The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. Ezra Pound
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/ezra_pound.html
Day: October 26, 2016
A wonderful post from Janet Weight Reed
What is blank verse ? How to write it
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Write-Poetry/step2/Blank-Verse/
Free verse neither rhymes not has fixed meter.Blank verse does have meter,often it is iambic pentameter… five beats to a line ,like a sonnet.But unlike the sonnet it has no rhymes.
The poet Ezra Pound was the person responsible for encouraging poets to leave fixed forms like the sonnet but now some poets and many readers have tired of free verse and of poems which appeal only to academics.There is a movement back to form
My own writing history followed that path.I wrote mainly free verse,partly because to write sonnets seemed very hard and almost impertinent for a beginner.But once I began I realized the pleasure of getting intense feelings into a shape.
If you want to write poems as a form of therapy, they say narrative poems are best for that.Are those called ballads narrative verse? Like Young Lochinvar…
I suppose people could it memorize better when few people could read or write.
Blank verse is harder to memorize
Blank
My neighbor locks her door with a brass key.
She walks by trees and gazes at the birds.
Onto a Western omnibus she mounts
To get to town to buy herself a man.
Or is it ham that she is in great need of?
For she is tired of men and needs no love
Yet ,even when alone, we need to eat
And, to ourselves ,we must in silence speak
I use the video camera on my laptop
To recite the events of every day.
I think this blank verse is quite dull
So I’ll have to write a different way.
Unblank
The leaves are turning red on my computer
The apples ripen better on TV.
But my friend says that red won’t mute her
So for a new blue coat, she makes a loving plea.
But as I only learned to speak in BASIC
I do not know if she will understand.
If I write a letter, she’ll deface it.
For my letters tend to be too bland
An email is a different sort of kettle
Not the type we use for boiling fish
So let the old men find their mettle
And get a frozen fish from off a dish
Toss it into Heinz baked beans a boiling
Let it simmer for a few more days
Then invite a friend for utter spoiling.
I’m sure she’ll inundate you with her praise.
Follow up with custard creams in gravy.
Serve the peanut butter on a tray
That’s what the folk eat in our great Navy.
Eat and eat and pray and disobey.
And impossible
What seems like death,may be a new beginning
Not the beginning of what we had planned
But the beginning of what was hidden,only symbolised
It’s not the strength of the man, the father
It is the strength of women
Afraid,suffering ,lost, they carry their newborn across rough ground
The strength to enter an unknown future with no provisions
No,only life itself will carry them forward.And if they die
At least they have tried,unlike their men,The men who lusted
The men who have no care.What is one seed when they have so many.
Yet out of one seed a new being can grow.
Our plans are provisional and worry us
Already the supermarkets beg us to book our Xmas delivery.Don’t let an unknown person steal your slot!
We may miss out.Our minds are caught on these hooks
While we miss the great river.
Everything comes from a chance meeting of two beings who did not know what they were doing.
Unthought,unknown,but possible.And true.And impossible
Strange dreams
Mary fed Emile on meat jelly.Then she went to bed and had a worse nightmare than she had ever had before.No doubt some News had infected her mind.
From a photo I took of my face in the autumn last year
She was heavily pregnant yet was walking alone through a grey desert full of rocks.And indeed it was utterly deserted with not even a building or a shack in sight..But suddenly her fear increased as she realised she was going into premature labour.A doctor appeared whose face was absolutely invisible.He delivered her child and then indicate wordlessly that it was dead.She lay back on the desert sands feeling full of grief after seeing him toss the body onto a heap of dead children nearby.Where these came from was impossible to know.
After a few days Mary realised that she would have to move on or she too would die but first she wanted to see her dead child.She walked acro ss and looked down.There was her baby… and he opened his eyes and gazed at her then smiled.Filled with shock and disbelief she picked him up and hugged him close to her bosom..
What should she do now without any help?Who would aid her?There was nobody there at all.Just the pitiless grey sand and the stony rocksSuddenly she felt a determination in her soul despite her terrors.She could not remain where she was or they would both die.So holding her baby tightly,she began her long and unknowable journey into their future on the other side of this grey blankness and grief
No meaning?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2015/02/25/why_is_poetry_difficult_to_understand.html
Her face ,half covered by her phone ,looks out
Some might know the brand , but I do not
So if she’s showing status,I shan’t pout.
For I don’t know which phones are truly hot.
Perhaps she’s shy and so withholds the whole
Yet she wants to show an image,just in part.
At least she shows more than a furry mole
A creature that likes living in the dark.
Sometimes there’s no meaning in an act
She shows a photo easy to upload.
Maybe she employs a certain tact
In hiding her own soul and its abode.
Interpretations,possible , exist
W scarcely know the clues we choose to miss
What we mean
A number of people I know always wait for some younger member of their family to sort out their problems with smartphones,laptops etc.If I ask them why, they say they are no good at doing it themselves.But I think many of then have never tried to do it.The obvious way is to buy a book like say,Computers for the Older and Wiser.But then I heard a friend repeat several times that she can’t cook.I just don’t believe that someone could not cook anything at all.Maybe they are thinking of a Cordon Bleu level of skill.
But I see that if you have someone near you who can do all those things then you are unlikely to bother to learn them
Some people seem to believe that clever people know how to do things without learning them just as they believe top level musicians don’t need to practise.Of course ,some of us are quicker than others.But, if you really want to cook, you will learn.
The disadvantage of constantly asking your children to do things for you is you feel less intelligent than you really are.And you don’t seem to realize that to learn anything takes time.Remember riding a bike?
Since we all learn to talk except for babies born deaf, then we can learn other things
Perhaps it is a way to get your children to visit! And it stops people asking you to fix their gadgets