Day: February 20, 2020

What nonsense

Writing nonsense is extremely hard
Writing rubbish verses can annoy
Nonsense has some style, some meaning too
Gyre and gimble till the spies  find you

Read aloud it makes me laugh and cry
Borogroves are woods where mancipes die
Wabe is like  the sea, its rappling  gorm
Please put  your wrong name upon  a form

Why not  stroke A Rest for Oxford now
Lie down in a stunt without a cow
The rivers   bring  down water from  the  hills
Why God put the springs there, we can’t tell

Read a little Alice for your heart
Through the mirror is the wiser part

The ink monitor

We used to make the ink   before the class
Powder  stirred in  water  turned it black
On the desk  were double  lids of brass
Sliding  back revealed the well ,its lack 

After  sums we  learned to write in ink
A dip in pen, lined paper and a space
We copied joined up writing,learned to link
Taking care, for ink can’t be erased

We used also used our pencils  now and then
The better off bought Biros  up the road
I had to save to buy a fountain pen
I have it still  to  write  down poems and  odes

So common now we never give a thought
Is ink what every human should avoid?

 

 

 

Rain

I’d like to melt into the slanting rain
Be mist or fog so I  may feel less pain
The   raindrops on the window tun like tears
Who is weeping,  has some death occured?

The strange eugenicist  just hired  has  gone
According to his thinking he’s not won
We’ve heard of racial purity before
This opens up a deathlike dangerous door

When I’m rain I’ll  have no need to  think
Into the earth with all  the past I sink
No more to  hear the News of  Government
The newspapers each  rotting  with dissent

Words in print are given special powers
We  think we’d   like  the truth but  we are cowards

Postmodernism in poetry

http://www.textetc.com/modernist/postmodernism.html

 

“To repeat a previous simplification: whereas Classicism, Realism and Romanticism all deal with the outside world, contemporary literature, by contrast, is commonly a retreat into the writer’s consciousness — to make autonomous creations that incorporate diverse aspects of modern life (Modernism), or free-wheeling creations constructed of a language that largely points to itself (Postmodernism).

Postmodernism began in the sixties, when there developed on both sides of the Atlantic a feeling that poetry had become too ossified, backward-looking and restrained. {1} The old avant garde had become respectable, replacing one orthodoxy by another. The poetry commended by the New Criticism — and indeed written by its teachers — was self-contained, coherent and paradoxical. Certainly it was clever, with striking imagery, symbolism and structural economy, but it was also far too predictable. Where were the technical innovations of the early modernists? Where were the alternatives to capitalism and the modern state that feature in Pound’s or Lawrence’s thought? And if contrary movements existed, they seemed disorganized. The UK might have its neo-Romantics, and a reaction to them. And in Europe were Milosz, Kundera, Ponge and Herbert. But there was no common purpose in these figures, and no common philosophy to give them intellectual standing. Into this vacuum came radical theory, and the generally Leftist theories of literature.”