Memory

Critiques, prompts & challenges.
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Artguy
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Memory

Post by Artguy » November 5th, 2009, 4:49 pm

This is a rather long poem I am working on. I have never written poetry in long form before. I'm usually a writer of Haiku or other short form pieces. It is an autobiography called Memory

Dreary drizzle on downtown pavement
Shoes - puddle slapping across the street
Sea gulls hang as kites below grey carpet above
The air has a strange crispness
Shivering beneath my jacket
Brown leather worn with age
Like my own skin
Creased
Grey haired – naked head
Like my Father & his too
In small tobacco plant village
Farms and dust
Blown wind
Owls – hawks
Bobolinks - early morning song
Railroad tracks
Detroit  Niagara
In their backyard
One legged John lived in
Asphalt shack – next to the tracks
Once worked on railroad
My Grandfather too
Grandmother made perogies
Old country
Austria – Poland – Ukraine
Cabbage rolls
My Dad their son
Left the village behind  Off to the city
Small boy – big fish
Manitoba
Now Toronto – 1940’s
Smelly port – No condos yet
Kensington then Jewish market
Now for nouveau hippies
Just down the street from my office
Where I sit now – with these words
Married Mom –> Me 7 years later
In sad east end Toronto
Dad worked at Ford
Down the highway
Mom, Sister – just a baby & I
Home on Dead End Street
Learned to ride a bike
Lived in a tree
School bell rang
I’m late again


Off to the burbs
Just a short stay
Golden Mile Plaza – Beatle songs
Pet rat
Mom gone bowling
Then ------
Country roads
Moved north
Old farm house
New baby brother
Wild freedom – hawks & owls
Picked up a paint brush – it started then
With birds
Ground hog eats potato peels
Baby skunk, porcupine,
Sad old barn
Cow skeletons – left behind
Deer in the orchard
Eat low hanging apples
Wolves howl at night
The crow starts my day
Dead dog under the mailbox
Red flag up
Dad’s Volkswagens
One rolled over
On late night drive home
One sat in the driveway and burned
Tractor rides
Great smiling farmer
Potato machine too
That earthy musty smell with me today
Thick muddy fields
Sis and I run through fields of rye
Sticking to our clothes
Took the school bus sis and I
Bright yellow driven by smiley old guy
Pine thick smelling forest
Mushrooms picked from ancient soil
Dusty dirt roads
Wind up and down fast driven hills
Rabbit in the long grass
Sis and I give chase
Where’d he go?


Our school all new – modern
Principal with corduroy jacket
He smoked a pipe – played guitar
Folk mass in the gym every Sunday
St. Marks
It’s yard with space to run
1967 trip to Montreal – Expo 67
Took pictures with Dad’s camera
Apollo capsule
Moved left the farm behind
South shore of a small lake
Lots of fishing my friend and I
Big ol pike and jumping bass
Bicycle all summer with school chums
Real Huck Finn existence
A new baby brother – now we are four
Then change
The kind that shakes a boy to his boots
Oh it’s not the pleasant kind
Night time eruptions
With violent sounds from the night
Parents yelling – screaming
Dishes breaking
Lives breaking
Marriage breaking
Lies deceit
It’s all there
It’s all gone
Dad has a new wife
Her kids and they have one too
Home is behind me
Now I’m with strangers
I roam a strange town
New baby sis cries
In my room alone
Paint some murals
Change the view
Paint one at high school too
Played hockey - not very well
Softball as well
Sneak out for a cigarette
Drinking & marijuana
Pink Floyd
Led Zeppelin as well


New ally in wild teen years
Crazed school skipping days
Downtown buy some beer
Laugh at it all
One stormy January night
His car took him to his end
Alone again I cried
Had to bust out
Get free
The town
The strangers
That - family?
Going to high school
Living with new girlfriend
Sex – but love?
I said those words
No echo
She too in separated
Family?
Concerts, parties
Part time jobs
Dear her dear me

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judih
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Post by judih » November 5th, 2009, 11:34 pm

kurt, through no fault of yours, i've just been listening to a dynamite rap and i hear the beat while i read your words
and it rocks
forgive me if it's not meant to rock
but as i read, it's rockin
a memoir in haiku, short line, power beat
rock\

now maybe if i'd been listening to Satie or Miles, it'd be different for me, and maybe it'll be different later on after i've heard some other sounds, but for now, it's rockingly powerful.

there's more, life goes on, i hope there's more verses to come.

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Post by Yejun » November 7th, 2009, 7:47 pm

Well, I don't hear a rhythm overall, but it seems to fall into rhythmic moments (a three or four beat strong stress kind of thing). The allure, perhaps, is the length itself but that creates its own dilemma.

To some extent, the charm has to be a feeling of honesty without being sensational (confessional).

More later.

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Artguy
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Post by Artguy » November 8th, 2009, 7:29 pm

read it slowly.....

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Post by Yejun » November 11th, 2009, 11:30 am

Dreary drizzle on downtown pavement
Shoes - puddle slapping across the street
There's a strong rhythm here.

But you lose it here:
Sea gulls hang as kites below grey carpet above
I don't hear it coming back.

A different rhythm?

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Post by Yejun » November 14th, 2009, 9:17 am

okay, nothing?

What do you mean by rhythm?

Everything has its own rhythm?

Not what I meant.

I meant something that everybody can hear.

Unless you grew up in the 60's.

Personally, most of you guys seem deaf.

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Artguy
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Post by Artguy » November 16th, 2009, 10:53 am

So where is the little black book of arbitrary rules....I write from the breath...and immediate mind in the tradition of Kerouac, Ginsberg et al...

Yejun
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Post by Yejun » November 16th, 2009, 7:23 pm

How about the dictionary:

rhythm:
1. movement or procedure with uniform or patterned recurrence of a beat, accent, or the like.
2. Music.
a. the pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the occurrence of strong and weak melodic and harmonic beats.
b. a particular form of this: duple rhythm; triple rhythm.
3. measured movement, as in dancing.
4. Art, Literature. a patterned repetition of a motif, formal element, etc., at regular or irregular intervals in the same or a modified form.
5. the effect produced in a play, film, novel, etc., by the combination or arrangement of formal elements, as length of scenes, speech and description, timing, or recurrent themes, to create movement, tension, and emotional value in the development of the plot.
6. Prosody.
a. metrical or rhythmical form; meter.
b. a particular kind of metrical form.
c. metrical movement.
7. the pattern of recurrent strong and weak accents, vocalization and silence, and the distribution and combination of these elements in speech.
8. Physiology. the regular recurrence of an action or function, as of the beat of the heart, or the menstrual cycle.
9. procedure marked by the regular recurrence of particular elements, phases, etc.: the rhythm of the seasons.
10. regular recurrence of elements in a system of motion.
The only possible definition I can see might be 5. But even that seems dubious.

A few qualifiers here:

1. I am not arguing that the poem has no rhythm and therefore it is not good. I am arguing that Judih above imposed a different rhythm on your poem. If that's what you want, fine, but it would be helpful if you told us what tune you had in mind.

2. It would seem that your idea of 'breath' and my idea of 'breath' are different and thus my problem with the zeitgeist of the sixties. It's not the poetry itself that was so bad (some of it is/was but most poetry in any decade is/was bad), it's the mystical mumbo-jumbo used to explain it. Ginsberg, somewhere, complains that his Whitmanesque anaphoras in "Howl" were the result of insecurity. If he had it written later, he would have dispensed with any recurring pattern at all.

That is, he would have dispensed with any identifiable rhythm (though I don't know if he would have kept the iambic runs within the poem).

So much for the guru of "first thought/best thought."

3. Simply put, there is no such thing as individual rhythm in the sense that is identifiable to you and not to me or anybody on the street. There is no difference between a complex rhythm that only one person can hear and no rhythm at all. There are complex rhythms of course that I can't really "hear" (the drum beats in a Noh play for example) but at least in theory I can learn them because they are repeatable.

4. Why focus on rhythm when you want to focus on something else?

Fifty years ago, Gary Snyder said, "I think mankind is headed someplace else." Yeah, we're there now. Ain't it grand? :roll:

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