Mudcat Poetry Corner

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: frogprince
Date: 01 Apr 10 - 08:03 PM

That is without a doubt the greatest poem I have ever read.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: frogprince
Date: 01 Apr 10 - 08:04 PM

April Fool!













(But it's a good one)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 01 Apr 10 - 11:29 PM

That is one of the best to grace this thread, and that's no joke. LEJ, you have The Voice. Treat it with joy.


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 02 Apr 10 - 12:53 AM

FP, I'll get even with you! ;>)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Young Buchan
Date: 02 Apr 10 - 10:19 AM

[When I visited Headington Church in the early 70s the churchyard was kept locked and could only conveniently be visited by going through the church when there was a service.]

At the Grave of William Kimber

Having paid admission
(An hour's Sung Eucharist)
I left the church's tollhouse
To find one special grave,
Whose newness sparkled in the noonday sun
Setting it apart from those
That moss and rain-stain long since dulled.

What came I here to see?
To left - seventeen stones, rough-hewn and crazy-paved.
To right - the headstone, and below -
Stone bellows, too carven to move,
But that show more clearly than the inscription
How Merrily he refathered English Morris.

What came I here to do?
To stand with camera at the grave-foot;
Record my momentary passing
At the transient memorial brightness
That stands above the ninety-year-old bones
Of never-fading music;
Repay with the little effort
Of ascending Headington Hill
(And an hour's Sung Eucharist)
The stretching of his fingers
To inspire my generation.

What came I here to hear?
Double Lead Through played on stone bellows,
Though almost drowned by squeals of music
From the toll-house organ;
Haste to the Wedding, very softly played,
Lest it offend against the matrimonial rites
Beloved of sixty Oxford Anglo-Catholics
Emerging to their cars and Sunday lunch.

Subject: Lyr Add: A SONG: I once met the poet (Bob Clayton)
From: GUEST,Songbob
Date: 02 Apr 10 - 03:03 PM

A Song

I once met the poet in the subway station
(I'd seen him before, so I knew him, you see).
He was standing in line for his daily blues ration,
The same as the other commuters like me.
Packed into the cars, we roared through the earth
Ignoring the people around where we sat,
When the poet fixed me with an eye full of mirth
And sang me the song of the hole in his hat.

I once met a busker while mailing a letter;
I tipped him a quarter and gave him a nod,
And allowed as how he could play so much better
Than most of the other street buskers, by God!
He played on his fife for all he was worth,
Depending on coins in the cup where he sat,
And, fixing me with an eye full of mirth,
Played me the song of the hole in his hat.

So, if you happen to see me someplace
(Now that you've met me, you'll know me, you see),
Don't be surprised by the look on my face,
For poets are known to be somewhat like me.
I may talk about football, or music, or news;
I well may debate the place of the cat,
When, suddenly struck by my musical muse,
I might sing you the song of the hole in my hat!



© 1991, Bob Clayton, Silver Spring, MD

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 02 Apr 10 - 03:50 PM

LEJ - A Poet Drowns Alone took my breath away. I am envious.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 02 Apr 10 - 03:51 PM

The Dancer's Sonnet

She dances, feet kicking from the dusky floor
Obsidian shoes hammering their adoring caress
With the drum beat upon the hardwood decor
And the lacy hems of her long ebony dress
Smoothly sweeping as if she were gliding
An angelic apparition floating upon each note
Her eyes closed in her shaking head as if hiding
From the dimmed lights shining on her silky throat
Her velvety quivering breasts threaten to burst
Their tender confines with intoxicating wit
Her passion blooms with a hedonistic thirst
Her soul lost in a musical trance as she submits
To the song, to the cadence of ecstacy's brink
She dances with the rapture of her aural drink

nt

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: frogprince
Date: 02 Apr 10 - 07:28 PM

Amergin, forgive me, but that lovely sensual imagery took me way back to this:

Saturday Night in Everett, Washington

(from a slightly more innocent time, in July 1967,
when they were called gogo dancers, and they
wore complete bikinis)

Sharon's shaking that shapely frame again
Making goosebumps pop up on the skin
Making male minds meditate on sin
Quivering shivering stretching your mind thin
To the unintellectual sensual sexual din
Trembling twitching twisting you within
A graceful animal molded in skin
Sharon's go - go - go dancing again.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 07 May 10 - 08:19 AM

The Junkie

She reaches into the steel rubbish bin, lined with a pale clear plastic bag. Her dirt stained fingers dig for the aluminium gold, desiring to bestow upon her another nickel toward her next hit. She lifts one soiled arm back to her side, raising it toward the sun, as she pushes it's unwashed sleeve back to her elbow, in a vain attempt to prevent further ruination onto the once white cotton fabric. Her action reveals in the late summer afternoon the bluish purple blotches in her skin, needle point reminders of her soul stealing damnation. She plunges her arm back into the receptacle, rummaging through its fly ridden depths, until she jerks her arm back out. The sunlight glitters on the dull metallic surface of the empty aluminium beer can held triumphantly in her right hand. Her dull eyes briefly glow as she spreads her prematurely wrinkled face, (her youth stolen, another year added by injection) unveiling blackened stubs of decaying teeth, resembling the dark maw of a cavern. She picks up the brown plastic bag fluttering lightly at her feet, and shoves the can within. She drops the bag, and grasps her way once more through the basket, fingers pushing their way pass empty grease stained brown paper fast food sacks, spit adorned napkins, and the alcohol perfumed dribbles of vomit, hoping to strike another five cents, only the search is in vain. Discouraged, she stands up, wiping her gaunt filthy hand upon her faded ragged blue jeans. Then she ambles to locate another bin in her desperate search to score another bag of death's solace.

nt

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 07 May 10 - 11:33 AM

The surfers learn early
To walk into the chaos
And find infinity on the other side.

Those who can learn to find the wall
Leap up to it and scale the
Crest just as it tumbles down.

Here is grace amid great forces
Tumbling to the floor and swift
TUrning to climb the wall-face again.

Taking the tunnel of green collapse
As a passage to the next leap
Never accepting that gravity could be terminal.

As they return, in the morning
To begin it all anew, like smoky larks on sky,
The surfers learn

Never to trust a man
Entering the water
Who cannot tolerate infinite space.

A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 09 May 10 - 03:09 PM

Heraclitus, e.e. cummings,
Sisyphus, and the fire-giver,
Met for tea around the rock-face
Where Prometheus lost his liver.

He assured his guests quite calmly
It would grow back in again,
And Sisyphus remarked, all kindly,
"Lucky they don't eat your brain!"

This, they all agreed, was lucky!
"That would be an awful shock!
"For the sin of giving fire,
To lose your brains upon this rock!"

"Never fear," said mister cummings,
"Gods are feeble in their schemes.
"What they call a ghost is waking,
Not a hypnotized undream!"

Sisyphus then made excuses,
For he had a rock to roll.
As he left them, e.e. asked them,
"Is he happy in his soul?"

Heraclitus nodded wisely,
"This, I think, is hard to know."
"Even Gods can't reach the answer.
Still, we must imagine so."

Kam Ooeue
Songs of a French Colon
Cambodian Free Press, 1969

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 10 May 10 - 02:32 PM

The Bull Rider

Randy Stoakes eases himself down
feels the momentary grit of cartilage on bone
singing like electricity in a line
that rings in his spine
as the dirt-colored bull lurches against the raw slats
Keet Lawson puts a boot heel on the brahma's shoulder
muttering "nasty ol bastard" as he tries to wedge him out
the echoed squawk of PA says "have a hand
for an ex-champeen, down in the runnin
needs a big ride on ol Hot n' Nasty"
and Stoakes wraps his fist tight and ruminates
on a beer-borne dream he had last night

back on the old man's hard luck ranch by Ten Sleep, he was
stalking a frozen creek for calves,in a lash-locking wind
when he come up on Delbert
his brother dead ten years
hunkered down in the lee of a big boulder
embers from the coffee fire scattering in the whirling air
across the outstretching white crust of snow
without speaking, he sat a busted spruce log, and took the cup from Delbert

The bull lurches sidewise again and the quick pain brings him back
in time to hear the bell, watch the gate snap open
feel the bull spring in the long leap, spinning the ass-end in a kick
Randy lets himself swing on the loop
but then the animal reverses with a sudden twist
flipping the cowboy into air, palm pinioned in the rope
he has time to hear the crack of his wrist
before he blacks out
staring at Delbert's crooked smile
tasting bitter camp coffee
and waiting for the Wyomin wind to slack
so they can head down the draw to warm beds

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 14 May 10 - 08:13 PM

Sveta In The Promised Land

Hope glimmered brightly in her future, it was a
Desire for an education, a hope for love, a teacher's utopia
A hope for a family of her own, so she kissed farewell
To her parents, and left the damp somber Eastern land
She called home and followed the illegal pied piper's song
Across the green billowing sea to the Promised Land

In her uncle's nightmare, she found her dreams scattered
One by one as she was beaten, her blood vessels shattered
Beneath the smooth pale layers of discoloured skin
Bones fractured through repeated "trips down the stairs"
Her spirit assassinated as she suffered rape after rape
Trust died in her eyes every day in the Promised Land.

The title deed of her enslavement was transferred
At a poker table in an underground gambling den
Her new master insinuating the corruption, the toxins,
The junk she smoked, snorted, injected, to alleviate the agony,
To asphyxiate her sorrow as she turned tricks on the street
His financial gain, the capitalistic dream of the Promised Land

Her youthful beauty eroded with each hit, with each screw
As her body gradually deteriorated from the drugs
And the abuse, the misuse inflicted upon her sexual being
The hooded haunted look hollowing out her stare
Until she recognised her abandonment on the avenues
A piece of refuse scuttling down the gutter of the Promised Land

Fear mesmerises her, a snakelike coercion, imprisoning her
As she patrols the burgeoning Russian communities
Of Portland and Vancouver, too ashamed to return home
Sometimes at night in a dark alley she cradles a photo
Captured of her when hope still glimmered in her eyes
The illegal emigrant's reverie, the dream of the Promised Land

nt

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 19 May 10 - 12:27 PM

strong stuff, Amergin

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 19 May 10 - 02:08 PM

Jaysus, Amergin, you really turned a corner with that one; I have never seen the like from you before. Well done!


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 22 May 10 - 05:42 AM

Thank you both very much. I should say that Sveta is, unfortunately, a real person. she was interviewed in one of the local alternative papers. It just plain broke my heart, when I read her story.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jun 10 - 07:14 PM

From Deda:

Put not your faith in princes
Whose only faith in you
Is that you'll play roughs and ditches
So the princes can play through.


DonÕt place your hope in bankers
Who only hope for wealth,
Who trade in guns and tankers,
And profit, pounds and pelf.


Waste not your love on lawyers
Whose hearts have turned to dust,
Those Ivy League marauders
Steal the pie and sue the crust.



May my faith not diminish.
Let my hope not erode.
Let love be the start and finish
And the entire road.


(c) Rebecca Jessup 2010

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 17 Jun 10 - 02:12 AM

TO BE WITH YOU

Oh love that steals my dreams,
That wilt not let me rest by night or day.
That makes my sadness weep,
Now that she has gone thither, far away.
Oh love that steals my sense.
That takes away all reason from my brain.
That makes me think of nought,
Except that I should be with her again.
Oh love that steals my life,
That rests the knife so easy in my palm.
That opens up the wound,
To let the blood, like some relieving balm.
Oh love, 'tis that I die for you ,
The blood slips from my body oh so fast.
Here lain upon your lonely grave,
Is where I deign to breathe my very last.

Mike Hill. February 2009

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Joe_F
Date: 17 Jun 10 - 06:00 PM

A madman to his old love made a phone call one year.
Said the madman to his old love, "How I wish you were here!
For the past is full of shame, and the future full of fright,
And if ever I had need of you, I have need of you tonight."

(1997)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: GUEST,CaptainFarrell
Date: 18 Jun 10 - 04:41 AM

There is a Pints and Poetry session at Saddleworth Folk Festival well worth checking out run by Mick Cartwright with help from Sid Calderbank

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 19 Jun 10 - 04:28 PM

School Prayer

Now I sit me down to pray
to the guy who made the universe in 7 days...
Free me Lord from the lies that pass
for truth down in my science class
that dinosaurs lived near here
back more than a million years!
We know the earth's only 5,000 years old
in Genesis the Bible tells me so.
Don't try to tell me that my teacher
knows more science than my preacher.
Those dinosaur bones just aint that old
they're skeletons of angels, I've been told
And all this crap about evolution?
God didn't put that in the constitution.
And the anthropology we been readin?
Weren't no neanderthals in the Garden of Eden.
And the Jews and Buddhists and non believers
the wicked muslim turbanned deceivers
their parents are mostly ignorant fools
and could use some Jesus in the schools.

Amen

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jun 10 - 04:52 PM

Lonesome, you demonstrate a powerful ability to permeate and see the viewpoint of the most compressed and frozen minds. I do hope each entry has an exit strategy!


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 20 Jun 10 - 03:35 AM

Compressed and frozen minds!... are they the ones that haven't the ability to take everything in without questioning or criticism?

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: wysiwyg
Date: 27 Jun 10 - 03:35 PM

Author of the below, Ellen Waterston, was Saturday's offering on The Writer's Almanac. I just cannot keep it to myself.

~S~

====

After ten hours of trying
the instructor undid
my fingers, peeled
them one by one
off the joystick.
"You don't need
to hold the plane
in the air," he advised.
"It's designed to fly.
A hint of aileron,
a touch of rudder,
is all that is required."

I looked at him
like I'd seen God.
Those props and struts
he mentioned, they too,
I realized, all contrived.
I grew dizzy
from the elevation
from looking so far
down at the surmise:
the airspeed of faith
underlies everything.
Lives are designed
to fly.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Joe_F
Date: 27 Jun 10 - 07:44 PM

You need two out of three -- altitude, airspeed, and a brain. -- Saying among pilots.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 05 Jul 10 - 11:39 AM

Why is a fern in a wet morning
More beautiful
Than, say,
A rusty truck?

There is no comparison.
Truck kills fern,
Fern eats truck.
Each one loves the game.


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 05 Jul 10 - 12:47 PM

When I was in my
First cause,
I had no God, and
I was cause of myself.

Meister Eckhart

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 27 Jul 10 - 11:28 AM

"Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I'm on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static."


From this article in the Guardian about the novel "C".

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 11 Aug 10 - 01:18 PM

The Secrets of Women

The practiced angle of the neck, the chin
And always of the eyes--all are learned young.
Using the hair to call or to dispel, tossing it for some
And for others presenting a dark shield.
The use of each tooth, in combination, well-practiced,
And how the lips must form to spell temperatures.

Liquid joints design the edited message
Scrutinized in rehearsal for degrees forward, back,
The illustrating turns, peer-reviewed in overnights.
The arc of presentation, detailed and designed,
Combines with an array of chosen curves
Into the certainty the practiced eye assures.

The painted tips and ends, and every measured beat
OF lash and finger and toe contrives
To flavor moments hot, or cold, or sweet
Or bitter as only the artist may decide.
The cold kiss arched aloofly back,
The passioned offer pressed
The echo of the wrist and lips
And deadly answer of a hardened breast--

All make a puzzle erudite,
For scholarly minds to puzzle on
While in the pouring rhythm of the street
THe tide and song and measured dance move on.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 13 Aug 10 - 01:37 PM

I come back here from time to time
And read the long history of
The charming hearts and sunspot minds
Of poets churning for years.
What a climate they have built!
It rains and shines on the
same side of the street,
Even late at night. Sometimes
Noon is dark and rivers
Run up to the corner cops
To ask directions!

Chains of miracles tie
The frothing mad middle down
KEeping it
Hogtied by magic, prevented
From renewing the mediocre!
Keep it up, you golden elves,
Sequoias of the long tongue, nova-crafters!

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 13 Aug 10 - 02:20 PM

Hey Amos. Back in Kentucky when I was a kid, I saw plenty of them truck-eating ferns.:>)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Joe_F
Date: 13 Aug 10 - 06:32 PM

However you wriggle
When speaking of people,
There's little that's stable
Or even quite true.
Affection is fickle,
And fairness is feeble.
With both, if we're able,
We might make it thru.

(Was once going to be the end of a song.)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 26 Aug 10 - 01:19 PM

The Wyoming Transplant

She met him in college
the scion of a blueblood Boston clan
and loved him for his dry humor and moist skin
What he saw in her
was a kind of elemental force
a straight forward disingenuous directness
and the way her eyes lit up in laughter
After graduation they wed
and he took her East to a big house on the Squanacook
where the water lay placid and green
like a late-summer pond in a Rock Springs feedlot
and the hills, cool and green in Spring
hedged the sky to a steamy patch in Summer
After a year or so, even the relentless high plains wind
seemed like a happy remembrance
She climbed big hills in ridiculous hope
of seeing the distant purple and yellow
of the faraway Wind River Range
Once, a Ford pickup with golden cowboy plates
lay just ahead at a Boston traffic signal
and as she passed, laughing, called out
"take me home!" to the startled driver
whose brown rutted skin creased in a grin

After the divorce, she stayed on from habit
growing pale and weak in the wet winters and soggy summers
Until, at age 56, and leaving two grown children behind
She sold out, loaded what was left
and moved to a double-wide on a dry, rutted arroyo
in the wide country East of Rawlins
and in that raw and sandy soil
that defied her attempts at a rose garden
she herself took root at last
and flowered, thin and bright
as Indian Paintbrush

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: katlaughing
Date: 26 Aug 10 - 01:33 PM

Oh, Leej! Beautiful and can I ever relate! Exactly the way I felt out East, at times. Some of your best lines in that one!! Rog will enjoy hearing it, tonight. Thanks for sharing.

luvyakat

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 01 Sep 10 - 09:56 AM

The Morrigan's Song

A soldier boy came home today. His camelbak lightly jouncing against his body as he walks into the arms of his young bride. She weeps into his chest, tears of relief and joy. He holds her, he kisses her, he laughs with her, but his outward gaeity never quite stretches into his eyes, always wary, always watching. They never losing the hard, damned stare, have squandered the essence that made him young. His youthfulness was burned away in gunpowder smoke, in blood, and the screams that wake him from his post traumatic dreams, his bedsheets fermenting with the night sweats. She senses the alteration in his spirit, that he is no longer the unseasoned man who knelt beside her before the altar on the day their union was blessed before God. He is no longer the boy who marched to the beat of the Morrigan's song.

A soldier boy came home today. After months wasting away in a military hospital, relearning how to walk, how to function , how to become a contributor of a capitalistic society. He feels the ghost pains of the arm and leg abandoned on the side of some desert highway, unnamed casualties of an IED explosion in the mutilated carcass of a military escort. His artificial titanium government issue prosthetics dully capture the arms of the summer sunlight, as he jerkily steps across the black pavement, the damp heat seemingly liquifying the distant tarmac with the caress of the Georgia sun. His rolling stuttering gait carries him home, away from the Morrigan's song.

A soldier boy came home today. His ebony casket draped in the red white and blue colours of his chosen nation's flag. His sobbing mother , near to collapsing, her quaking hands clutching a sodden tissue smeared with black mascara, dampened with tears. His stunned father stares at the pall with red fringed eyes. His wife sits on a folding chair, her face streaking with make up stained tears. Each drop a memory of their brief years together. She winces at the rifle volleys fired over his body, honouring the soul of a young man, though scared beyond anything he ever felt before, flung himself into the Morrigan's extended arms amidst the battle frenzy of rifle shots and hand grenades. The honour guard to heaven, in their smart dark blue dress uniforms, hand her the triangularly folded flag, which she grasps to her quaking bosom, the tear drops soiling the cotton fabric. She gazes up for a moment to spy a raven inspecting the proceedings, his beak open, cawing the farewell note of the Morrigan's song.

nt

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 01 Sep 10 - 05:12 PM

An Artist's Devoted Touch


Ribbons of curling burgundy hair
Dangles before her countenance
Obscuring the auburn freckles
Splashing her cheeks, buoyant kisses
Lavished the Northwestern sun.

Shrouded behind this portiere
Of ringlets stained by a sanguine sunset
Reclines a shuttered eye, where
Four glossy lashes protrude through
Specifying the location of her vision.

The aquamarine illuminating aurora
That is the allure of her spirit,
The effeminate ethereal charm
Ensared by an artist's devoted touch.

A tenuous fragment of a smile
Emerges from the tightly woven
Flesh coloured lips, as if perceiving
She'll be fastened behind a glass pane
Confined in a dusky wooden cage,
Her glamour beguiling generations tomorrow.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 10:59 PM

Singer

There is
no choice but
To sing where you
stand;
That is where you
sing from.
The words must be clear, but
Otherwise are unimportant
If only they are true enough.
The notes should be
well-chosen
for the place
from which
you are singing.
Beyond this, you
need only stand there,
where you sing from.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 11:31 PM

The Explainer passes judgement
On your case.
Over his left shoulder he
Is whispered to by
A host of notions, like angels.
Armed with these whispers
The Explainer concludes
That you will die.
Not for crimes that you have done
But for requiring
Explanations.
Although it is in your power
To erase the court,
Sentence, charges, and all,
You--in your holiness--refrain
And march with dignity
To an inexplicable end.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Joe_F
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 05:16 PM

inanimate
inaminute

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 08 Oct 10 - 03:22 PM

National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse

Science and poetry were once closer than they are now, writes Steve Jones in response to National Poetry Day.

By Steve Jones
Published: 12:00PM BST 05 Oct 2010

"Thursday is National Poetry Day, a fact that once would have been of much interest to scientists. In the 1700s several poems appeared that passed on a scientific message. The best known is The Loves of the Plants, by Erasmus Darwin, who in 1791 set out in verse an account of the sexual habits of the vegetable world. He used heroic couplets, in which the rhyme pattern is AA, BB, CC and so on (for the sensitive plant, for example, he wrote that "Weak with nice sense the chaste Mimosa stands,/ From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;/ Oft as light clouds o'erpass the summer glade,/ Alarm'd she trembles at the moving shade"). Byron, a rather better poet, liked the form ABABABCC and in his epic Don Juan even manages to squeeze in a mention of Newton ("And this is the sole mortal who could grapple/ Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.")

Overblown as Erasmus Darwin's verses might seem nowadays, the point of poetry was pattern; to use a strict structure of rhythm and rhyme as a framework for words of passion or pedantry that would become fixed in a reader's brain. Robert Frost put it neatly when he wrote that "Poetry without rules is like tennis without a net".

Poetry, in other words, is mathematics. It is close to a particular branch of the subject known as combinatorics, the study of permutations – of how one can arrange particular groups of objects, numbers or letters according to stated laws. As early as 200 BC, writers on Sanskrit poetry asked how many ways it is possible to arrange various sets of long and short syllables, the building blocks of Sanskrit verse. A syllable is short, with one beat, or long, with two. In how many ways can a metre of four syllables be constructed? Four shorts or four longs have just one pattern for each, while for three shorts and a long, or three longs and a short, there are four (SSSL, SSLS, SLSS, and LSSS, for example). For two of each kind of syllable, there are six possibilities. Do the sum for metres of one, two, three, four and more and a mathematical pattern emerges. It is Pascal's Triangle, the pyramid of numbers in which the series in the next line is given by adding together adjacent pairs in the line above to generate 1, 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 3 3 1, 1 4 6 4 1, and so on.

As in a great poem, hidden within that elegant structure are deeper truths that touch on apparently unrelated things; on fractal patterns, on the theory of numbers, on primes, and of complexities too deep to be accessible to mere mortals untrained in the mathematical art. One useful property is that Pascal makes it possible to ask in how many ways it is possible to arrange a group of objects, be they footballers in a league, or lines in a poem...."

From the UK Telegraph

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 12:21 PM

Part of the Answer

What is success?
Grasping at icicles,
Harvesting the drips,
Eating gold.

Aren't beans more substantial?

You look at each others' store of
chocolate, with envy.
Who could possibly eat so much?
There aren't enough days in the
year to wear all those clothes even once.

Don't you have anything to love?
Nothing to treasure?
Nothing to hold in your hands, or your arms,
Or even stroke with your fingertips?
Nothing so comfortable to wear that it molds
to your body from long use?


Eiseley

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 12:22 PM

Poverty!

Come sit down here on this box.
I'll give you some thoughts,
and my attention.
I'll stay up late and write a letter,
one you can hold in your hands
and feel the paper crinkle
against your fingers.
It's the attention that really matters.

To how many people in your life did you really pay attention?
Did you really never see that golden light
streaming onto the concrete
through the turning leaves?
How do you think you'll recognize it now?
When the shell is gone, you'll be hollow inside.

So sit outside in the sun or the rain.
Then at least you'll be filled with
light and water.
And something planted in your soil
can grow.


Eiseley

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 12:23 PM

From: Eiseley
Date: 15 Nov 10 - 10:43 PM

Meditation

Open a door into a quiet, changing room.
Sometimes it has no roof, no walls.
Sometimes it is dark and still, dusky light with a comfortable couch.
Still other times it is simply a window with a raindrop trailing down, following almost but not quite the tracks of countless other drops,
And the quiet of the room behind the window.

Who is there, sharing that vast, enclosing, freeing space?
There is a presence, benign.
Malignancy can't find the door, doesn't even know to look. But if he did, the way would be indistinguishable in his dark corridor.

But for you, the outline shines with a silver light.
Step inside. Everything is waiting for you.
Lining the walls are the placidly smiling Buddhas, their eyes twinkling with delight and welcome.
But don't be shy. They're in their own rooms, after all.
This is the in-between space where everyone and no one is.

One is waiting, ready to let you see through his eyes.
You can feel it, can't you---
The acceptance, the peace, the air like breathable music?
Veiled though you are, and shrouded in blind mortality,
Here is the space between.
Come, wander and rest,
There's a door on this side, too.

Eiseley

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 12:23 PM

Creativity
What is it?
Longing mixed with involuntary music,
Upwelling from the heart of things,
Unfinished, hidden, partially obscured.

Why is there no resolution?
It takes a kind of perseverance
Beyond just the regular flitting from thing to thing.

Stop.
Dig deep into the recesses.
Find the glittering prize and bring it out into the light.
It's worth showing to the world.
Things shouldn't remain hidden.
That smacks of ingratitude.

It doesn't matter if you can't do it all.
At least do some,
And do it well.
Don't leave one treasure covered in muck
Because you're so anxious to find the next.
These things take time.

And in the end there will be jewels enough,
Sparkling in starlight.

Eiseley

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 12:24 PM

Words of the Sculptor

We will now discuss Death,
That changing of one thing into another,
A reality beyond which we cannot see,
Stuck as we are in the undaunted hereness of now.
We work upon substance
As firm as marble, as fragile as porcelain.
Don't go into the next room.
There is nothing inside---
No floor.
Take this chisel. Make your scratches on the rock.
Let the people coming in later wonder what you meant
By your wild profusion of grapes.
In a little while you can go stand
At the door of the floorless room
And toss in a shard.
But don't expect to hear it clatter at the bottom.
The one I threw is falling yet.

Eiseley

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 04:50 PM

The above poems graciously contributed by Mudcatter poet Eiseley.

A stellar addition to our glowing galaxy.


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: katlaughing
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 05:06 PM

WOW!! Thank you!

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Leadfingers
Date: 16 Nov 10 - 05:28 PM

400

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 19 Nov 10 - 06:21 PM

The Chain

He lifted the bottle to pour
as she flicked a crumb from her dress
He could just walk out that door
and be finished with the god damned mess
with nothing here to adore
no hunger left to be blessed
just anguished rumination
and a longing deep in his chest
chained to something he abhored
it's her...or no one...he confessed
He couldn't have loved her more
and she couldn't have thought of him less