See my location.

Charlie - the interesting thing when Zeno mentions Lucretius and Byron is to contrast, what 'her flowers' = her poetry, is talking about with theirs.
It is, purposefully, anti-epic...unlike Byron and Lucretius - she wants to talk to/ ironize her gendered position as a female poet and she is also critiquing the desire of her predecessors to speak of epic things.
It is oppositional - epics have grand time scales - this is not much more than a series of fragments.
If you read the 'old man' as a traditional figure of poetry and poetic wisdom - the playful way she scares the old poet with her invocation - 'her flowers' parody the earnest and self-ascribed power of traditional poetic POV to capture grand things.
That is a way of saying - why she is/should be considered a Modernist poet. Though she is better known for her short stories.

Ambigiuety lies at the heart of some of the tensile phrasing...her flowers - her words the more she speaks the less she can see. An anti-clarity...an exploration of obscure times and places which become less 'clear' as the words grow above her eyesight 'until she could hardly see'.

I was the one who mentioned Byron, in a post that existed on several levels, at least one of which was missed by Zeno, and maybe even by John Cole. Don't give them more credit than they deserve.

Thanks again for further explanation. It makes sense and you're good at it.

My apologies.

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

Thank you, Jeeves.

this reminded me of marianne moores "poetry":

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”--above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

I love this Moore poem. And I like free verse -- its versatility alone is worth the price of admission (although often when I used to write I found that being constrained to a particular form made me work harder to get the poem right and I usually felt that the poem turned out better for it -- my sanity... not so much). My question is: what makes it a poem instead of a piece of prose? Yes, there is a wealth of imagery that prose doesn't often achieve; and yes, there's a little irony going on, some nice clever tongue-in-cheek kind of stuff to go with her evocative word usages; and yes, there are some vivid repetitions and crescendos. But there don't seem to be any other discernible traditional poetic devices in use that make me think "poem". Yet still I think "poem" when I read it. I accept it as "poem". Just, why? What's the difference between reading it as posted above and reading it as posted below? Surely a bunch of line breaks don't make a poem? Genuinely curious about this. The answer feels like that little floating bit of debris in my glass of water that I keep unsuccessfully trying to finger-scoop out. It just doesn't want to come, so it keeps sliding out the way. I guess I can accept an answer that tells me to just smoke a doob and roll with it, dude, but I'd really like to get a little deeper if anyone has the knowledge.

I kind of raise the issue because of the meaning of the poem itself, along with its form, although I'd like to ask the question in a broader sense.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, by T. S. Eliot (1954)

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish — which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,

So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

Walking Around by Pablo Neruda, translated by Robert Bly


Just had this poem pop back into my head the other day and thought I'd share. I love the griminess and audacity of the imagery. One of my favorites, for sure. I tend to like poetry best when it's a little bit dirty, when it explores the nasty side of life that people rarely talk about. Absolutely love the lines about mirrors weeping with shame, bones flying out of hospital windows, a warehouse for corpses, and "my convict face, blazes up like gasoline", etc.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...le-beauty.html

Neruda's Walking Around sent my thoughts to Yeat's Sailing to Byzantium and its

"An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul claps its hand and sings..."

Which is why I write... still
And...as the article above points out
It's Easter

I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all
- Ogden Nash

The opening lines of Little Gidding have been going through my head on these cold and snowy April days:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown . . .