but Syl...that was me and sarge that liked that original better than
the sonnet form of Insecticide. and of all the writers on KW I'd imagine
that sarge and i are the most "out there" of the free versers. heh.
both sarge and i tend to ignore rules when it comes to form and punctuation and such.
i agree with vraith that knowing "the rules" or having knowledge of what came before or how others have done things can provide lots of new tools.
Insecticide is a perfect example of how having new tools changed the way Syl saw the piece. he went to school and got him a BUNCH of new tools to play with, which is very cool. it will (or already has) broadened his view of the work and i don't believe he's the kind of writer that would be constrained by rules anyway. he'll break em when he wants to and follow em when he wants to. that's the kind of writer he is.
but he was already a writer before he got those tools.
i don't know how much he was writing as far as prose or poetry before i met him but the reason I am a watcher at ALL is because of his writing.
he wrote the most stunning posts on the 3 Seas forum!!!
(ananda agreed too but i don't know that watcher at all so can't speak for...yeah i don't even know if ananda is a him or a her. LOL!! SORRY ANANDA!!)
you're more advanced than a cockroach,
have you ever tried explaining yourself
to one of them?
~ alan bates, the mothman prophecies
i've had this with actors before, on the set,
where they get upset about the [size of my]
trailer, and i'm always like...take my trailer,
cause... i'm from Kentucky
and that's not what we brag about.
~ george clooney, inside the actor's studio
a straight edge for legends at
the fold - searching for our
lost cities of gold. burnt tar,
gravel pits. sixteen gears switch.
Haphazard Lucy strolls by.
~ dennis r wood ~
Aw, geez, Luci. You're too kind, and I mean that both as the cliche and literally. I looked up my old posts at 3seas (all 150-ish of them), and the vast majority are about what music I'm listening to and 'the first word that comes to mind' (the shame. that's basically Mallory's). The only really good post I had was copied from the "What is it you believe" thread here. But yeah, that was a good board. Too bad the mods/admin let it get overrun by spam and that it kind of died when Scott stopped posting.
As for my writing... eh. It's never what I want it to be when I start, though occasionally it ends up better. Even then, I always see the flaws peeking out, awkwardness that I often think a few good workshop-type classes would've helped. Too bad I took more of PhD track and less MFA. Though when I finally publish my approach to critical theory... look out, world.
Heh. Rules don't hold me back; just laziness. And meter. Damn I suck at meter.
"It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
-George Steiner
Sarge got it and U. fleshed it out waaayy more than I could've.
There have been a couple of times in my life that might help me to say what I'm getting at. Early in my degree course we spent a lot of time looking at elctron micrograph images of cellular organelles etc. At first these images were just a blur of spots and patches - I saw nothing in them. But with familiarity the information seemed to just come out of them, and suddenly I could see what I had been blind to before. Exactly the same happened in the viewing of x-ray radigraphs. Only after the viewing of many hundreds over time do the images truly start to speak and at that point you are truly seeing the pictures differently than a novice, who see's nothing. This change is not conscious - it is entierly beyond ones controll and is exactly what I'm talking about in relation to understanding the mechanics of poetry. By imersing oneself in the art, by climing the edifice of 'what has gone before' one gets to a place where, with no conscious awareness of how, one just knows that one is creating art and not just putting words on a page. I believe that while we may not all be Byrons we can all, by application and study make that unconcious crossover - this is V.'s 'visceral sense' IMO.
Take syl's poem [which I love - god that image speaks to me!], did he unconciously slip into near sonnet form in the original [which I haven't seen] as a result of familiarity with the form. I don't know, but gosh it works in the final one.
Here's a few opening lines from the Jumblies by Lear. How does he make just the way the words come out so bloody satisffying! It's almost uncanny the way the meter rolls around. The subject is ridiculous, the imges the stuff of childrens tales, but what tragic hero ever embodied honour and loyalty more thann the Dong with the Luminous Nose in his never-ending failed search for the Jumbly girl [with her sky blue hands and her sea green hair] who has captured his heart.
They went to sea in a Seive they did,
In a Seive the went to sea;
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winters morn, on a stormy day,
In a Seive they went to sea!
And when the Seive turned round and round,
And every one cried, "You'll all be drowned!"
Thet called aloud, "Our Seive ain't big,
But we don't care a button! We don't care a fig!
In a Seive we'll go to sea!"
Far and few, far and few,
Are the Lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a Seive.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.
....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'
Le Pétermane wrote:
They went to sea in a Seive they did,
In a Seive the went to sea;
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winters morn, on a stormy day,
In a Seive they went to sea!
Hee hee...back in my actor days, at various times with classes and visiting artists and such, four different voice teachers/guests used that as an exercise piece. And when I teach it [which I randomly/occasionally do even now] I use it, too.
On your analogy...it's pretty good. And you did learn to see in a new way...
But as much as you were learning a new technique/method, what you were ALSO doing is breaking/correcting the "rules" of how you USED to see.
The information is identical. There is a level above the technique and tools that creates the method by which you "see anew." It isn't bound by the rules of seeing, it makes the rules for a given purpose.
[spoiler]Sig-man, Libtard, Stupid piece of shit. change your text color to brown. Mr. Reliable, bullshit-slinging liarFucker-user.[/spoiler] the difference between evidence and sources: whether they come from the horse's mouth or a horse's ass. "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." the hyperbole is a beauty...for we are then allowed to say a little more than the truth...and language is more efficient when it goes beyond reality than when it stops short of it.
