Day: May 17, 2019
By love enacted falsly, some are raped
Should we write in form to make a shape
Or let our minds run free, associate?
Such tangled webs within the mind are draped
Oh, to run as free as antelopes
But from sharp tigers noone will escape
Can we control , disarm within a shape?
Love’s enacted falsely , making rape
Inside our hearts shall we recover hope?
Such tangled webs the curtained mind creates
Round the marbled minds we half dazed traipse
Wherever we go hunting, we’re too late
Can we control our fear within a shape?
Collapsing faith cracks , can we concentrate
Or from the deal , do we dissociate?
Such tangled webs of mind make ripe our hate
Now sex compels but will can’t procreate
Can kindness smile and friendship instigate?
Should we write in form when we love shape?
Our mingled maps of mind might mangle fate
Can love be obtained via injections?
Perspective ,proportion,projection
We need these for our own protection
But sometimes we fail
We are too frail
Can love be obtained via injections?
We talk to our friends and our foes
Share our insights and our woes
Their point of view
Our thought will renew
We learn to be kind when we’re low
Humour and poetry
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/humor-and-poetry
Extract:
In 1993, I took a left turn one day out of my MFA program and found myself at the National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. There I discovered several poets who were funny for the sake of being funny. Particularly Hal Sirowitz from New York (“don’t stick your arm out the window, mother said” and Matt Cook from Milwaukee (“it was easy to write the Great American Novel, back when there were only five American novels”) Both poets initially delighted me and confounded me: There are no similes, a voice in my head said. What would Tom Lux (my first teacher) say? the voice continued. Despite my resistance, I believe those poets gave me a kind of permission to explore humor a little more vigorously in my second book, The Forgiveness Parade (1998), for “I thought the word loin and the word lion were the same thing. I thought celibate was a kind of fish”. Perhaps in that book there were places where I was too vigorous in my pursuit: looking back there are a few poems that are just a little too jokey somehow, a little one-dimensional.
I am becoming aware of how some humor can set a roadblock for the poetic speaker, making it impossible for the speaker to get back to a serious place. And how some other (less frequent) uses of humor can leave that door open. I want to leave that door open
