jordana's litblog

some poems i like

2005-06-08T22:27:00.000-07:00

Song of the Open Road - Walt Whitman

excerpt:

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.


Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;

I do not want the constellations any nearer;

I know they are very well where they are;

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.


(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;

I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go;

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;

I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

*

The Munich Mannequins - Sylvia Plath

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.
It means: no more idols but me,

Me and you.
So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles

These mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

Naked and bald in their furs,
Orange lollies on silver sticks,

Intolerable, without mind.
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

Nobody's about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting

Down shoes for a polish of carbon
Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

O the domesticity of these windows,
The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,

The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.
And the black phones on hooks

Glittering
Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

*

Nothing Gold Can Stay - Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

*

The Listeners - Walter de la Mare

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:-
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

*

The Lady of Shalott - Alfred Lord Tennyson

*

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

third blog review

2005-06-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

Poet Made of Angst

A great site that pokes fun at angsty teen poetry.

For my last blog review, I wanted something really angsty. Angst is always fun. I found what I was looking for - surprisingly enough - at "Poet Made of Angst". It's the poetry blog of a 22-year-old woman in Indiana.. so, technically, it's not your usual teen angst. But close enough. Her interests include: angst, creativity, crying, expression, hate, hurt, love, loving, lyrics, music, poems, poetry, sadness, singing, songs, thinking, thoughts, and writing. You can almost hear The Cure playing in the background..

Most of her poems revolve around being sad about a boyfriend, although a few are about nature.. dancing in the moonlight, entwining in the grass.. that sort of thing. Although I do feel kind of bad reviewing her blog in a bad light (she makes it pretty clear that she wants to keep it private, and that writing poems helps her when she's depressed).. the Internet probably isn't the best place for keeping personal therapy private.

With that said, I think the main thing that I dislike about this blog isn't so much the quality of the poetry itself. It's more the general theme. Angst in poetry has been beaten to death. For the most part, she uses what I read as predictable descriptions and boring techniques, although some of her poems I did like more. She seems to have a habit of starting off a great poem.. a happy poem.. then, come mid-point, you start seeing words like "empty", "numb" and "tortured".

I'm probably being cruel and insensitive. Poetry can and should be whatever you want it to be.. but, for the sake of critique, I'm not a fan of the "Poet Made of Angst".

2 out of 5

Here's hoping she never Googles her own blog and finds this..

nigel!

2005-06-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

Psst.. go check out Nigel's blog. He has a music theme going on.. which is great.. since so many musicians incorporate poetry into their songs.

Plus.. his layout is very cool. Nice pics, too. :p

my own haiku

2005-06-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

I cheated. But it is a lot easier writing haiku without worrying too much about syllables.

morning physics
light beams converging; rays
i stare at the clock

stones skip lightly
in split seconds & hops
across the Pacific

cats doze in the sun
twitching nostrils & tails
as morning light slants

the man with the mole
sometimes runs to catch the bus
he likes to wear gingham

haiku / second blog review

2005-06-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

Well, my blog is finally up on Nicenet, thanks to Mr. Nick Smith. So, hopefully, everyone has access to it.. and I wasn't too hopelessly late. :p

For my second blog review, I wanted to focus on haiku.

Japanese ladies.

For a while, I wasn't big on haiku. It seemed pretty useless.. just something you try out in elementary school even though nobody seems to take it seriously. I started appreciating haiku more and more in high school. I like the simplicity of it. The fact that an image or emotion or whatever is being portrayed can be brought forth in 17 syllables is pretty refreshing. Maybe the main reason that I like haiku is because I'm impatient. Or maybe I've just been conditioned by our get-done-quick lifestyle. The "modern lifestyle" is a good scapegoat.. blame all of our flaws on IT.

With that said, it took me a while to find an actual haiku blog, but I *did* do it. It's called.. daily haiku: the haiku of dustin neal. That's right, he doesn't use capitals - so you know he's a true artiste. His first entry was on May 25th of this year, so, unfortunately, there isn't much content. But his entries are strictly haiku. No introductions or commentaries or different "blog things" like that, which helps keep the focus on his work.

The actual poems are quite good. He has a unique and confident way of writing haiku, and many of his images are quite soothing and reflective. They convey many feelings and situations in just 3 dream-like lines.

Some of my faves are:

13,
an apple falls
into empty palms -
adam hides in the evening.

14,
scribbling notes
in my bible -
still confused.

23,
garage -
barefoot youth
stepping in oil.

26,
in my yard
pine trees are silent -
i strum them a song.

The only thing that kind of surprises me is the inconsistency in the numbers of syllables. We've always been taught that the correct format is 5-7-5.. no ifs, ands, or buts. I remember counting syllables on my fingers and getting frustrated with "dipthongs".. words like "moon" which seem like they could be either 1 or 2 syllables. Plus, I was pretty paranoid, so the fate of the world pretty much seemed to rest on my grade 3 haiku. Haiku is, after all, very Japanese. Very strictly defined.. very efficient.. very traditional. It's almost like you're going to piss off the gods if your second line has 6 syllables instead of 7.

Anyway.. back to the review. If nothing else, this blog helped me see more of the freedom behind haiku. Instead of adhering to that cage of 17 syllables we all know about, Dustin Neal jumps back and forth between everything from 1 to 10 syllables for each line. Maybe that doesn't make it "authentic haiku".. but the general feel of haiku is still very much there.

3.5 out of 5

Not much content.. simple design.. nice poems. Good holiday fun.

overload

2005-06-06T22:49:00.000-07:00

I just spent an hour commenting on our litblogs. Hope I got them all.

I'm having trouble with Nicenet... so, as of now, nobody knows that this blog exists. Except me. I'll have to get help from Nick tomorrow.

So.. I'm behind, but trying to catch up.

I'm having a hard time finding good poetry blogs.

rosie o'donnell

2005-06-06T19:07:00.000-07:00

r blog

Rosie O'Donnell's self-portrait. Because it matters. It really does.

I don't think this is actually a "poetry blog".. though it can probably be argued that every blog is a poetry blog.. but I had to at least mention this one. It's kind of weird reading a (ex?) celebrity's blog, complete with hundreds of comments made by adoring fans. She writes all of her entries like this:

listening to kd langs
hymms of the 49th parrallel
i love canada
she sings a joni song
“i am a lonely painter
i live in a box of paints”

are you a lonely painter
parker asks
hmmm
well yes i think so i said
most paint by themselves
alone
with music to open the channel
2 god he asks
2 god i say

... which makes me *almost* want to say it is indeed a blog of poetry.

Very E.E. Cummings. It's interesting to read. It's strange imagining Rosie O'Donnell sitting down and writing about Barbara Walters lying about liking her punk vest, or seeing someone named Joyce at the ice rink. I like the integration of poetry and journal writing. A lot of people make journals seem pretty formal... "Yesterday I..." "Wow, Diary, I haven't written in you in forever!" As if the diary is some pseudo-friend from elementary school that we have to be fake and cheery with. Writing in the form of prose - be it Shakespearean sonnets, or E.E. Cummings "u r 2 good 2 b 4gttn haha" kinda stuff - allows more freedom and less guilt when it comes to diaries and journals, I think.

3.5 out of 5!

Because this wasn't actually a poetry blog..?

spam image

2005-06-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

spam
Originally uploaded by jordana_s.

Just testing out my flickr account.

my own crappy e-mail poems

2005-06-06T13:38:00.001-07:00

Kristin Thomas' blog was pretty nifty... so I thought I'd give 'spam poetry' a try.

I delete spam e-mail pretty quickly, so, right now, I don't have much. So I cheated and used subject lines from all of my e-mails.

Hi Jordana...

Checking in

It's me, eating crow and such

Thought you might like to see this

true or false?

This is not An "I Still Love You" e-mail

I want this back.

It DOES work.

i wanna be an airborne ranger

fun stuff

just in time for the summer

Ladies and gentleman...

For A Good Cause

this is my "check-up" e-mail.

Part Two

boo~

Missing you

15 things you never would have thought of

summer job

News

Wiped

tell me...

who is this again? do i know you?

I tried. :-\

first blog review

2005-06-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

Kristin Thomas Spam Poetry

This seems to be a pretty popular choice in our class, so I'm guessing I'm not the only who hit "poetry blog" into Google. It's not surprising, though, that so many of us have chosen it to review. Its title is intriguing, and the theme is very original. I always complain when I receive something like 8 spam e-mails.. but this girl gets around 400 every day. Kind of makes you wonder what sites she's logged on to.

She started the site in 2003, constructing poems out of the spam subject lines that she receives at her many different e-mail addresses. Definitely a tough project, and she's even received a bit of media attention for it. Some of the content, though, seems to be kind of stilted and doesn't really flow well. Pretty understandable. Buuut.. even if you don't like the poems, just the sheer difficulty of what she's doing deserves respect.

I have learned one thing from this blog. I get lame spam. This girl gets subject lines like "embark in the dewy chronograph of heterostructure..." and "somewhat by a nightdress in tachinid arccosine". I guess that some spam writer out there doesn't know that "SEX" will probably get more attention than big words... or Kristin Thomas is just making it all up. :)

3.5 out of 5

I like a lot of the poems, like her most recent entry of "spam haiku".. but some of them seem kind of awkward. The theme is awesome, though. One and a half enthusiastic thumbs up!

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2005-05-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

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