Old Age Thread
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Yossarian wrote:Laureate.
Dear Stan, I wrote you, but you still ain't callin'. £6k for writing about a leccy meter seems reasonable.
A lot of poets are probably genuine and quite lovely, but it's a show-offs' trade.
I'm fine with people shoving a hundred pencils in their gob or jumping from silly heights into paddling pools or whatever, because that's totally honest no-hands-ma. High poetry takes a ton of time and effort, is invariably about the human condition, and yet we're asked to believe that Thomas would've been happy with a few ‘Nice poem, lad’ comments from locals?
Trying so visibly hard to impress runs in contrast to all this generosity jibber. Larkin consciously avoided those pitfalls, which is why his effort back there is good. -
I don't think that poetry gains you much these days financially or otherwise, it's about as niche an art form as exists in the 21st century, hardly anyone engages with poetry ever.
I mean, fair play if you aren't a fan, but I don't think that the argument of being a poet for personal gain of one sort or another has much weight behind it. -
Aye all those poets who died of poverty were utter sell outs.
Personally, I'm a Keats man. Doesnt go as safely purple as Wordsworth and got all his output completed by sodding 25 before he died of TB. -
Yossarian wrote:I don't think that the argument of being a poet for personal gain of one sort or another has much weight behind it.
I agree. I'm not saying for a minute that lofty poems are born of anything less than the best intentions, but it's natural for writers of any such attempted edification to seek as many readers as possible, else their intentions can't be communicated as widely as they'd like. So acclaim becomes inarguably desirable to the poet, and that itself — and only that — has this unfortunate, cynical bearing on my reaction to poetry.
It's a mostly self-competitive artform, too, which I can get behind. -
On topic for the thread, Keats was even kind of beautiful in his language as he was dying. He would wake up and be in such pain he would curse the fact he was still alive -
'Severn—I—lift me up—
I am dying—I shall die easy;
don't be frightened—be firm,
and thank God it has come.' -
"Come on Nigel, pass the soap,
I need to wash my periscope.
There's lots to clean, no time for slacking,
I told you I was bloody packing". -
regmcfly wrote:Aye all those poets who died of poverty were utter sell outs.
Personally, I'm a Keats man. Doesnt go as safely purple as Wordsworth and got all his output completed by sodding 25 before he died of TB.
25? Bloody slacker. Thomas wrote most of his poems before the age of 18. -
Emo Milk Wood.
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Reminded me of this:
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Yossarian wrote:I don't think that poetry gains you much these days financially or otherwise, it's about as niche an art form as exists in the 21st century, hardly anyone engages with poetry ever.
I mean, fair play if you aren't a fan, but I don't think that the argument of being a poet for personal gain of one sort or another has much weight behind it.
https://youtu.be/khjumpkbXMk -
Yoss/Tempy, good choices, I hadnt read either of those before.
Moot, the joke ones are lol -
I don't know/get much poetry, but I like this:
The Interrogation of the Good
Bertolt Brecht
Step foward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend
Are you also a good friend of the good people?
Hear us then: we know
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall.
But in consideration of
your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth. -
Moot_Geeza wrote:The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.
She whips a pistol from her knickers.
She aims it at the creature's head
And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.
A few weeks later, in the wood,
I came across Miss Riding Hood.
But what a change! No cloak of red,
No silly hood upon her head.
She said, ``Hello, and do please note
My lovely furry wolfskin coat.''
Little girl, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way,
Never trust a stranger friend,
No one knows how it will end,
As you're pretty, so be wise,
Wolves may lurk in every guise,
Now, as then, 'tis simple truth,
Sweetest tongue has sharpest toothGet schwifty. -
Brevity with poetry can be good.
From William Butler Yeats.
The Choice
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
Tempy wrote:Pretty sure we have a poetry thread if someone wants to go diving
I surely created it -
Yes, you did.
Jon B posted the same poem, and I posted Funeral in my Head by Dickinson, so we're nice and consistent -
Perhaps this thread can be for reposting bits of other threads as a tribute to our collective dementia.
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Told you I didn't know much poetry.Tempy wrote:Yes, you did. Jon B posted the same poem, and I posted Funeral in my Head by Dickinson, so we're nice and consistent
Coincidentally though, I did come across another Brecht this morning, which I also like:
Within me there is a struggle between
The delight about the blooming apple tree
And the horror about a Hitler speech.
But only the latter
Forces me to my desk -
Yossarian wrote:Perhaps this thread can be for reposting bits of other threads as a tribute to our collective dementia.
Running within the long legs of the @Skerret's body were a series of milk canals, filled with Blue Rat and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected verticals and signalled the levers.
The Skerret turned toward Aberdeen Harbour. -
Childintime wrote:Reg left me hanging. FML.
Too busy dying in steps in Rome -
You must be H.
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This is from Glass Wings (2013). She's (Adcock) now in her eighties so I bow to her wisdom, and evidently not off her nut yet either. Cancer envy sits well with me;
And then there's the one about the old woman
who very apologetically asks the way
to Church Lane, adding 'I ought to know:
I've lived there since the war'. So you go with her.
This comes with variations, usually leading
(via a list of demented ancestors)
to calculations of how much time you've got
before you're asking the way to your own house.
But it's not so often that you find the one
about how, whenever you hear of someone
diagnosed with cancer, you have to hide
that muffled pang that clutched you, at fifteen,
when you saw Pauline Edwards holding hands
with the boy from the Social Club you'd always
fancied. -
The fuck is this thread? -
Dino was doing shit in mk8 tt and felt old.iosGameCentre:T3hDaddy;
XBL: MistaTeaTime
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