To Whoever finds this I love you....................

Here he is:

http://www.able2know.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=3&pos=86

Cav, he is beautiful. I love the markings. I don't comment in the gallery because I can't do it for all, you see.

For Cav's dog:

Circled eyes in sweet burnt umber,
Half awake and half in slumber.

Pedigreed in soft, white fashion,
Love and cared for--furry passion.

This message was lost, annoyingly, so I will try to reconstruct it.

Your dog is adorable, Cav; and your poem to him, Letty, is perfect. How long have you had him?

As for poetry, I agree wholeheartedly that poems should be short and impacting. Whereas I like many Larkin poems, my favourite is one of the shortest that he wrote, Home is so sad. Whereas most of Yeats' long work bores me to stasis, 'When you are old'-- just twelve lines-- hits the mark. I really Hate 'Daddy' or 'Lady Lazarus,' 'Child,' which is really short, always reads like the first time that I read it. I guess that it is true; to be a good poet, you need either great style, etc, or economy; to be a great one, you need both.

I love all the poets that you mentioned. 'in just spring' is fantastic, like most of e.e.'s corpus. One gets the impression of a really interesting and bubbling guy, when one reads him, so it's really surprising that he was a bore in life. Still, I don't believe in concentrating more on a poet's life than on her or his works themselves...

Drom, did you know that e.e. wrote some very erotic poetry? Sorta shocked me, frankly, but it was great.

As someone once told me:

I don't care if a person's life was ****, just so he doesn't write like ****.

William Stafford's "The Animal that Drank up Sound" is long, but glorious and he can do both.

In searching around for his work in the past on the Internet-- English book shops, by and large, criminally neglect him by not selling his books, so I have to rely on the Internet (I will buy his Collected Poems when I go over to America; but I won't buy online, for safety's sake, despite my liking to have the book, to scrawl all over it with annotations and random thoughts)-- I have found quite a few interesting pieces of the erotic nature. Here's the first one that comes to mind:

'because i love you)last night

clothed in sealace
appeared to me
your mind drifting
with chuckling rubbish
of pearl weed coral and stones;

lifted,and(before my
eyes sinking)inward,fled;softly
your face smile breasts gargled
by death:drowned only

again carefully through deepness to rise
these your wrists
thighs feet hands

poising
-to again utterly disappear;
rushing gently swiftly creeping
through my dreams last
night,all of your
body with its spirit floated
(clothed only in

the tide's acute weaving murmur '

I feel sympathy for someone for having an awful life, but I never read a poet's biography. A poet should live on through their words, not an other's.

'The animal that drank up sound;' that's an interesting title. When did he write it? I've tried to find it on the Internet, and I got (beautiful) illustrations on their own, commendations, but nothing else.

cav, actually I was more confused by the meaning of your responses to dom and I than your actual poem

What poem? I didn't post any poem in this thread.

oops, I meant to respond to letty

Okie dokie then.

er, stuh. Which response was that. Lord have mercy, I love it when we talk at cross purposes. Sometimes I get in trouble with Miss Communications.

Laughin' here.

Drom, was that e.e.cummings? I'll find The Animal that Drank Up Sound and be back in a few. (still laughin')

Ahh, e.e. cummings...this is one I really like, something to sink your teeth into:

"Gay" is the captivating cognomen... (XVIII)
e.e. cummings

"Gay" is the captivating cognomen of a Young Woman of cambridge,
mass.
to whom nobody seems to have mentioned ye olde freudian wish;
when i contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass
you try if we are a gentleman not to think of(sh)

the world renowned investigator of paper sailors--argonauta argo
harmoniously being with his probably most brilliant pupil mated,
let us not deem it miraculous if their(so to speak)offspring has that largo
appearance of somebody who was hectocotyliferously propagated

when Miss G touched n.y. our skeleton stepped from his cupboard
gallantly offering to demonstrate the biggest best busiest city
and presently found himself rattling for that well known suburb
the bronx(enlivening an otherwise dead silence with harmless quips, out
of Briggs by Kitty)

arriving in an exhausted condition, i purchased two bags of lukewarm
peanuts
with the dime which her mama had generously provided(despite courte-
ous protestations)
and offering Miss Gay one(which she politely refused)set out gaily for
the hyenas
suppressing my frank qualms in deference to her not inobvious perturba-
tions

unhappily, the denizens of the zoo were that day inclined to be uncouthly
erotic
more particularly the primates--from which with dignity square feet
turned abruptly Miss Gay away:
"on the whole"(if you will permit a metaphor savouring slightly of the
demotic)
Miss Gay had nothing to say to the animals and the animals had nothing
to say to Miss Gay

during our return voyage, my pensive companion dimly remarlted some-
thing about "stuffed
fauna" being "very interesting" . . . we also discussed the possibility of
rain. . .
E distant proximity to a Y.W.c.a. she suddenly luffed
--thanking me; and(stating that she hoped we might "meet again
sometime")vanished, gunwale awash. I thereupon loosened my collar
and dove for the nearest l; surreptitiously cogitating
the dictum of a new england sculptor(well on in life)re the helen moller
dancers, whom he considered "elevating--that is, if dancing CAN be ele-
vating"

Miss(believe it or)Gay is a certain Young Woman unacquainted with the
libido
and pursuing a course of instruction at radcliffe college, cambridge, mass.
i try if you are a gentleman not to sense something un poco putrido
when we contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass

ok letty here's what i didnt understand...too much!



dont' see it



cuneiform was a writing style used to carve in clay with reeds, not the tablet itself (i am pretty sure). regardless, what are you saying? what do my philosophical views have to do with anything? what do you think of my views? i have no idea!



i think if i remove a bunch of words i get at your meaning:

you and all of us are striving for original.

yeah, sure I am.



eh?



whoa, young people are a new species now? what, they're going extinct too? lol

okay about the sand and the glass:

How is glass made? From heated sand, right? Glass blowing is a lost art in many ways. You can always tell a hand blown glass object by the slight imperfection, usually a bubble. Fine crystal is fragile and I made the allusion to the fact that love can be fragile but strong.

As for the cuniform of clay that is tempered, that is a hashed metaphor comparing words on clay to signatured tempered steel, or stolid peasantry to physically decadent royalty.(besides which, I like alliteration)

The money that should go to preserve the arts is the first to be rerouted to war efforts.

Children are a vanishing species because they are turned into adults too early. Wow! stuh. poetry can be abstract or it can be concrete. You are a good poet. You just have a different style.

Hope that helps, but I doubt it.

I'll check back in later, all. Need to do stuff, ok?

()

That was e.e., Letty. And Wow, Cav, that poem was fascinating; so much so that I started reading it again, despite my own will.

You are right about the arts, by the way. People sigh about.... Newark.... not being as nice as the Dordogne or as cosmopolitan as Paris, but no one seems to try to preserve the arts much in America (unlike France, who spend 1% of their budget on arts every year, without room for exceptions.

Cav, I love it! Wow! I had no idea e.e. did that kind of stuff. Back after happy hour, folks.

Grrrrrr. Couldn't find The Animal That Drank up Sound. Suffice it to say that the basic poem was about an animal created by the moon who drank up all the sound from the planet, then died because there was no more sound to absorb....As the creature spawned by the moon lay in a white slump, and the world was soundless, suddenly there came the sound of a cricket...chirping...chirping..chirping, rather like Thurber's "The Last Flower."

For stuh:

When we explicate verse,
We may kill it.
Relegate it to chasms and deep pits.

But you have a right,
Guiding birds in their flight,
May you always do so
If the shoe fits.

Yuk. I just displeased myself.

Sorry, stuh.

hey letty...

i dont like beeing classified as a poet...i have some really different stuff too! cav would know, he read a sampler of my stuff (my first post here)

since then ive posted everything in the same style...

hmmph lets see if i can do something.

sinking sun this time will set
a summer's dream which way will go
we met another time to pass a second
too early for the day
words of parting come too late
slippery shoes and thoughts decline
a picture that wasnt caught in time
the nets fall short and catch nothing
claws scrabbling for a final word
never heard

and just what made you think that you were not a poet, stuh. That was beautiful...

"....we met another time to pass a second
too early for the day...."

Taking that in, and feeling the sense of it. Yes, stuh, another time--

The redness of red and a clairon call,
Rainbows in wine and a feel of it all.

ah, my friends,
I owe you all big time.
Goodnight with the cold wolf moon
Smiling sardonically.

ah, my mind is all mixed up on this thread. that's the second time I have erred...I didn't meant that I don't want to be thought of as someone who only does one kind of poem. I have no problem being called a poet!

I like the poetry in your recent reply also...much better than the one before it!

Coming back to say, "Thank you, stuh"....adieu