Poetry Attack: blue on blue

Posted by gorboduc on March 23, 2009, 01:29 PM | #

...Much I disrelished Norman’s verse,
But here is something even worse.
The screen invites me to “Replay”
But I would rather ran away
And hide beneath the stairs or bed,
In fact, I’d rather be shot dead
Than hear that geezer stumbling through
That turgid nonsense “blue on blue”
A second time! Such dreadful stuff!
For God’s sake! Once was QUITE enough!
I’ll say no more: I cannot stoop
To argue with a nincompoop.
Re-born, McGonagall, arise!
And proudly claim the booby prize.

Posted by P. Mouse on March 23, 2009, 10:03 PM | #

http://www.cygnetschool.com/definition_files/image002.jpg

Attack away?  How could anyone attack that?  (RE: attempted Seuss mockery, above)

Posted by bud or cog on March 23, 2009, 11:01 PM | #

Sylvia Plath’s son, an evolutionary ecologist, has killed himself.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7958876.stm

Posted by Al Ross on March 24, 2009, 02:33 AM | #

The first man to fuck little Sophie,
Has just won the Krafft-Ebing Trophy,
Plus ten thousand quid,
Which, for what the chap did,
Will be widely denounced as a low fee.

Posted by Al Ross on March 24, 2009, 06:29 AM | #

Will the cremated remains of feminist heroine Sylvia Plath’s son be placed in a Bell Jar?

Posted by Al Ross on March 24, 2009, 07:50 AM | #

The cognoscenti will doubtless perpend that it appears here again with the text prepended.

Posted by Lurker on March 24, 2009, 07:56 AM | #

Its all beyond me Al.

Whats prepended then?

Posted by gorboduc on March 25, 2009, 06:15 AM | #

POEM!

Line two exhibits a gross ineptitude in the use of ‘eke’.

One doesn’t ‘eke’ anything (transitive) and neither does anything ‘eke’ (intransitive).

One ‘ekes out’ a commodity with an inferior one, perhaps in times of short supply.

As in “Mildred eked out the Napoleon brandy with the cooking sherry”.

Some people talk of “ekeing out a miserable life” - they probably mean “dragged ou a ... ” or “endured a ...”

It probably took three minutes to cobble this lot together: it would take hours to point out all the bad grammar, sloppy syntax and misused and misunderstood words.

Taken all in all, the piece could (and IMHO should) be abridged to

Blue! It’s my favourite shade, no doubt:
I’m glad there’s lots of it about!
The rhymes involved a great expense,
I had to bid farewell to sense!
A cynosure I’ve made appear:
Its meaning, though, was far from clear.
Full stops and commas I’ve abolished -
It’s more grown-up; it looks more polished.
Birds, eggs, cats, snakes, I dragged in too:
I don’t know why, and nor do you.

‘The Leader read “blue on blue” to the guerilla troupe, who, animated and inspirited by the deathless verse, rushed on, shouting ‘Death or Glory!’
  “We couldn’t have done it,” said one of the survivors, “if we hadn’t got that immortal example of The White Man’s Creative Powers to urge us on!. Without it, we couldn’t have reconquered Europe! I had to kill a race-traitor who said that it reminded him a bit of Allen Ginsburg.
  “Tailefer, the minstrel, rode out before the Norman ranks chanting from “The Song of Roland” while throwing up his sword and catching it; Wolfe quoted Gray before Quebec, and Buchan wrote to Chesterton to say how his “Lepanto” had been chanted in the English trenches in WW1: and this is JUST as inspiring!”’

Posted by Fred Scrooby on March 25, 2009, 08:59 AM | #

“Wolfe quoted Gray before Quebec”  (—Gorboduc)

Here’s the poem he recited as he lay dying on the battlefield right after his victory on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec,

http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc

and here he is reciting it,

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Benjamin_West_005.jpg .

He told the men attending him as life slipped from him, when they said he had won the battle, “I would rather be the author of that poem than the victor in this battle today.”

That’s the sort of lore we learned when I was a schoolboy, and well I remember learning exactly that particular detail about the French and Indian Wars in high school history class:  how Wolfe died reciting that poem, a poem which we were at the same time studying in high school English class. 

What the Jews have them learning today one can only guess —  something about the history of Kenya no doubt, Black History Month, Saint Martin Luther King, and oh yes, the poems of Maya Angelou. 

Does anybody wonder that I want the old WASP hegemony back?  This post-‘60s Jewish hegemony, I’m sorry, but the Jews can take it and shove it you-know-where.

GO AWAY, JEWS!  JUST ... GO AWAY.  AND TAKE RAHM EMANUEL WITH YOU PLEASE.  YOU’VE HAD YOUR CHANCE, AND YOU’VE UTTERLY FAILED.  WE WANT NO MORE OF YOUR CRAP.

Posted by rb on March 25, 2009, 09:08 AM | #

AND TAKE VON HOFFMEISTER WITH YOU

Posted by exPF on March 25, 2009, 01:24 PM | #

In unrelated news -

I think the links below are an interesting discussion of Animal personalities… something
which is quite interesting if you think about it: different animals of the same species actually
do have different personalities. I’m sure many of us have experienced this anecdotally but
here it is verified (to some extent) by science.

It may be that this is one of those ‘growth fields’
to watch in the future, because we often learn new ways of understanding human life when we
can start with a paradigm based on the simpler world of animals.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Evolution_Of_Animal_Personalities_999.html

http://www.livescience.com/animals/081010-animal-personality.html

I bet that if animal personality study ever gains steam, it will tell us a ton about human nature.

Posted by gorboduc on March 26, 2009, 07:00 AM | #

This really must stop, but as ole Gorbo has got his cynosure out again, he thought hed’d like to show how easy it is to spout off a la blue on blue,  so he perpends a bit more text.

Here’s white on white, complete with some zoological refs,

white moon high floating among silver clouds,
heavens hung with fluffy clean white snowy drapery
all still and silver white like whitened lepers’ shrouds
thick-piled (hush) like white eiderdowns or drapery
at a high-class hotel, oh whisper white white sky,
let not your cold whiteness freeze the white white of the eye
or at at last float off into a white misty far beyond
and softly to subside into the argent ice-plants, silver leaves that lie
drifting thick like silver icicles hanging in frozen glades
over the shiny mirror of the silver frozen pond
for the white snowflakes waft in white whirlpools in air everywhere,
raging white steely blizzards cut breath’s vapour with sharp blades,
upon the Arctic cliffs the white drifts glare
burning cold white fire puffing out snowy crystals, and the snipe
breasting the black and white geometry, a lost Euclid of the air
(it’s like cocaine) white feathers oh so white, or platinum, ash-blonde,
skimming the silent air currents, and below the small white-furred bear
hugs close his snowy counterpane and dreams of warm white TRIPE

now read the initial letters downwards.

Tough on the Hughes family: David Sexton said recently in the Daily Telegraph that Ted and Sylvia wrote “very dangerous books”.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 26, 2009, 06:00 PM | #

lolz

Posted by gorboduc on March 26, 2009, 08:06 PM | #

Oh dear, last word end of line 4 was meant to be ‘napery’

Posted by Al Ross on March 27, 2009, 05:08 AM | #

Looks like the work of a cross tick, gorboduc.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 27, 2009, 10:41 AM | #

lolz**2

Posted by q on March 27, 2009, 06:07 PM | #

The fucker (not that I don’t like him) can’t even read his own shit in a professional manner.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 27, 2009, 08:06 PM | #

You think CvH wrote blue on blue and then somehow lost familiarity with several of the words in his own poem? Interesting. Not what I would have concluded but an interesting approach.

Posted by cladrastis on March 27, 2009, 09:46 PM | #

I like this poem, excepting the last three lines; it grows on me every time I read it.  You should have been more generous to CvH, who has a nice voice, and let him practice before filming!

Posted by cladrastis on March 27, 2009, 09:50 PM | #

correction:

the first two of the last three lines

Posted by Søren Renner on March 27, 2009, 10:50 PM | #

True, cladastris, he was forced to do a cold reading. Not in his native tongue either. Whether that added to or detracted from what might have been we shall never (alas) know on this side of the veil.

Good thread. Glad I provoked it.