[Tony Barnstone]

Glenn, thanks for the insightful reading of the poem! I wonder if others have issues with the rods of insect light (yes, I was thinking fireflies, and no, I was not trying to make them take on lots and lots of meaning--just fireflies in the dark--tho' at the back of the mind I must have been thinking of Japanese Zen poets who present the firefly as an image of enlightenment in the darkness of existence). But is that semi-surreal image just too far out to do its work with interest?

[Tony Barnstone]

...and after all that I made a few changes. Maybe they help?

[Matt Q]

Hi Tony,

Lots to like here, including how the poem riffs of the Heidegger quote. It's a very long time since I read Heidegger, but I recognise some of the themes, the loss of gods motif, things, being, nothingness. I particularly like the line, "What’s a being / who’s made of things to make of these things?"

I do wonder if maybe the last line could be stronger. The closing "lists of lists" seems to depart somewhat from what precedes.

I preferred "insect" to "fireflies". Insect has interesting associations, like "alien/other" and "insignificant", that "firefly" loses.

I also much preferred, "the why / of nothing born as things" to the (to me) less complex and less interesting "the why / I seek in nothingness". The latter can also be read as something like, "the why I seek in oblivion", suggesting, drink maybe, or sleep. Do you want that meaning?

L11 strikes me as hexameter:

be|ings we | invent | ed to dream | us up. | Here lies

If so, I guess one possibility might be: "beings we dreamed to dream us up" or the less regular, "beings we dreamt up to dream us up".

best,

Matt

[Tony Barnstone]

Matt! Very useful, thanks. See revisions. I'm eliding "Beings" into one syllable to make troche/iamb to start line eleven.

beings we | invent | ed to dream | us up. | Here lies

It has an anapest, which I almost never allow, but what the hell. Once in a thousand lines is okay, I guess.

Similar minds, my friend, in fact I originally wrote per your suggestion "beings we dreamed to dream us up" but changed it feeling that "invented" was clearer -- yet, I think it is also more didactic, less lyrical, so I'm gonna take your suggestion here, thank you!

[Glenn Wright]

I’m with Carl on keeping “lies.” One possible solution is to finesse it with punctuation:
. . .Here lies/ a phone—a book, sweatpants, a blue ink dot
Or
. . .Here lies/ a phone. (A book. Sweatpants. A blue ink dot.)
The bonus in this one is that the parentheses imitate the grouping of random items into lists that you mention in the last line of the poem. It’s as if the speaker is struggling to create meaning by comparing and contrasting. “How is a raven like a writing desk?”
Glenn

[Glenn Wright]

On the fireflies. . . Sometimes I think it’s okay to include a vivid image that resonates emotionally and feels necessary even though a neat, clear, logical justification of it isn’t possible. In other words, it’s okay to stump your reader once in a while. Your panther in line 3 is a spectacularly successful example of this principle. The speaker is, after all, inviting the reader to join him in his quest to extract meaning from absurdity.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Tony Barnstone

Does my discussion above help at all re: how nothingness relates to the layer of meaning we impose upon things? I see the whole discussion as related, and thus I actually changed "mind" to "brain" to suggest that human being is determined physically (mind is a function of neural chains), whereas I worry that "mind" suggests too much of "soul," animism, the idea of a thinking psyche outside of gray matter …

To my mind, the poem is precisely about how minds (whatever they are) and meaning emerge from brains, rather than about how brains and other things emerge from nothing. Insects have brains, but they don’t think how nice that is. You’re telling me it’s more complicated than that, which I can readily believe. I’ll get back to you after I’ve read and absorbed Heidegger.

Originally Posted by Tony Barnstone

I'll think about lie/lies.

Think of it this way: “Here lies a phone, [and here lies] a book, [and here lie] sweatpants, [and here lies] a blue ink blot.”

I notice you’ve dropped a syllable from L7, roughing up the meter. Many here will like that, though I had to catch my balance.

[Tony Barnstone]

Hi Carl,

Okay, you convinced me on these three points--tho still worried about lie, lies.

And yeah, I can't pretend to be a Heidegger expert, either! If the poem is working, it will bring across interesting questions whether one knows his work or not.

Thanks so much, Tony

[Alexandra Baez]

Tony, another lovable rigorous philosophical poem. The first line is an inviting usher.

In the list of three that follow, I’m a bit bugged by the grammar of it. The first item is a statement, while the second two items are just items--unless the second item were intended to modify the first’s “hair” (I don’t think so)—but then that would leave the third item as an outlier, even though “panther” has a certain nice association with “whiskers.” “Wind maddening my hair” would tidy all that up, although it would change the meter (but that’s already varied, and there are also possible subs for the verb). Granted, the disorientation of the syntactical shift arguably enhances the sense of the chaos of things, so it does appeal to a certain part of my brain (or mind)—but it rankles the other.

Nice next sentence.

“The alibi of love”—hmm, I wonder what that could be, and if it could be tied to the “grace of doves descending.” Like some others, I do rather enjoy the disorientation of the randomness of this second list.

I wonder too a bit about the “golden trumpet songs of butterflies.” Of course, butterflies don’t sing, nor do they play trumpets, although they might feed on flowers shaped like golden trumpets. Are you fancying them as terrene angels of sorts? I guess this is simply a whimsical way of saying what you say more directly two lines later--that creation creates its creator. But there might be a way to do so that seems a little less odd. ?

How about a semicolon after “phone” to clarify the grammar?

I love “beings we dreamed to dream us up”—or even “beings we invented to dream us up.” A nice "snake biting its tail" effect.

And I like the way the last line resolves things in its tidy progression, starting out by biting the tail of the first line and then expanding outward from that.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

I miss the fireflies, their seeming blink, to be and then to not.

I feel differently to you on his espousal of Nazism. I believe Habermas asked him twice to recant and he could not do so even in the face of all the whispers becoming shouts.

I admit I have no clear understanding of ‘Dasein’

However, the poem triggers thought in me I enjoy it on many levels and in the different levels of incarnation. One cannot ask for much more.

Jan