[Catherine Chandler]

Janet,
Love your tango poem. Of course, being married to a Uruguayan, I've been told that the tango originated in Uruguay and that one of the greatest tango singers of all times, Gardel, was Uruguayan (not French or Argentinian, as others claim!). My own "tango poem" is really a song!

Tango norteño
(To be sung to the tune of “El choclo”)

How can a poet who grew up in Pennsylvania
think she can possibly pretend to entertainya
with tidy poetry that lacks Latino passion
in rhymes and rhythms that defy the latest fashion?

Ah, but this U.S. native knows the sorry stories
(despite the fact that she’s akin to Whigs and Tories)
sung in La Boca bars in dusky Buenos Aires
not just on Fridays, but all week long.

She sings of heartache, of love gone unrequited,
of destinies decided
by vagaries of chance.
She sings of jealousy, treachery and censure,
and I would venture she is partial to romance.

She sings of absence, of lovers long-departed,
and of the brokenhearted,
of friendships tried and true.
She sings of sinners who flaunt the Law of Moses,
and she supposes a confession’s overdue.

And so this gringa won’t skip the light fandango –
too much of guava, papaya, quince and mango;
because her sorrow can’t be sweetened by their juices,
she’ll keep their symbols for other uses.

Ay! Ay! El Choclo! Her hoot will not be muted;
she’ll sing her stories, unlike the owl, reputed
to have grown silent so a señorita’s lover
would not discover that his trust had gone to hell.

And though she favors the flavor of the Beatles,
she needs the tango, with all its pins and needles,
when she is craving to engrave the dark pulsation
lost in translation, like the birthplace of Gardel.


C.

[Janet Kenny]

Catherine,
Love your Gardel poem. What a suave and sinuous singer he was.
Janet

[Quincy Lehr]

Sorry, Catherine, the tango's from Buenos Aires, a way of passing the time before screwing a prostitute.

See Donna J. Guy. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

[Janet Kenny]

Or skip that and listen to this .


But New Zealanders invented the Pavlova dessert no matter what Australians say.

[Maryann Corbett]

My own hypothesis is that the spurt of activity on Met is a confluence of ordinary variations that have randomly varied all in one direction.

It's true that a few people who go back and forth between Met and the other boards happened to pick Met this week.

Additionally, there are several regulars who post poems weekly, and for the past long while "their day" has been Thursday. (I used to be one of them, but I fell behind the pack.)

There are people who post very irregularly but nearly always on Met, and they happen to have posted on yesterday.

I wish I had statistical evidence to back this up, but I feel pretty confident that nothing bad is happening. Quite often, people feel sure that a rash of illnesses or accidents in their area is being caused by some identifiable evil Thing, but the numbers say it's nothing more than chance. I think that's what we have here.

Maryann

[Lee Harlin Bahan]

First, I *adore* Janet's and Catherine's poems on this thread. I appreciate and am nourished and delighted by excellent formal verse. However, and though I will refrain from partaking nourishment from Germaine Greer, I'm not necessarily interested in writing perfect formal verse myself, and so probably am one of those Communists to whom Michael refers.

I know how to spin iambs. I've written and published poems in many different forms. I don't need to learn how to do those things. What interests me is learning how to break the rules, unprettyfying/de-regularizing formal structures, refusing to meet expectations, but to seduce the reader anyhow. Formal poets are cruelly used in this free verse world and I love that TDE is their sanctuary. But it *is* their sanctuary, the rules for admission are clear, and because I like seeing how far I can bend those rules before they break, I oughtn't post my work there. On the more practical side, I believe that if I did post there, an analogous thing would happen to me in TDE as happened when I submitted formal verse to free verse workshops in MFA settings: members of TDE would push me toward writing strict formal verse just as free verse workshops pushed me to give up form altogether; neither group has an interest in, probably isn't capable of (this is not a slam but acceptance of insurmountable differences in mindset), helping me to do what I'm trying to learn to do in this phase of my work. If I really understood what I was doing, I would just do it; I guess I'm hoping to run into the right critic(s).

Which brings us to: I only post work that I need help with. If I think a poem's not got any more wobble in it, I stick it in an envelope and let an editor have a go. When the editor rejects it, it's time to reconsider and see what people on the boards perceive the problem(s) to be. All feedback is good, you just have to know how to interpret and apply it. If I put up what I considered perfect work, *I* would just be showing off. Publication is sharing. I respect people who circulate their work informally and they are probably nicer people than I am. The funny/silly poems on the Vegemite thread, for instance, are brilliant, as is the fellowship with educated persons, but are Mike and Mark going to send those poems out? (Go for it, boys!)

I can't theorize why people aren't posting at TDE, but I hope I've explained why I am unlikely to post or spend much time there.

Best,
Lee

[Lightning Bug]

Yes, Mark, clearly The Deep End IS dying. And everyone here knows the reason, but they're too petty to admit it. It is because you, Mark, no longer post your poems for critique there.

[Ethan Anderson]

Do the math.

Midterm elections.

The new Congress has put the kibosh on the secret budget for sending coded metrical messages through our operatives "Tim Murphy," "Rose Kelleher," "Jan Iwaszkiewicz" (whose name, when combined with "Janet Kenny," is an obvious reshuffling of the letters in "Jesus, what the hell are we gonna do about Iraq") and Donald Rumsfeld (a.k.a. "grasshopper").

We're currently working on a more cost-efficient triolet-based system. Those who need to know will know when something is known.

I was never here, and you are not reading this.


p.s. "Jim Hayes"...the condor has flown over the taco stand...repeat...the condor has flown over the taco stand. Over.

[Terese Coe]

Do we need a new thread to take up the issue of right tit versus left tit sucking (or suckling, and I think the term goes in certain minority-group cases)? Perhaps not.

Michael and others should know that the left tit is considered generally inferior to the right tit. Well, maybe you shouldn't know it. I dunno. But I believe it's true. In terms of milk, that is. (I have not googled or dogpiled this info, but you're welcome to.) And this is not about Greer, whose tits I have never encountered anywhere (for transparency's sake).

[Rose Kelleher]

oh, nevermind

[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 17, 2006).]