The Poetry Thread

[Al B. Sure!]

No. We talk like Sly Stallone in Rocky . We've been over this before in the vocaroo thread.

This thread is for poetry not an analysis of my voice I have no idea why it sounds so odd to some of you.

Oh and how does a black person sound, gribbler? You racist *******

[Al B. Sure!]

Well we know what this one is about... much shorter than the others:


I'd really like to perform this one on stage

Actually listening to it, I really like it. Definitely a good one to perform

[Barnabas]

Sk8ter boy

He was a boy
She was a girl
Can I make it anymore obvious?
He was a punk.
she did ballet.
What more can I say?
He wanted her.
She'd never tell.
Secretely she wanted him as well.
And all of her friends
Stuck up their nose.
And they had a problem with his baggy clothes.
He was a sk8er boi
she said see ya later boi.
He wasn't good enough for her.
She had a pretty face
but her head was up in space.
She needed to come back down to earth.
Five years from now she sits at home feeding the baby
she's all alone.
She turns on TV and guess who she sees.
Sk8er boi rocking up MTV.
She calls up her friends.
They already know
And they've all got tickets to see his show.
She tags along, stands in the crowd .
Looks up at the man that she turned down.
He was a sk8er boi
Now he's a superstar slammin on his guitar
to show pretty face what he's worth.
Sorry girl but you missed out.
Well tough luck that boi's mine now.
We are more than just good friends.
This is how the story ends.
Too bad that you couldn't see..
see the man that boi could be.
There is more than meets the eye,
I see the soul that is inside.
He's just a boi, and I'm just a girl.
Haven't you heard how we rock eachother's world?
I met the sk8er boi
I said see ya later boi.
I'll be backstage after the show.
I'll be at the studio
singing the song he wrote
about a girl he use to know.

[Al B. Sure!]

Isn't that a song by that girl? The rock chick?

[connorkimbro]

I dunno if I'd call Avril Lavigne "rock" but yeah, that's one of her songs.

[SlowwHand]

Pop/Rock
I have The Best Damn Thing (2007), which has that track.

[connorkimbro]

Grr... was going to post one of my own here, but I can't figure out how to preserve proper spacing. There's got to be a way. How can I do this?

[Al B. Sure!]

record it like I did

I honestly don't even believe poetry should exist as words on a page. It's better expressed verbally.

[connorkimbro]

I think it depends on the poem, and on the poet. There are most certainly some poems and some forms of poetry that are better heard than seen. However, that is definitely not *always* the case. For certain poems, the appearance of the poem on the page is important to it's meaning/impact - especially when the poet plays with whitespace, etc. There is no way you can vocalize those kinds of things.

I enjoy spoken word. I enjoyed what YOU posted very much, for example. But my stuff is not spoken word poetry, it is page poetry

[connorkimbro]

Ok ok fine. I'd still like a solution to preserving formatting though

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

devilmunchkin writes poetry that needs particular spacing. She gets around forum problems by scanning them and posting them as images.

[Al B. Sure!]

bump

[Barnabas]

A very literal translation of The Golem by Borges

If (as one Greek states in the Cratyle)
the name is archetype for the thing,
in the letters for rose is the rose
and all of the Nile in the word Nile.

So, made of consonants and vowels,
there'd be a terrible Name, the essence
of God its cipher, that Omnipotence
guards in letters and syllables full.

Adam and the stars knew it
in the Garden. Sin's stain
(so the kabbalists say) erased it
and the many generations lost it.

The cunning and candor of man
have no end. We know that in their day
God's own people searched for the Name
in the small hours of the Jewry.

Unlike that of some other vague
shadow betrayed in vague history,
there is still fresh and living memory
of Judah Loew, a rabbi in Prague.

Thirsty to see what God would see,
Judah Loew gave in to permutations
with letters in such complex variations
that he at last uttered the Name that is Key.

Portal, Echo, Host and Palace,
upon a doll with clumsy hands
he engraved, and taught it the strands
of Word, of Time and Space.

Through dreamy lids was this likeness
confounded by forms and colors,
utterly mixed in subtle rumors
and made its first timid movements.

By small degrees, like us it was
imprisoned in this resounding net
of Before, After, Yesterday, While, Now,
Left, Right, I, You, Them, Others.

(The kabbalist that gave it home
this vast creature nicknamed Golem;
these truths are told by Scholem
in a learned passage of his tome.)

The rabbi taught to it the universe
"My foot, and yours; here is a clog."
After some years this thing perverse
could sweep, well or not, the Synagogue.

It could have been a miswriting,
or an error uttering the Holy Name;
despite so high a spell, it did not
learn to speak, this apprentice of man.

Its eyes, less a man's than a dog's
and so much less of dog than of thing,
tracked the rabbi through the trembling
shadows of their closed quarters.

Something odd and crude was in the Golem,
since out of its way the rabbi's cat
scurried. (This cat is not in Scholem
but, across time, I can glimpse that.)

Raising its pious hands to God
it mimed his God's devotions
or, dull and smiling, it sank
in hollow oriental genuflections.

The rabbi looked upon it with pride
and with some horror. How (he mused)
could I give birth to a pitiful son
and lose the sanity of inaction?

Why did I add yet another symbol
to the infinite Series? Why bring
to the vain skein spun by eternity
another cause, another effect and pain?

In that hour of dread and blurred light,
his eyes lingered on his Golem.
Who will tell us, what did God feel,
looking upon His rabbi in Prague?


from this blog

http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2007/09/borges-golem.html

[Barnabas]

A very literal translation of The Golem by Borges (with some mistakes)

If (as one Greek states in the Cratyle)
the name is archetype for the thing,
in the letters for rose is the rose
and all of the Nile in the word Nile.

So, made of consonants and vowels,
there'd be a terrible Name, the essence
of God its cipher, that Omnipotence
guards in letters and syllables full.

Adam and the stars knew it
in the Garden. Sin's stain
(so the kabbalists say) erased it
and the many generations lost it.

The cunning and candor of man
have no end. We know that in their day
God's own people searched for the Name
in the small hours of the Jewry.

Unlike that of some other vague
shadow betrayed in vague history,
there is still fresh and living memory
of Judah Loew, a rabbi in Prague.

Thirsty to see what God would see,
Judah Loew gave in to permutations
with letters in such complex variations
that he at last uttered the Name that is Key.

Portal, Echo, Host and Palace,
upon a doll with clumsy hands
he engraved, and taught it the strands
of Word, of Time and Space.

Through dreamy lids was this likeness
confounded by forms and colors,
utterly mixed in subtle rumors
and made its first timid movements.

By small degrees, like us it was
imprisoned in this resounding net
of Before, After, Yesterday, While, Now,
Left, Right, I, You, Them, Others.

(The kabbalist that gave it home
this vast creature nicknamed Golem;
these truths are told by Scholem
in a learned passage of his tome.)

The rabbi taught to it the universe
"My foot, and yours; here is a clog."
After some years this thing perverse
could sweep, well or not, the Synagogue.

It could have been a miswriting,
or an error uttering the Holy Name;
despite so high a spell, it did not
learn to speak, this apprentice of man.

Its eyes, less a man's than a dog's
and so much less of dog than of thing,
tracked the rabbi through the trembling
shadows of their closed quarters.

Something odd and crude was in the Golem,
since out of its way the rabbi's cat
scurried. (This cat is not in Scholem
but, across time, I can glimpse that.)

Raising its pious hands to God
it mimed his God's devotions
or, dull and smiling, it sank
in hollow oriental genuflections.

The rabbi looked upon it with pride
and with some horror. How (he mused)
could I give birth to a pitiful son
and lose the sanity of inaction?

Why did I add yet another symbol
to the infinite Series? Why bring
to the vain skein spun by eternity
another cause, another effect and pain?

In that hour of dread and blurred light,
his eyes lingered on his Golem.
Who will tell us, what did God feel,
looking upon His rabbi in Prague?


from this blog

http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2007/09/borges-golem.html

[Asher]

I'm only familiar with a handful of poets (aside from the other poems everyone has heard, like Flanders Fields)

When I heard at the Close of the Day
by Walt Whitman

When I heard at the close of the day how I had
been praised in the Capitol, still it was not
a happy night for me that followed,
And else when I caroused – nor when my favorite plans were
accomplished – was I really happy,
But the day when I arose at dawn from the perfect
health, electric, inhaling sweet breath
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and
disappear in the morning light,
When I wandered alone over the beach, and undressing, bathed,
laughing with the waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my friend, my lover, was on
his way coming, then O I was happy,
Each breath tasted sweeter – and all that day my food
nourished me more – and the beautiful day passed well,
And the next came with equal joy – and with the next,
at evening, came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll
slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed
to me, whispering to congratulate me,
For the friend I love lay sleeping by my side,
In the stillness his face was inclined toward me, while the
moon's clear beams shone
And his arm lay lightly over my breast – and that night I was happy.