h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Christ, Pin. How many nails can you hit on the head in a single post?

I was laughing out loud, for most of it, when I wasn't ducking and diving to avoid the direct hits. I am not going to list them. It is good enough (and bad enough) that you picked them up.

Thanks for the detailed critiques. I will take a look at the tweaking, per your suggestions, (a previous comment of yours about a previous poem resulted in "by north and south, by east and west" instead of a whole bucket-full of "and"s there, so I do pay attention).

You are right about tears. Bloody English. It would work when read aloud but it does make one stumble when reading on the written page. I was failing to get 'bruise' into that line. Not sure about 'rends' though. Sounds too much like what happens to meat before it becomes petfood.

Oh, and it took me a good month or so to realise that there was a Marvel resonance to my situation. And even then the damn thing slithered under my hands and turned into something else as I wrote it. My first attempt was a 16 line viator, more than a month ago, and it stalled horribly. However, I confess to being quietly smug about the Marvel reference now. Though Hoo was expecting something about electronics, or dvds, or at least about the phone. And I thought that boy had been given a decent education!

I wansn't sure about the full flood line. But now that you have mentioned the euphamism, (you dirty minded bugger you), I will leave it in to confuse other dirty minded buggers. I still like the Shakespeare reference. Though the previous version of the line "I would / enjoy our love in it's full flood") was better in some ways.

*sigh*

Why isn't poetry *easy*?

Thanks again, Pin.

B

"Fr'instance, I never realised that Ben was modest!"



Shrinking violet, me! Y'all know that!

On the apparent contradictions - let's just say that the lines

"But distance, duty, care and love
threaten us, and place above
such intermittant links as these
a powerful sword of Damocles"

were tested and double tested for truth and accuracy, before they made it into the final version.

I'll mail you the original, as you saw it, Chai.

B

Thanks B. I await your email with pleasure and anticipation. As I said, it's a helluva poem, and the contradiction of love threatening love does ring true.

G'night. And here's a link to "Wild Garden."

F115543?thread=305970

Cheers,

Chai.

Sent.

(Thinking onto the keyboard, becuse otherwise I will go to sleep and forget what I'm thinking).

Pin: "Final lines are a bit we-heavy. "We each" sounds all squeaky like Furby-speak; how about "that both"?"

I prefer 'each' because it implies separateness and I don't want the cozy togetherness of 'both'.

Of course I could go with "to pay the dues that we must pay" which I quite like. It glides over the issue of separateness and togetherness, and gliding over that issue is what this poem is all about, and has a certain inexorability about it. Yep. I think so. Thanks Pin! (Sorry about the remaining we though).

"Losing one of the "can"s in there might help too. Replace with a "might", perhaps. It depends whether you want to sound assertive or tentative."

I have been messing around with those specific modal operators ever since I first wrote that damn quatrain! I take your point about the can-can. The voice at this point is tentative. I am reluctant to make it yet another bloody question: "But will we ever find a way...?" In particular, I don't want to end on a question.

How about

"that we might build a time and space,
where we may love, without disgrace"?

Might has an ambiguous tentativeness to it which I like, there.

I do need to go to bed. I'll update the html tomorrow.

Thanks for indulging me, guys. I really appreciate it.



B

Chai: I have responded to F115543?thread=305970 in the thread itself, since there is already a substantial conversation there.

Pin: likewise I will respond to yours attached to the entry, or to the conversation in which you gave me the link.

It would be nice if this thread became a general poetry workshop thread though. But evidently not this round.

I ended up writing another today. I am going to post the link without comment, because I am interested in your inital reactions.

So here you are: Life and death in Epping Forest:

http://uk.geocities.com/bethcargill/mindscapesandlandscapes.html#eppingforest

B

My Latin's not up to the title. 'Quid pro quo' allusion? Quid po(quo)etry?

This new poem then.
Wo-ah.
I'm having difficulty decoding it, because the first lines remind me very forcefully of something else.

That was a piece a friend wrote, and I'm afraid I helped polish, many years ago. It was pure, sick mischief. It was a piece about necrophilia, and started something like :

Your shallow grave in verdant idyll.
So neatly wrought, the killer's knife...

I'm sure you get the picture. A little after that, it went on about putrefaction, with lots of blooming flowers imagery.
He sent it in to a ladies' magazine poetry competition, I'm ashamed to say. Boys will be boys. (It didn't win)

You can now probably understand the problem I have in distilling your subtler messages.

I'll keep working at it, OK?

Pin *vile creature*

Wow. That new poem is powerful.

It's interesting to think about the state of mind you were in when you write your poems, Ben. They strike me as very moody (Not in the bad way). Especially this one...

As you know, I have trouble commenting on poetry, but wo-ah

Quid quo pro means "returning the favour" - or just possibly "tit for tat". I wanted to reply to Pin and to Chai before posting Epping Forest.

Yeah. I thought it came across much more strongly than I intended. I have a strong sense of the history of landscapes, and I have the vaguest memories of a drip-feed of news reports over the years saying that a body had been found in Epping Forest.

The poem is actually about the elms, the fact that they were virtually extinguished in the UK in the early 70s by Dutch Elm Disease - which is carried by beetles - and that any that do grow no never make it to maturity.

It is not that odd for me to put a kicker of some sort in at the end of the poem, it is just that in this poem the kicker is in at the beginning.

So no deep or hidden meanings, just a stiflingly hot day, the surprise of finding elms, albeit ones which were young and dying, and an awareness of the tabloid history of the place.

B
PS - Pin - why does nothing about that story surprise me, while everything about it amuses me?

State of mind? Jodan. Spaced out of my head, ususally. Not on drugs or alchohol, just on words.

I was thinking about this the other day. I have an exceedingly analytical brain, and the poems are really analyses of my feelings about any particular thing which has moved me. I am wary of dissecting happiness, I prefer to just enjoy it, which is why so many of them are about troubling things.

B

Hi Ben,

I just copied and printed out Life and death in Epping Forest. Wow!

But, I really think it would be not just good, but astonishingly good if the first lines were last. OK, you say you have put the "kicker" first, but as humans, we take the lives of young girls more seriously than young elms. So the parallel between young elms not making it to maturity, and young girls not making it to maturity is tinged with bathos, if you liken the elms to girls, rather than the other way round.

If you put those first four lines last, you get the added image of the elms being fertilised by the sacrificed lives of the girls, which resonates powerfully with all sorts of dark elements in our psyche.

Also the fact that you use "mutilated" would be a surprisingly strong word to use of a tree, if it had not already been used for the girls.

Presumably v 3 line 2 should read "stand tall" not "stand all?"

Just a few thoughts.

Cheers,

Chai

Thussish, do you mean, Chai?

http://uk.geocities.com/bethcargill/eppingforrest.html

I am wary of the final kicker becoming a cheap stylistic trick, since it is one that I have used so often before.

B

Dearest Ben,

Absolutely not thussish!

Simply putting those first four lines

"In Epping Forest
the bodies of mutilated girls
lie hidden
deep within the loam..."

last instead of first is the only thing I'd change. You absolutely don't need that "newspapers remind us stuff. Indeed, yeuch!

Don't change anything else at all ( apart from the noted typo "tall," as you have done.)

OK?

I need to go to work, I will print off both versions and brood over them.

Thanks for the suggestions, Chai.

B

Me too. See ya. In the meantime, I've posted a "tree" poem of mine from 20 years ago!

Where de trees? Can' see 'em for de woods!

Me trees am in de journal.

Hiya Ben
Chai's right of course. If the shock-bit goes in, it goes at the end and it needs the minimum of dressing up.
If you want this to be a poem about the plight of elms, though, you need to talk about elms. Not so much about beeches or dead girls.
If you want it to be a poem about the atmosphere of a particular place, then it's pretty good.
I'm going to say the same thing as usual about articles. Try going through it and check the "the's" that really need to be there. Three, probably, I reckon. For me, all the others should be removed.
There are a couple of weak verbs in there too. You can say something more thought-provoking than "grow". And "mutilated by beetles" was good, but is now repetitious, whereas "Destroyed" is lazy; anyone could have thought of that word.
You are indeed very analytical/mechanical (I've got a secret theory you're a bloke, but that's another story ). Your stuff tends to be solid and well-constructed around the pivot-points. Poems that won't fall over. Which is fine, but the ones where you're vulnerable, confused, not so cocksure are your best ones. I think so, anyway.
So I think you should maybe try be a bit stranger, just now and again. If you don't like it, you can always fix them later, right?
Pin*really a girl, but you knew that anyway, yeah?*

Well, this one comes into the category of one that I am not in the least big cock-sure about. But I don't think it is one of my best either.

To be honest, I am not entirely sure *what* I am trying to convey, except this combination of stifling heat, awareness of the history of the place, and the absolute shock of finding trees that I had thought were extinct in the UK 30 years ago, and the powerful awareness that they were dying.

I think, for me, the poem is balanced in its shocks, whereas for other people it clearly isn't. (There is a backstory in my life about elms, which it would be tedious to post now).

Chai - I disagree with you about putting the first four lines at the end in the way in which you suggest. It turns them into a tasteless and self-indulgent coda which has no connection with the rest of the poem, and I would rather leave them out altogether, than put them at the end. So there!

It was Epping Forest's reputation, which exercised my mind. Not the reality of murder. Hence the introduction of the newspapers in the second version. I found the reality of the diseased trees more powerful than the places' reputation as a charnel house, to be honest.

Just call me a sad, sick, tree-hugger, with no real human values. (Oh and a bloke as well, while you are at it - and, Pin, I truly admire and respect you too. )

Hmmm.

More thoughts to think, more brooding to brood.

Thanks guys. I don't know if I will rework and repost tomorrow, or after a couple of weeks or so.

B

Hey Ben...you stopped talking about this, then? Just when I thought it was time to explain myself. And there was me thinking that you don't have an off-switch.

Just because you feel a certain way as you write doesn't automatically mean you get it down for others.

So...you don't feel cocksure, you write something, and now it can go several ways. You can leave it fragile and uncertain, or you can start bolstering it.

Leaving things unfinished a while is nearly always good. I'm sure we all do it and we all improve that way, and I'm glad you know to do it because (temperamentally) you're probably disinclined to stop when you're on a charge.

I don't know. This one reads like you decided to let it lie a few hours too late. It seems like there's shoring-up here that needs stripping away before you'll get back to something useful. (Maybe it's the dead girls; you obviously think so. I'm not so sure...)

Anyway, less of that. I'm making a philosophical point rather than a specific criticism of this or any poem. It seems to me that if you really want a collaborative poetry thread, you have to bring stuff that's less finished, less Ben(or whoever)-stamped, less yours to make the final call on.

You might not be able to put your little C-in-a-ring on such stuff, even. But, hey, the poems that have taught me most and delighted me most aren't mine.

Food for thought?

There, I confer your femininity back. Respect. I couldn't find a tree for you to hug, so will this do?

Pin