As per MARK TWAIN
We have natural and justifiable distrust of talky men who make a sounding and ostentatious pretense of saying a thing and yet don’t say it after all — men who hide a mustard-seed of an idea in a kaleidoscope of words, so that the more you turn the thing the more you can’t quite capture that elusive little idea, because it always takes refuge, just in time, behind a new and bewitching rainbow-explosion of fine language …
– in a letter to unidentified friend, 1876
Tag Archives: On Writing
No Contest
This poem knows it can’t compete
with its neighbors
the Freeverse-Smiths
over there on the left
in concise lines and white spaces
of their modern open plan
and on the right,
the Traditionalform-Joneses,
with that fancy meter on the siding
clicking along in whatapest iamb.
It’s no secret
that this poem’s comment box
is always empty,
almost as if it had no identity,
no real composition.
This poem believes
it’s entitled to more.
So it will lurk.
It will do close readings
of them all. It will wait enjambed
until their phrases are turned
and steal as many as it can carry,
stuffing its stanzas full of cool devices
as it exits through their workshops.
If caught, this poem will plead
no contest.
j. blakkan
http://allpoetry-classic.com/dune
Armchair Explorer
I peek cautiously through the kitchen blinds.
It’s like a BBC 2 jungle documentary out there,
A green canopy growing wild and untamed.
Nature is reclaiming my garden,
and I feel like
this is a job for another day.
I tentatively open the cupboard door.
It’s like an explosion in a skip,
no antiques or heirlooms here.
This is Tutankhamen’s stuff for the tip
rubbish unfit for any afterlife.
Another job for another day.
I’m no Attenborough or Carter
Fearlessly investigating or excavating.
Instead I brave the TV channels
to visit far away lands
armed with a cup of tea
Sitting comfy in my armchair.
Richard Archer
https://skaggythepoet.wordpress.com
Quotes floating on the editor’s desk. No. 1
“All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS. What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.
“That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.”
― Toni Morrison
TheParkBenchReview 