Horror Movie
 

Version 1.30 (further exentsion)

Temptation

Is it so wrong to want to make such sweet
And careful love to ghosts that flock my room
Like spectral pigeons seeking carnal crumbs
Around an eerily deserted pond?
I'm asking for a friend who is much burdened
With uncontrolled insouciance, and some
Strange curse he got by cutting off a witch
When late for work on Monday morning. Ah,
What is a soul worth anyway these days,
Especially with spiritual inflation?
Unstable witches and portentous warnings
Have all the subtlety of glory holes;
I would ignore both, all the same, but still
The internet ignores my ghoulish fetish
And leaves me wanting when I want the most.
I tracked the witch down and apologised.
Her cackling laugh was so insistent that
I tuned it out like traffic near my house.
When laughter died, she started on the topic
Of virgin sacrifices by the dozen,
And there was nothing left to do but leave.
I have to speak aloud about the nights
When writhing, agitating ghosts would reach
A pitch of pleasure unimaginable,
And one of them would pause their fun at times
And look me sharply in the eye as if
A thoroughbred atop his mare would pause
To look across a fence straight in the eye
Of some poor runt without a mate who must
Avert his sight from the castrating gaze
But cannot stop his eyes returning to
The thoroughbred exaggerating while
The mare is louder to accent the point—
Such is my life, such is my night and day.
Yearning Dante would be sympathetic,
And write my suffering in the Inferno,
And mark forever its significance,
And place his laurel wreath around my head
To make me happier than I have been,
All full of lust and edging on damnation.
I want to grab a shifting ghost and wreck it.
(I lied about the need for gentleness.)
I hear their passions on the window pane;
It sounds like raining, but there is no rain.

Version 1.20 (Beginning to extend the poem)

Is it so wrong to want to make such sweet
And careful love to ghosts that flock my room
Like spectral pigeons seeking carnal crumbs
Around an eerily deserted pond?
I'm asking for a friend who is much burdened
With uncontrolled insouciance, and some
Strange curse he got by cutting off a witch
When late for work on Monday morning. Ah,
What is a soul worth anyway these days,
Especially with spiritual inflation?
Unstable witches and portentous warnings
Have all the subtlety of glory holes;
I would ignore both, all the same, but still
The internet ignores my ghoulish fetish
And leaves me wanting when I want the most.
I tracked the witch down and apologised.
Her cackling laugh was so insistent that
I tuned it out like traffic near my house.
When laughter died, she started on the topic
Of virgin sacrifices by the dozen,
And there was nothing left to do but leave.
Yearning Dante would be sympathetic,
And write my suffering in the Inferno,
And mark forever its significance,
And place his laurel wreath around my head
To make me happier than I have been,
All full of lust and edging on damnation.
I want to grab a shifting ghost and wreck it.
(I lied about the need for gentleness.)
I hear their passions on the window pane;
It sounds like raining, but there is no rain.



Version 1.10

Temptation

Is it so wrong to want to make such sweet
And careful love to ghosts that flock my room
Like spectral pigeons seeking carnal crumbs
Around an eerily deserted pond?
I'm asking for a friend who is much burdened
With uncontrolled insouciance, and some
Strange curse he got by cutting off a witch
When late for work on Monday morning. Ah,
What is a soul worth anyway these days,
Especially with spiritual inflation?
Yearning Dante would be sympathetic;
I want to grab a shifting ghost and wreck it.
I hear their passions on the window pane;
It sounds like raining, but there is no rain.

Version 1.00

Is it so wrong to want to make such sweet
And careful love to ghosts that flock my room
Like spectral pigeons seeking carnal crumbs
Around an eeringly deserted pond?
I'm asking for a friend who is much burdened
With uncontrolled insouciance, and some
Strange curse he got by cutting off a witch
When late for work on Monday morning. Ah,
What is a soul worth anyway these days,
Especially with spiritual inflation?
Yearning Dante would be sympathetic;
I want to grab a shifting ghost and wreck it.
I hear them making love on window pane;
It sounds like raining but there is no rain.

Lots of interesting pieces here, Yves, but I’m still trying to fit them together. Meanwhile, please tell me that “eeringly” is a typo and not something playfully experimental. Dropping articles is a trick I’ve seen in poetry, but “on window pane” just sounds stilted to me. I love the last line, though I’d add a comma after “raining.”

Like Carl, I'm trying to fit the pieces together. The proposal is delightfully off-the-wall, but then polysyllabic words come out, and while I grasp that the speaker pissed off a witch, who cursed him with ghosts as payback, I find the rhetorical question a non sequitur. I'm amused by the misdirect of "asking for a friend", but I'm not sure how we got from the speaker wanting to "make such sweet / And careful love" to the speaker who wants to "wreck" a ghost. I agree with Carl that the last line is great.

For the penultimate line, I dislike the omitted article and the repetition of "making love". Maybe "I hear them coupling on the window pane"? Shagging? Probably several other possible verbs.

Maybe, "I hear them intimate" or something like "I hear their passions"? It needn't be literal, just implying sex with a subtle innuendo and anyone paying attention will get it.

Hello Carl, David, and N. Matheson,

I hope you don't mind if I collect your comments together and respond them. Yeah, the penultimate line was originally "I hear them rutting on the window pane." but [1] I wanted to see if the omitted article would fly, and [2] wanted to take a step back from literality. I am willing to accept it does not work.

Sure, I will re punctuate the final line.

I hoped with the "asking for a friend" I established an unreliable or not totally forthcoming narrator which would justify the transition from "make such sweet/ And careful love" to "I want ... to wreck it". Also the speed of transition was supposed to be mimetic to the state of mind.

Sure, "eeringly" is not a hill that I am willing to die on, since it is such a minor special FX (after Sarah).

I am going to post a revision responding to the remarks immediately.

Yeah, interesting pieces/fragments is one way to think about the poem.

Oh, the second question is meant to efficiently heighten the stakes of the curse, and is supposed to link up and further progress the first question.

I will immediately post a revision responding to the comments.

I also added a title. I am open for suggestions.

I said I loved the last line, but with N.’s suggested change, I can now say I love the last two lines (and not only).

My talent for always getting the wrong reading in ambiguous cases never fails. I’ve only just realized that the N is asking on behalf of a friend and not looking for a friend. Maybe the pieces will fit together more easily now.

Carl, I am happy the adjustments have improved the poem for you. I did actually conceive the poem as a sequence of set-pieces so even if the poem does not cohere for someone, I am hoping they would still find it a an entertaining experience at the level of language.

Carl,

Actually the poem would still work in the other case: I am asking for a friend who is similarly cursed (no chance to get one), perhaps Dante would do because of Beatrice and the passage through hell. But whatever reading works for you. Yeah.

Hello all,

So this poem is perfect for practicing iambic pentameter. For that reason I have begun to extend it. Here is the first cut. Any comments?

Addendum 1: I added some extra lines after making the above comment.

Sure, I have a comment.

I notice that you often self-deprecate in your workshop threads, dismissing a particular poem as just an experiment or exercise. Here, you are characterizing this poem as iambic pentameter practice.

Not that there's anything wrong with writing persona poems. The narrative "I" need not actually be the poet for a poem to bear witness to Truth. Some of M.A. Griffiths's most devastatingly effective poems are persona poems in which the narrator is quite obviously not her, but one gets the sense that she is truly inhabiting that person's perspective and world in a way that evokes genuine emotional responses.

In contrast, this poem feels as if it's being told from the safe distance of a hypothetical situation and a fictional persona. The transgressive sexual scenario has edginess, first for its strangeness and then for its violence, but to me that edginess seems blunted by distancing strategies such as the narrator's claim to be "asking for a friend" rather than asking on his own behalf.

The longer Version 2 feels even more removed from the Truth than Version 1. The precise details of his interactions with the angry witch are far less interesting to me than the narrator's defensiveness about being judged harshly by others in general. I sense some interestingly genuine, autobiographical Truth in that reluctance to be personally vulnerable — even in the very act of writing what appears to be a confessional poem.

(Not that I think that what is being confessed has anything to do with the poet's actual life, of course; but the narrator's fear of making himself emotionally vulnerable by admitting to his own feelings seems to be coming from somewhere real and personal. I sense that there's something really at stake in the poem, whether or not the scenario described is completely fictional.)

I could be all wrong about that, in which case, bravo for fooling me so effectively in that regard.

Anyway, that's the aspect of the poem that intrigues me. More content about the witch doesn't. I hope that's helpful to know, even if it's only one person's reaction.

Hello Julie,

I will respond later, but, really, I am not self-deprecating. I do not put the effort into literature that I interpret serious people, like Keats, put in. I would like to write more iambic pentamenter but it is difficult to get enough content, because I am not that inspired these days. Here I can sort of conceive an entire world that gives me enough content to write enough iambic pentameter that I can better understand how it works. Iambic pentameter is only something you can understand when you are forced to keep on finding lines and phrases again and again and again, and you are trying to avoid monotony of texture and sound and mood. There are levels of skill to everything. I compare myself against folk in anthologies, because they provide a consistent standard of achievement. For example, Auden's sestina, “Paysage Moralisé”, is astonishing to me for how he managed to conceive of it in the first place, and then pull it off. I imagine that the man just absorbed so much literature that he had the most gigantic bag of poetic tropes ever.

Maybe other people think they are writing gold everytime they post a poem, but I am really not that impressed by msyelf (though sometimes I think my technique is glorious before I hit the anthologies again). My Elvis sonnet, though, that was a proper poem, a sonnet that I would match with any sonnet anywhere, anytime. I happily beat my chest to that effort. I think this poem could do something interesting, but also I would understand if folk thought that it was not very good. I imagine reactions to this verse would vary quite a lot, even reactions to specific passages.

The poems are an experiment in the sense that I am trying to do something different each time, and I have a specific technical focuses with each effort. There was a period of time when I was trying to absorb the feeling of pop songs into poems, which folk generally did not take that seriously, but it taught me a different way to phrase lines, a different way to evoke emotion, gave me another tool in my toolbox. Do folk think poetry is so easy, that you just sit down and write something new, because you want to, without any preparatory work? For myself, I have to constantly be trying different approaches and angles of attack.

Hopefully I have expressed enough ego.

Hello Julie,

So for me, I found it more interesting to write a poem that was less a man howling at the moon all the time, but had retreats, and circumlocutions, and deflections, distancing and coming close, as well as moment of straight -out blurting your feelings and hurt, my interpretation of "saying it slant", a continuation of my last narrator, who was interpreted as being inauthentic and not coming out with it. Poetry as only one heart sincerely confessing to another is uhm ... yeah! I have never truly been into confessional poetry, though I accept its role in broadening the amount of things one can talk about, and, generally, expanding the box of poetic tools.

Obviously, you are speculating about autobiographical content, and that is cool, but also I have spent my whole life listening and observing people: different kinds of shame are everywhere in our porn-addicted culture, and people are out here getting publicly shamed all the time in a world of social media.

Addendum: All poems are persona poems. Like what are you doing talking in iambic pentameter anyways?

This is funny! The latest version has the most intact swing between riffs, although I wonder how the Dante scene is precedented by the previous witch-conversation (— a great blast: that "virgin sacrifice by the dozen"!) I see how it is precedented by the later fucking-riff, but not by the previous ones. Although I now wonder at the poor wretch's desire to fuck the ghost in juxtaposition with his squeamishness over the v. sacrifices. Is the incline into explicit sexual desire too great and sudden? It is nice practice. I remember your Elvis sonnet with admiration and nostalgia ...

Hope this helps.

Cameron,

Dollars to donuts, you of all people would see the play. I miss the Elvis sonnet sincerly. Your questions about the swing between the riffs is interesting. I will have to think about that and get back to you while I contemplate the balance.

I like your ghazal. I will try to find something to say.

Hi, Yves.

I'm not wistful for more obviously autobiographical content, but for a more obvious sense in your thread responses that you take your own poems seriously. If you don't, why should anyone else?

It's none of my business whether any poem is informed by the poet's firsthand, lived experience. (I once told a poet that I liked her poem about a bike accident, and she mentioned that she had made the whole thing up, which didn't change in the slightest how I felt about that poem's ability to testify to the truth.)

But I do care very much if we are being asked to spend time critiquing a poem that is regarded by its author mainly as iambic pentameter practice — or some sort of casual experiment with this or that effect — rather than as a real, full-fledged poem.

I hope I'm mistaken in taking your frequent statements of humility about your work as evidence that it doesn't mean much to you.

I'm not a fan of confessional poetry, despite the fact that much of my own work having been interpreted as such. I mentioned confession here only because your narrator is confessing to a sexual obsession with (literal or figurative) ghosts, and later to having lied about the violent nature of that obsession.

After the poem's mention of the Internet, I did briefly wonder if the ghosts at the window might actually be a reference to online porn, which has obvious relevance to a lot of people. But I decided it couldn't be, because the narrator had also blamed his ghost problem on a very specific cause — namely, a witch he had cut off in traffic within the past week. Since porn obsessions tend to be of longer standing than that, I decided that a more literal interpretation was more likely, and that things in the poem should be taken at face value.

Frankly, I don't think the presence of the witch is doing the poem any favors in any version of the poem. The less of that red herring, the better for literalists like me.

I do like the title "Temptation," which seems to have disappeared after Version 1.10. I hope it's still there.

I either missed your Elvis sonnet, or I'm forgetful in the wee hours of the morning. Would you mind sending it to me via PM, Yves?

Hmm, I was going to ask for the Elvis sonnet too, but now I’m worried. When I clicked on “Quote,” I got:

The web page has been blocked by the Restricted Internet Content rule. Reason: the web resource belongs to the Adult content content category.

R-rated I can deal with, but an X-rated Elvis sonnet might be too much for me! ))

In all my dreams I see the face of Elvis,
when he was pretty as a girl. O Elvis,
why did you have to age? A song by Elvis
is always playing in my head, since Elvis
first came into my life—my blue-eyed Elvis.
I tried to sing just like my idol Elvis,
but soon was told I sound not much like Elvis.
I paid for surgeries to look like Elvis,
but soon was told I look too much like Elvis.

I take my wife to bed, dressed up as Elvis,
and pleasure her with hips that move like Elvis.
She soon cries out the lovely name of Elvis.
During all this she wears a mask of Elvis.
I weep when she takes off the mask of Elvis,
the act implicitly insulting Elvis.

Brief stop, will be back for proper replies.

Carl, I think it is because I used the p--n word maybe.

Julie, I don't think a fair assessment of one's own ability is humilty. I care enough about the poems to create them. Yeah!

Kinky, yes, but not X-rated. And not like any sonnet I’ve ever read. Cool, Yves, thanks!

Carl, I have really experimented with sonnets!

If only this had been a year ago. I would have asked for it for LM. If only...

Cameron,

And I would forever be known as the poet who wrote the Elvis sonnet.

Hello all,

So I have had fun adding more lines.

Cameron,

So the balance between the riffs will not be just until I have gathered all the pieces. At this stage, we have drafts and more drafts.