Prufrock on the Web

[mnaz]

Nominated for all-time cliche,
a love song has eternal purpose.
The code, the language, the aging cyber ducts.
Prufrock is not getting lucky tonight.

To quote the reader of the writer, we're strangely aloof.
'This poem is his brain scan, as he wanders from room to room.'
'Inner fears won't allow him to risk sexual vulnerability.'
Prufrock may not be able to converse, but he sings.
'for the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
rubbing its back upon the window panes.'
Sex is a cataclysmic confrontation,
beloved touch of smoke.

'Line after line, he departs from the flesh and blood around him,
soars into twisted, almost comically overblown realms of imagination'.
'Do I dare disturb the universe. Would it have been worthwhile
to have bitten off the matter with a smile,
to have squeezed the universe into a ball'

'A kiss on the cheek would feel like an earthquake', we respond.
'Shall I part my hair behind. Do I dare eat a peach?'
Love song had the nerve to write such a childish thought.
'Poetic inanity in the service of truth is an act of courage',
the reader capitulates at last.

These things take on lives of their own.
The world hinges on unhinged questions.
He has a reputation and does not travel well,
sold up the river by phantoms and the simplest dues.
Shallow behind the veil, or the utter pain of sight.
Prufrock is not so deep, he's only trying to escape,
unable to feel, to connect, writes an inhuman poem.
'I should have been a pair of ragged claws,
scuttling across the floors of silent seas'.
This is no love song, but a hate song.

The reader agrees.
All hate is rooted in fear.
'Isn't the case against the poem also the case for?'
'We can seek to be hollow, but that attempt always fails'.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotions, but escaping them.
They sold you up he river, the phantoms and simple dues,
without a bang or whimper, in the darkness of light,
in your heart of darkness, the art of disease,
in service of unable to feel, to connect.
carry your banner well.

[hester_prynne]

Wow Mnaz...fascinating poem, content and style.
I really really dig it!

However, thus hence and soforth, you know, I happen to like ol pruufy alot....I mean, can we, in a mood, call it escape, when perchance, in another mood, it might be, a dream, or declaration, ah or even a truth!

Geez. You know I really don't know where the above paragraph just came from!
I sort of went into a trance....and boom! there it was....

H

[mnaz]

Many thanks to Eliot, the author, and to Levi Asher, who read it for me-- a hopelessly hollow poetic infinitude of a poem. Found it on litkix under the 'On Prufrock' heading from a couple years back. Not that the details of intersection are all that important.

[hester_prynne]

Well no, those details are of no consequence, but the detail of your piece seemed to almost bring eliot to life for me.
He was right up on the edge of it for sure.
I dug it.
H

[creativesoul]

this rocked me, how dismal how real how beautful, "how very sad I can be between spiritual awakenings"I felt myself walking with you at some party at a nice house, and then the revulsion of possible rejection, and thus rejecting that which we are afraid of, to be vulnerable.I would wear my bearded lizards skin if I could. With her little thorn like pieces of flesh and her holes for ears. And she looks right at me. this is something that I have sought to both improve and ignore, because I feel naked and it is a different kind of naked than just having my clothes off.
BEAUTIFUL WORK

[e_dog]

i don't get it.

what's this s'posed ta be?

[mnaz]

A poem about analyzing a poem.

A high-proof discussion I found on a fine lit site...
Eliot's Prufrock seems hollow, yet experiences such intensity of experience.
And yet apparently no ability to feel, or connect, some would conclude-- the case both for and against the work. And the respondents log in with their observations... In real life Eliot was an anti-Semite. He had fascist leanings. He was this. He was that. The poem was influenced by Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Prufrock might as well be Kurtz. The posts just kept coming, the connections got deeper and stranger, until some of it found its way into my scribbling. That's all.

[e_dog]

hollow? as 'n Tha Hollows Manz?

What you talkin' bout Prufrock?

scuttling claws over yer stockexchang.

life measurd out in T-bills.
The ladies pass gas in n out of 'fganistands.

Dante's kind of super-fiscal. That Goethe gotta getta betta pome than tha glib shit he be spoutin' ... and fa(u)st!

[mnaz]

Oh, there was a long, long cyber-talk about favorite poems (on ye olde L.K.)-- in particular, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', by TS Eliot, and that twisting, wandering discussion kicked my ass last weekend, after a coupla whiskees. Link: http://www.litkicks.com/Prufrock

Yeah, the Prufrock-Heart o' Darkness-Apocalypse Now connections kinda freaked me out. Not sure if I buy it entirely. And A-Now... couldn't make myself watch that flick until just last year. I hadn't missed much.

[e_dog]

i am boycotting litkicks.

cant remember why, but i am angry.

[Totenkopf]

10 pages of a French or German officer's day journals from Verdun or the Somme put PMS Eliot's neurotica to shame. What's some haw-vah boy lamenting the yellow fog or peaches or Prince Hamlets compared to a pile of corpse-burgers with rats dancin' on 'em? Not much. Alas poesy cannot do mustard gas or trench warfare as a whole much justice: maybe poetical scratch n sniff? Yass.

[e_dog]

revised version smells moe powerfully,

but what happened to Bertie Russ.?

[Totenkopf]

Bertie shanking Viv? Ah took it out. Cambridge platonists are a trifle quaint for webland, even more so than catholic-monarchist poeticals. And you were probably ready to press the petit-booj-wah jackal reactionary button or somethin.'

Phanns of TSEliot might recall that TSE more or less tossed his Viv into an insane asylum and forgot about her for 10 years until her death. And however reactionary Russell may have been, he never contemplated joining the fascists as did TSEliot (probably even more sympathetic to the nazis than his one time pal Pound). Oopz es tut mir leid-- not soo poesical. Poesey has always been one of the idylls of the Queen.

They sold you up he river, the phantoms and simple dues,
without a bang or whimper, in the darkness of light,
in your heart of darkness, the art of disease,
in service of unable to feel, to connect.
carry your banner well.

Not bad mnaz. The river's a key difference between Conrad and Eliot. Conrad journeyed up rivers--even up He River, most likely (and across oceans--i.e. Lord Jim ). TS Eliot once took a chartered steamer with fellow academics (including Ruscull).

[mnaz]

Disconnect and paralysis, time frozen, others as mere pins on a map. Could describe a self-absorbed, overprivileged Prufrock who never leaves his room... or perhaps Messianic leaders fixated on their final kingdoms, or encrusted generals and their 20th-Century gazillion-dollar 'mandates' holed up in the war room. War as a grim, faceless (don't look for too long into its eyes), mass-produced industrial revolution. Honor by lottery. OK, I'm reaching a bit-- all these connections. They don't all translate perfectly..

Anyway, I suspect even trench warfare journals would be hard pressed to cover the depth and insanity of their subject, and I suspect those who wrote them knew they could never fully capture the shattering intensity and numbing devastation in writing. What expression could measure up to Verdun? Mathematics? Journal entries? History lessons? These would seem more like base camp before the ascent or descent; only so many terrible eyewitness accounts or newspaper returns. Perhaps only a poetic dimension has any shot at plumbing a deeper consciousness (or unconsciousness) of atrocity, and war's inevitable spiritual paralysis.

[Arcadia]

i am boycotting litkicks.

cant remember why, but i am angry.

mmm... why e-dog?

I read the poem yesterday, don´t remember to ever read it when I posted in the litkicks thread !. I like the bitter-dark-humor in it!!!