Bflag's Pleasures of Criticism

bflagsst said:

I'm trying to read through this 'short' paper, but it's proving difficult.

http://www.discourses.org/OldArticles/Some Problems of Generative Poetics.pdf

"It is necessary now to assign a theoretical status to all these rules that determined the generation of literary texts. Different view-points have been mentioned in this paper: "literary" rules (if they are rules) are part of performance: this implies that they are only specific uses of the rules of grammar and specific violations of them (under socio-cultural conditions). these rules are part of a specific grammar of 'poetic competence'. which contains these specific rules. This grammar is based on (intersects with) the grammar of 'normal' language but is not a part of it. The additional rules formulated in it either replace or transform the rules of non-literary discourse or simply cause their elimination."

But I'm most interested in the genealogy of the poetic aesthetic, so I don't know if this will help at all.

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re:
Dated, too much technical jargon (I am not in that field) , too many off page references I do not have access to. Too many exceptions.
Thanks, anyway.

Something from years ago that I finally got around to polishing up.

Have at it.


The Gunslinger's Story


Skeleton resting
Back against a boulder
Another cowboy that lived and died

Empty is the canteen
Slung across his shoulder
Rusted sixgun still holstered at each side

Somewhere on the blazing horizon
Galloping through the mean cactus maze
The stallion he was meant to ride
Melting out there in the haze before him

Where legendary outlaws hide

Desire remains ever present these days
In the hollowed eye sockets of his skull
Full of fiery gold daydreams
And cold silver prospects

There is a cautionary tale to be told
Spoken by the wise old soul
Dressed in traditional native attire
Who now sits in a worn out lawn chair
To the left of the corpse he propped up
And adorned with dime store spectacles

To the right
A dead scorpion
Impaled by a nail
Decorating a wooden sign staked in the dirt
Scrawled across it,
WISDOM $1.00

The Indian says as he waves around an eagle feather,

For all the dollar signs in his eyes
Gunslinger had not any sense
His vision of untold wealth
Left him too farsighted to grasp
Bugs crawling on mesa rocks
Resembling crawdads in creek
Were venomous like asp
Or any other snake rattling about the desert

And he adds while producing a shoebox
Filled with cheap magnification glasses,

Five Dollars apiece

If there is a moral to this story
I am too blind to see it

twelveoone said:

This is a huge world, 7 billion population. The number of pup tents grows exponentially, on a daily basis. Sure we may talk of demographics, but because pup tents have been brought in, we may have to talk about poles. Such talk can be misconstrued. Right now, at this moment over 21 billion poems have been wrote, that is more poems than the number of people that have ever lived, even throwing in the apes (who probably did not write much poetry, limiting themselves to certain genres of songs uh-huh-huh-yeah-yeah). Now if we throw in songs that would be 42 billion and there may be some significance there, as this is a billion 42's. 42 is the answer to every thing and the age of Elvis when he died. Elvis is a time traveler and he was our primal ancestor.
Elvis invented the pup tent with Raquel Welch Welch in One Million Years BC. There where no poles about, so he had to come up with something.
We have not advanced much with Nooki on the Jersey Shore. Somewhere there is a poem in that, what was your question? This is ancient history.

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42 - uh huh

my question? i forgot. the reply was infinitely more interesting.

Magnetron said:

Something from years ago that I finally got around to polishing up.

Have at it.


The Gunslinger's Story


Skeleton resting
Back against a boulder
Another cowboy that lived and died

Empty is the canteen
Slung across his shoulder
Rusted sixgun still holstered at each side

Somewhere on the blazing horizon
Galloping through the mean cactus maze
The stallion he was meant to ride
Melting out there in the haze before him

Where legendary outlaws hide

Desire remains ever present these days
In the hollowed eye sockets of his skull
Full of fiery gold daydreams
And cold silver prospects

There is a cautionary tale to be told
Spoken by the wise old soul
Dressed in traditional native attire
Who now sits in a worn out lawn chair
To the left of the corpse he propped up
And adorned with dime store spectacles

To the right
A dead scorpion
Impaled by a nail
Decorating a wooden sign staked in the dirt
Scrawled across it,
WISDOM $1.00

The Indian says as he waves around an eagle feather,

For all the dollar signs in his eyes
Gunslinger had not any sense
His vision of untold wealth
Left him too farsighted to grasp
Bugs crawling on mesa rocks
Resembling crawdads in creek
Were venomous like asp
Or any other snake rattling about the desert

And he adds while producing a shoebox
Filled with cheap magnification glasses,

Five Dollars apiece

If there is a moral to this story
I am too blind to see it

Click to expand...

The poem begins as a 1960s country-western song, so the attitude is clear immediately. It could be taken as purposeful schlock, satire and/or kitsch to encircle something poignant or important. Namely, white culture dressing up indigenous culture for sale followed by indigenous culture cashing in with knowing grin...but the poem doesn't deliver much of a message on that point and the kitsch itself isn't all that memorable.

The poem could have been completed and ordered as a song too and I could have analyzed it in that regard, but it's half sing-songy and partially littered with free verse, so that's a no-go. I've thought about what I could say about this poem off and on since yesterday. I apologize I don't have more to offer regarding it.

This struck me as a spaghetti western retelling of Ozymandias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

Well ...... shit ...... now I want a Wikipedia page dedicated to a single poem.

Sunday Sundry Thoughts on Voice of Narrator

There is no advantage, as far as I can tell, to giving your poem a specifically masculine, feminine, or universal voice before pen is put to paper. And we as readers are often given the choice of assigning the narrator that gendered voice within poem due to some authored ambiguity. But there are advantages regarding each individual poem you construct whether you want to express something in a feminine/masculine or universal voice.

I'm going to go through the gamut from unisex to ambiguously male/female to unambiguously feminine/masculine and give examples of authors who were successful within each frame of voice, then try to say a little bit about what it might mean to give a gay/lesbian voice to the narrator.

Tsotha offers us the unisex: http://www.literotica.com/p/you-and-me-18
-Which I have trouble assigning gender to the 'me'. And I'm going to go in order of most unisex to most gendered voice.

Foehn's Hanna does very little to goad the reader into giving the narrator a masculine voice(forgetting the 'for my daughter' at the bottom and imagine we know no biographical details of the authors) but I assign it due to the narrator positively identifying Hanna as 'obedient' and he the narrator is someone who loves something obedient. Which is also the term that threw off my original reading of this poem because I never noticed the 'for my daughter' at the bottom the first dozen or so times I read the poem, however I always assigned the narrator as masculine regarding the feminine.

Sapphos Sister has splendid forms: http://www.literotica.com/p/forbidden-fruit-15
-Which can easily remain as a genderless narrator, it's the 'we' and 'our' formula. The peach and plum, juicy character leads me to believe there is at least one female caricature, if not two. So in the end I assign the poems a feminine voice.

WickedEve with the unmistakably feminine: http://www.literotica.com/p/bare-gossip
-I chose it because it doesn't proclaim "I am she" textually, just makes the feminine voice of the narrator impossible to deny upon any serious examination.

Twelveoone with Undo Ki http://www.literotica.com/p/undo-ki
-The elegant masculine approaching the traditional female gendered as submissive.

-----------
I am by no means an expert on contemporary gender discourse in literature or even the politics of thinking about it critically in public. The point of bringing it up is to show examples of folks who repress or bring out gender markers delicately when giving voice to their narrator. The narrator is always ever-present between author and reader and is the main tool in manipulating the reader toward a specific understanding of a feeling, emotion, relationship etc.

I'm interested in the gay/lesbian point of departure because of how difficult it is to express gay and male/female without traditional gender markers pointing to cultural dichotomies regarding hetero relationships. For a gay narrator to be clear often the poem has to become a political statement, which isn't true of the clearly masculine/feminine hetero point of departure. So, I guess I'm looking for good gay poems at the moment that are non-political in nature as an additional viewpoint on expressing gender.

bflagsst said:

I'm interested in the gay/lesbian point of departure because of how difficult it is to express gay and male/female without traditional gender markers pointing to cultural dichotomies regarding hetero relationships. For a gay narrator to be clear often the poem has to become a political statement, which isn't true of the clearly masculine/feminine hetero point of departure. So, I guess I'm looking for good gay poems at the moment that are non-political in nature as an additional viewpoint on expressing gender.

Click to expand...

I'm 1/8th lesbian.

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1023566

bflagsst said:

I'm interested in the gay/lesbian point of departure [...]

Click to expand...

***

PS. By the way--berkelectuals, fags sounds ok among Florida bums.

bflagsst said:

There is no advantage, as far as I can tell, to giving your poem a specifically masculine, feminine, or universal voice before pen is put to paper. And we as readers are often given the choice of assigning the narrator that gendered voice within poem due to some authored ambiguity. But there are advantages regarding each individual poem you construct whether you want to express something in a feminine/masculine or universal voice.

I'm going to go through the gamut from unisex to ambiguously male/female to unambiguously feminine/masculine and give examples of authors who were successful within each frame of voice, then try to say a little bit about what it might mean to give a gay/lesbian voice to the narrator.

Tsotha offers us the unisex: http://www.literotica.com/p/you-and-me-18
-Which I have trouble assigning gender to the 'me'. And I'm going to go in order of most unisex to most gendered voice.

Click to expand...

This is not a contradiction, or a derailment. Tsotha's poem has a string variant reading, it would be a negotiation between writer and reader, bonsai and container being the metaphor for the poem. This would be outside gender assignment. The main reading would be as you said.

Senna Jawa said:

at a bus stop


the fag was patronizing me
mocking
i got defensive:

a ring?!
yes
a ring of a woman's two arms
closed around
my square neck ...​

the fag interrupted me with a smirk:

no, no!
it's me who is old-fashioned --
i want a shiny golden ring
on my finger
when i pull it out
of my lover's ass
to look at to admire ...
​

the fag closed his eyes
and brought his outstretched pinky
to his nose ...

exasperated
i didn't care anymore
for right or wrong
i got on the step of the bus
and shouted back at him:

cliche!​

H.California
1991-09-23​

***

PS. By the way--berkelectuals, fags sounds ok among Florida bums.

Click to expand...

Well it could have been an engagement ring with the stone falling out and the prongs ripping the hell out of shit. I think this was the original premise of Snow White and the Eight Dwarves. Stinky gave his life to retrieve the stone.
Or maybe it was Ren and Stimpy.
Well you must have brought it on yourself with the sign "Unemployed poet - will word for food". Brings out the worst in people, "will word for food" WTF, I got words of my own...

twelveoone said:

This is not a contradiction, or a derailment. Tsotha's poem has a string variant reading, it would be a negotiation between writer and reader, bonsai and container being the metaphor for the poem. This would be outside gender assignment. The main reading would be as you said.

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Are you saying that you assign gender to the narrator or that the reader will assign gender based on their preference?

I think the markers are male and female, that the speaker is even keel regarding presentation of the masculine and feminine.

bflagsst said:

Are you saying that you assign gender to the narrator or that the reader will assign gender based on their preference?

I think the markers are male and female, that the speaker is even keel regarding presentation of the masculine and feminine.

Click to expand...

Depends, tso's poem is about a relationship, claustrophobic and ambiguous, in the context of what you did "unisex" would be fine. In one reading it is a nonsexual relationship, writer/reader (poems to a certain extent are often about writing poetry).

I don't disagree with what you wrote. The voice of the poem may be the most important part of the poem, if it is clear and unique it stands out, however, gender assignment in the absence of textual clues would be difficult and to a degree pointless, i.e. butters often writes beyond it, at times I do. Any poem without a strong "I" is difficult or impossible.
Another trap would be be gender assignment would be to fall into gender cliche as an example an aggressive stance from a woman to a passive man, without the textual clues; but that poem would probably be weak for a different reason as it would lack concrete clues and tend to the abstract.

All that said, there are poems by butters, WickedEve and Angeline I can very easily read in a straight* male voice.
*straight in every sense of the word, no irony (unless called for), etc.

i'd like to think that those i write 'genderless' is because they're aimed at everyone, address the sort of issue/emotions we all feel regardless of our sexuality. it has the benefit of making any write more accessible to a wider audience. for me, the voice of the poem is more important than mine, and if a poem needs fem or masc markers then i hope i get them in there but that they don't work to exclude a reader.

adaptability

when your life depends on nectar
fear the sudden summer blizzard
that blights the bloom upon its stem
shrinks stomach, slows the wing

or make like a bison
grow hooves
shrug off nature's tantrums -
the bison has endured bleak winter's bite


in this, whilst the first half might be interpreted as more feminine than the second, it's not about gender-assignment but about the lighter, more delicate/vulnerable characteristics of love v the more enduring and solid - when love is adaptable it survives and has endured. come the return of the sun, hummingbird wings and nectar can take flight once more.

bflagsst said:

Stare at my hands and dare them to speak

[I'm a connoisseur of first lines and this one is excellent.]

the scars that blink as they move

[This line I didn't quite get the blinking image. Unhealed cuts can be seen to open and close, but scars blinking?]

tri-tone paint splattered callouses

[Does tri-tone have significance? Or are you just talking about paint on hands?]

mix with fresh cut skin

[Maybe this answers my blinking query, cut skin and all.]

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To answer your questions here bflagsst

scar tissue is discoloured from normal flesha nd tends to have a sheen, I was attempting to show the sheen of light that passes over it as my hands go about their business, I feel senna jawa nailed it when he went through it in my open invite thread,

my lack of punctuational prowess seems to have reared its head again,

tri-tone is about the three different contrasts

paint (fresh and new)whatever colour you wish)
callouses tend to be a yellow colour as compared to normal skin
and finally the blood from fresh cuts.

butters said:

i'd like to think that those i write 'genderless' is because they're aimed at everyone, address the sort of issue/emotions we all feel regardless of our sexuality. it has the benefit of making any write more accessible to a wider audience. for me, the voice of the poem is more important than mine, and if a poem needs fem or masc markers then i hope i get them in there but that they don't work to exclude a reader.

adaptability

when your life depends on nectar
fear the sudden summer blizzard
that blights the bloom upon its stem
shrinks stomach, slows the wing

or make like a bison
grow hooves
shrug off nature's tantrums -
the bison has endured bleak winter's bite


in this, whilst the first half might be interpreted as more feminine than the second, it's not about gender-assignment but about the lighter, more delicate/vulnerable characteristics of love v the more enduring and solid - when love is adaptable it survives and has endured. come the return of the sun, hummingbird wings and nectar can take flight once more.

Click to expand...

I was trying to include different ways the voice of the poem is represented and then assimilated by me as reader. It's natural for reader to assign the voice male/female based on textual clues and outward biases such as personal preference, knowing biography etc. and very difficult to write that sexless, genderless narrator into a universal poem. I thought the Tsotha poem walked the narrow path well, where maybe I thought the 'you and me' were male and female, but the 'me' as narrator was genderless.

It's just another way to think microscopically about something as your writing. I can go back and look at some of my poems now where I may have unwittingly come across as a feminine narrator or overly masculine(aka cliche ridden) to some anon reader, for good and for bad.

butters said:

i'd like to think that those i write 'genderless' is because they're aimed at everyone, address the sort of issue/emotions we all feel regardless of our sexuality. it has the benefit of making any write more accessible to a wider audience. for me, the voice of the poem is more important than mine, and if a poem needs fem or masc markers then i hope i get them in there but that they don't work to exclude a reader.

adaptability

when your life depends on nectar
fear the sudden summer blizzard
that blights the bloom upon its stem
shrinks stomach, slows the wing

or make like a bison
grow hooves
shrug off nature's tantrums -
the bison has endured bleak winter's bite


in this, whilst the first half might be interpreted as more feminine than the second, it's not about gender-assignment but about the lighter, more delicate/vulnerable characteristics of love v the more enduring and solid - when love is adaptable it survives and has endured. come the return of the sun, hummingbird wings and nectar can take flight once more.

Click to expand...

i'd like to think that you are awesome, etc., etc., and capable of putting the stamp of what you want on things.
Now this poem, if you put a Freudian bent to it yields a shriveling dick.
How did she do that?
Here I question bflag's judgement as to maybe it is too narrow range in the determination of good poetry. Strikes me as more market position. Hetero 90%, etc.

todski28 said:

To answer your questions here bflagsst

scar tissue is discoloured from normal flesha nd tends to have a sheen, I was attempting to show the sheen of light that passes over it as my hands go about their business, I feel senna jawa nailed it when he went through it in my open invite thread,

my lack of punctuational prowess seems to have reared its head again,

tri-tone is about the three different contrasts

paint (fresh and new)whatever colour you wish)
callouses tend to be a yellow colour as compared to normal skin
and finally the blood from fresh cuts.

Click to expand...

go with this
tri-tone is a summation, difficult to visualise
yellow, red, are not. yellow, red...and black are often warning colours in nature.
perhaps a little threading throughout?
read a walk on the path - I am mixing colours throughout in a rough proportion to the punchline.

todski28 said:

To answer your questions here bflagsst

scar tissue is discoloured from normal flesha nd tends to have a sheen, I was attempting to show the sheen of light that passes over it as my hands go about their business, I feel senna jawa nailed it when he went through it in my open invite thread,

my lack of punctuational prowess seems to have reared its head again,

tri-tone is about the three different contrasts

paint (fresh and new)whatever colour you wish)
callouses tend to be a yellow colour as compared to normal skin
and finally the blood from fresh cuts.

Click to expand...

My questions as critic are usually rhetorical. This is a spot where I don't know the clear path. Some poets are glad to answer questions about their poems and make things perfectly clear, some will just give hints and try to assist the reader into a better understanding. I don't really have an opinion which is the better path. TS Eliot seemed glad to comment on the Waste Land with more cryptic puzzles when asked to aid the reader. Dylan Thomas would say his poetry wasn't arcane in anyway and that anyone with a high school English education could understand every word of it.

Do you want your readers to feel the same way you feel about your poem?

Do you want your readers to feel a myriad of feelings about your poem?

twelveoone said:

i'd like to think that you are awesome, etc., etc., and capable of putting the stamp of what you want on things.
Now this poem, if you put a Freudian bent to it yields a shriveling dick.
How did she do that?
Here I question bflag's judgement as to maybe it is too narrow range in the determination of good poetry. Strikes me as more market position. Hetero 90%, etc.

Click to expand...

The heterodox position on gender doesn't have as rich a history of symbol and metaphor in literature. The politicized narrator is topical and won't be interesting in five or ten years, traditional or atypical. I'm interested in shriveled dicks and non-political gender-bending tricks so far as they show a lineage to sound and symbol and a relevancy to future culture.

...
that blights the bloom upon its stem
...

also, I love this line right here.

bflagsst said:

My questions as critic are usually rhetorical. This is a spot where I don't know the clear path. Some poets are glad to answer questions about their poems and make things perfectly clear, some will just give hints and try to assist the reader into a better understanding. I don't really have an opinion which is the better path. TS Eliot seemed glad to comment on the Waste Land with more cryptic puzzles when asked to aid the reader. Dylan Thomas would say his poetry wasn't arcane in anyway and that anyone with a high school English education could understand every word of it.

Do you want your readers to feel the same way you feel about your poem?

Do you want your readers to feel a myriad of feelings about your poem?

Click to expand...

all well and good, very good points.
Two answers, the reader won't feel the same way and I personally could care less if the feelings do not match mine exactly, as long as I don't bore the shit out of them across the board. It will happen anyway.
If the reader gets to the end with a rough approximation, I won.
Credo: Don't bore too much, or too often.

Eliot was repressing and Thomas was drunk all the time and even fucking Frost was playing games. The guy that told the truth, P. T. Barnum. I don't think he wrote much poetry although This way to the egress rocks.

John Ciardi was good. Pissed Frost off.

bflagsst said:

The heterodox position on gender doesn't have as rich a history of symbol and metaphor in literature. The politicized narrator is topical and won't be interesting in five or ten years, traditional or atypical. I'm interested in shriveled dicks and non-political gender-bending tricks so far as they show a lineage to sound and symbol and a relevancy to future culture.

Click to expand...

Milton, Owen, etc.
if you do it, do it well
however it is tough to predict future culture, let alone relevancy to...
the person who probably has the greatest impact on the present may be Frank O'Hara

bflagsst said:

The politicized narrator is topical and won't be interesting in five or ten years, traditional or atypical.

Click to expand...

This is an arbitrary opinion, bflagsst, is it not?
I am in the process of moving house so I don't have any poetry books handy to quote a better example, but have a look at this popular verse which I published a few days ago, what do you think?
And how would you know its relevance today?
It was written in 1936 about political situations in Greece and it is as relevant today (for Greece again) as it was then. Proof of it is that the song is enjoying again very big popularity.

pelegrino said:

This is an arbitrary opinion, bflagsst, is it not?
I am in the process of moving house so I don't have any poetry books handy to quote a better example, but have a look at this popular verse which I published a few days ago, what do you think?
And how would you know its relevance today?
It was written in 1936 about political situations in Greece and it is as relevant today (for Greece again) as it was then. Proof of it is that the song is enjoying again very big popularity.

Click to expand...

Yes, opinion. I read your Greek song and found it on youtube, but it has no relevancy to me anymore than a working class cajun/zydeco tune from the same period in America. I don't know the history, more importantly I can't identify with 1930s culture or the people so it's entirely foreign.

However, the Seikilos Epitaph I can identify with as a poet and as a lover of melody.

Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου --- Hoson zēs phainou --- While you live, shine
μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ --- mēden holōs sy lypou --- have no grief at all
πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶ τὸ ζῆν ---pros oligon esti to zēn --- life exists only for a short while
τὸ τέλος ὁ xρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ. --- to telos ho chronos apaitei. --- and time demands its toll.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk

Poems only last so far as people experience the same inexplicable feelings over and over. The author of the Rebetiko may hold a special place in contemporary Greek culture, while the author of the Song of Seikilos can have a relevancy at any given time for any human culture.