Anonymous Poem:

______________________________

FOLLOWING HER

Are you sure, Zoe?
That part of our building: is it not off limits?
The smell that comes from there sometimes—
I pack towels into the cracks of my door.
And the dinginess!.
Even the custodian won’t replace the bulbs.
Now that we’re here, I have an inkling of what draws you.
The corridors tug so, a mazy momentum:
I rush through them,
I am swift around the turns.
Slower now, much slower.
What are these alien growths along the walls?
Some kind of tumor, some kind of villi?
I can’t edge through without being touched all over.
I think they are more alive than I am;
they bear down on my dwindling vitality.
The sanctum that you promised me—
is it around the next bend, the next?
I do not know if I can hold on any longer,
beseiged, as I am, by small flagellents.
I seem to be swelling now, pluralizing,
and my mind that was so keenly watchful
goes dimmer than these shadowy hallways,
darkens utterly, sleeps.

PLEASE note: if formatting does not come through, let me know.

TJ

Once again, everything is being passed through to this thread fast as I can.

Anonymous Poem:

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SPAM DIPTYCH

I: Authenticating an Audubon

Is it conceit, a fiefdom of definition,
a fictive explanation, a codeword imperative?
Must we rummage through a bijouterie,
suffer its custodian’s trophic acerbity --
the crystalline wiggins, the corduroy ottoman,
dandelion tea and Delft?

Skip the chromatogram, close the casebook,
engage no Jacobi inquest.
Courage! Simplicity! Swig the dose
and cranny the matchbook Camelot:
a Rhodes Landslide, a Pinball Townsmen,
a Thundershower on the Esplanade.


II: A Gangplank near Nantucket

Alex and Jean meet like a metronome,
pockets stiff with triplex documentation,
conscious an aristocratic escutcheon is doubtful
as gild, borderland impracticable --
Persian carpet or not.

Shall an Haitian scold eardrum or cochlea
or a conscious contraption breathe of mullions and arches
by a riverine minnow-streamed Chaparral airstrip,
as somewhere a chimpanzee
passes the Turing Test?


[This message has been edited by Tom Jardine (edited September 23, 2004).]

Re the Audubon and the Nantucket Gangplank:

Whoever wrote these is on thin ice, using obscurity to question the need for obscurity. The first poem especially reminds me in a weird way of George Herbert's "Jordan"--I sense in each a tone of complaint at the same time that each betrays a degree of attachment to the very qualities of verse about which he(she) complains.

Has anyone here, by the way, tried out the Turing Test associated with Raymond Kurzweil's cybernetic poetry generator? It's not altogether satisfying, but it's reassuring to see how far computers still are from being able to counterfeit (or authentically create) sense convincingly. The test does, however, leave one slightly saddened at the failure of certain HUMAN poets (Kurzweil himself included) to counterfeit sense convincingly.

-Peter

Anonymous Crit:

________________


On Spam Diptych:

Poems composed to incorporate a heap of random words, such as spammers now use to camouflage their efforts from spam filters?

Peter's comment may have been intended as satirically tongue in cheek, but these pieces do "counterfeit meaning" to the point where we wonder what deep connections might be escaping us.

A well-executed joke, perhaps, or a faking of surrealism, but such exercises can produce results we never intended or foresaw. We might dismiss this as the nonsense it was probably intended to be, and yet L3-6 of I, and the first two and last two lines of II, do seem to reach a kind of sense.

Anonymous Crit:

__________________________________

Alphabet Passion, Envelope Love

P q r s t u v;
w, w, j k l.
God, I love you! Can't you tell?
A b a b a b b.
M n o? X y z?
R d p r v v j?
I'm useless since you went away.
D d c c a b b...

I thought this was touching. It looks light but there's a little dagger in it.
The way I read it was this:

Alphabet Passion, Envelope Love

P q r s t u v; (Things were going along smoothly, you thought. Everything in order.
w, w, j k l. (Oops. Trip up. Relationship is stalling. Suddenly, you're emotionally back in the middle where things like committment are still up in the air.)
God, I love you! Can't you tell? (Desperation is starting to make you panic.)
A b a b a b b. (Go back to the beginning and examine things. Did you miss something?)
M n o? X y z? (Examine the middle. Is it really over?)
R d p r v v j? (I'm so mixed up. Maybe it was this. Or that. Maybe both. And probably some of this, too. I don't know. I can't figure it out.)
I'm useless since you went away. (Self-explanatory)
D d c c a b b...(Still ruminating...and doesn't know how to begin again.)
I enjoy a free thinker who likes to stretch boundaries, and this one appeals to me.

Non-anonymous grammar nit...shouldn't it be "a Haitian" instead of "an Haitian"? There was a thread in General about this very thing about a year or so ago...

-eaf

Anonymous Crit:

____________________________


This piece worked well overall--my only complaints stem from a few
awkwardly-worded lines and a couple of unnecessary statements. The
ending worked very well, if a bit on the predictable side.

No Movies of Me

Think of the movie stars that were --
their heydays brimming with hormones,
> Opening works fine, though that first line could be a bit more
engaging.

then their relentless public ageing:
a bloated Brando, a withered Bacall,
> Not sure there's enough contrast between the heydays and the
aging...seems a bit out of kilter. Four lines of "aging" images and
just one line glossing over their early performances? Might want to
consider giving the readers a bit more meat for the comparison.

a Groucho shifting his dentures in a shriveled mouth,
a crumbling, leathered Moore,
a doddery Hope, no hope left,
gazing into the distance, or the past.
> The last line is too much for me. Borders on overwritten. Liked
"doddery".

How lucky there are no movies of me
on my Road to Anywhere, only stills:
no home Super-8 replay of someone past,
> Reusing the word "past" stuck out for me. "Only stills" doesn't seem
necessary unless you want to talk about them. They kind of interrupt
the narrative flow, anyhow.

fresh-featured, lithe and limber, playing the fool
forever in a ski-sweater of Norwegian style,
> Really liked the way these lines felt, though the wording of the
second line is a tad awkward.

splashing water at the camera lens,
or taking a loving glance for granted.

Or maybe just one. Somewhere in a tin trunk
stashed in the lumber-room of a childhood friend
now gray or gone, there may survive a short trick sequence:
thirty grainy seconds of me at ten or eleven
climbing out of the same cardboard box
again and again, before fading out.
> Nice ending.

To all,

Just to let everyone know that I can extend this anonymous project out a while, as it plugs along slowly.

Once again, I do not know who is sending the poems and crits, and I just pass it along. (Actually, one or two just used their own named-e-mails)

I have not posted anything myself at all.

Anyone can post non-anonymously if they have a comment.

I think a few more poems put up for crit would be good.

If I get several poems anonymously, I will start each one on its own thread.

Just another week or so. Then whatever people want.

TJ

Anonymous Poem by Anonymous


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Instant Messages

Eye-Emming, Dad. Not Eye-Ming! A mnemonic:
You watch TeeVee, not Tiv. You make folks smirk
by saying “I will I’m you.”. How ironic
that retirement made you a piece of work..

Remember? You did slide rule computations.
You’re an engineer. You sent man to the moon!
I’m speechless that my e-mail explanations
require me to draw you a cartoon.

Since mom died you dread dinner, so you eat “dunch”.
Although you rib, here’s my interpretation:
The slow time in a restaurant’s after lunch,
when waitresses have time for conversation.

At night you eat your Cheerios with no doubt—
you’ve gone from "to the Moon", to moon about.



[This message has been edited by Tom Jardine (edited September 28, 2004).]