[ZESTPoets] poemette

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:54:40 -0700


No Ronnie dear,
 
 It's not a poemette, just the last stanza from an earlier one...I was talking about the process of whittling down a poem to its bare bones. Though actually it does work even when divorced from its partner.
 
I had posted a poem earlier about yellowing leaves, but puhleeeze...you should assume they have yellowed!!!! It's in the nature of dead leaves to be sere and yellow, you just don't have to keep saying so. What's nice about poetry is the amount of stuff you can leave unsaid...The best pornography is the kind that leaves lots to the imagination - and that goes for almost everything else. To be too explicit is to leave the reader with nothing to do but absorb your image, which insults his intelligence. He should be able to add a couple of layers of his own.
 
I hated Shelley as a teenager, so embarassingly romantic. And those picturesque cobblestones are extremely slippery and death on stiletto heels. As a teenager I lived in a small town in the Lake District (beloved by Shelley, Wordsworh, Keats, Coleridge, etc, etc) at the peak of the Beatles and stiletto heels...I think boys still blushed, in those days.
 
I prefer Eliot to shelley, but even his view is quite romantic, especially the bit about the cab horse. Which period was he writing about? Perhaps a childhood memory of a grimy London suburb. Try Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings, very sixties, and to me, more evocative of my romantic years.
I quote the second stanza:
 
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
 
(Philip Larkin: The Whitsun Weddings)
 
Um. Hope you liked it.
Jane

ronnie banerjee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jane - do i get a bit of Shelley in ur new(?) poemette-
 
"O West wind
thou breath of Autumn's being
thou from whose unseen presence
the leaves dead are driven
like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...."
 
Great poem Jane! but i would rather have the leaves littered on a cobbled windswept pavement. and the leaves have to be yellowing isn't it? and the pavement slightly wet..
remember Eliot?
 
the winter evening settles down
with smells of steaks in passageways
Six o'clock
the burnt out ends of smoky days
and now a gusty shower wraps
the grimy scraps
of withered leaves about your feet
and newspaper from vacant lots
the showers beat
on broken blinds and chimney pots
 and by the corner of the street
 a lonely cab horse steams and stamps
and then the lighting of the lamps..
regards
Ron
 
 
After the first gales, leaves lie across the grass
Like corpses, whispering death in ghostly voices,
And the wind keens through the empty branches,
Sharpening their edges against the bitter sky,
Cutting it into a grey shroud for dead summer.
 

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