/or _____ at the end three stanzas in a row kind of shows. And Lorca punctuated throughout, hijo. And my one other criticism: you might consider an exciting writer for once. How's your Russian? Some recent Russian poets are totally ace.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	5-May-04/9:04 AM
Read further in your Derrida. There is no physical to speak of, only language, so worrying about "the physical" makes no damn sense. You might as well just call language-constructs the physical and go on from there, which will at least get you through your seventy-odd years on Earth. Saying "there is some 'real' physical which can't be matched to anyone's language-physical" is a crap way to go about things. My language says there's a thing called "gravity" which causes objects to "fall" towards an object of greater "mass". However artificial and arbitrary that is, it at least gives me some idea which direction I'll go if I take a running leap off a cliff.
Re: a comment on American Idle by wilco	5-May-04/8:39 AM
Oh I am!
Re: a comment on American Idle by wilco	5-May-04/8:39 AM
The Eagles song goes like this: I like the cheatin' kind of women, Which all women are, and terminally numb; She's going to her sorry-ass man's for some sinnin' While I sit at home, 'cause I'm dumb. The Tool song goes like this: Forsaken's "poetry" times infinity.