same with poetry, if it does not evoke the here and the now, what IS the point?

Makes poor facts ants tummy.

Picks up pencil, snapped in half Then drowns oneself in lukewarm bath For as someone who forceth rhyme I also fit this heinous crime!

i think it's marvellous!

well, we have to symbolically kill our parents. need i say more?

errr ... what the question again?

42

well 42 hardly evokes the here and now... more like the late seventies. WAKE UP!

Always thought the late 70s WAS the here and now...

Can't remember late 70's as I was in my infancy.

in fancy dress?

"People ask me if I remember the seventies, and I say, well honey I certainly don't remember anything since then." People who have a PS2 may have a nagging feeling that they know this from somewhere.

so my poem about space hoppers ... what's the point? my poem about the moon landing ... what's the ... my poem about men in eyeliner with floppy sleeved white shirts and pixie boots ... what's ... my poem about the millennium dome opening ... wha ... there is only a point to this poem now ... this ash on my desk ... this glass of neat vodka ... and me in my pajamas .... is that it?

if you write about space-hoppers as though the last thirty years had never happened then you don't deserve to have ever had a space-hopper. now show us your clackers

i bounce i bounce my hopper is big and orange i grasp his handles and i bounce i bounce i bounce ... ok clever dick ... rewrite that poem to give it a taste of the here and now ... show us how you can reflect that the last 30 yrs DID happen .... *hides clackers down pajamas*

that IS the here and now fish.... a poem written today in language no longer used, about things that didnt happen in this century, isnt......

ok. i hope this is happening enough... zounds this mortal bounces very gravity he flounces the devil is gargantuan the very hue of cadmium a witch he rideth in the fold a demon grip the horns do hold and bounces gad he bounces how he bounces

i thought Liana did the bouncing?

she does in my head

I do a lot of peoples heads in *smiles sweetly*

Does this mean you think a lot of the Golden Greats are outdated and therefore no longer have a point to make? In Zanadu did Charlie Brown a stately car repairing shop decree. Where Ford the ancient cars they ran to bills measureless to man....

I think there is a craft to poetry that is lost because too many people beleive that rhythm and rhyme are out dated. This may very well be true but if you can't master these techniques then how can you call yourself a poet? I am a particular fan of William Blake. Now, his poetry may seem out dated, but if it is understood in context you can see that it has echoes of truth even today. Neither would I throw away Coleridge or Poe because they are not of the 20th century. Anyway, as this is the 21st century maybe we should make 2000 a poetic year zero and cast out all those dead writers from 1900 to 1999.

I'm a great fan of WB too - and I don't even LIKE poetry (mostly).

folk seem to forget the fact that somone like chaucer was an outrageously modern laddie when he hit the lit scene. it is down to his 'popularity' that vulgar english drew us away from the the anglo-saxon, latin and french possibilities. now for this very reason we have to be aware of his literature. but if i was to write in the very same style and the very same language as the chaucer cat then it would deny the fact that anything else had happended since. right? it isn't feasible for me to have the same perspective as him simply because i know a differnet load of @!#$ than he ever knew and vice-versa. same with willie shakespeare. if i try to re-capture his style and content i would have to do so as if nothing had impinged upon the elizabethan psyche. which would be bollocks. rhythm and rhyme are fundamentals of poetic construct but they also undermine it because meaning ought not to be sacrificed just to make a word fit, at least not if you have the slightest idea that there was an actual romantic revolution against the neo-classists and pre-enlightenment luddites, as there was a modernist revolution against the romantics. blake was a modernist if you take a look at his songs of innocence/ experience... the very notion that we might not be able to get over chaucer/ shakespeare/ blake etc, to enjoy our heritage yet react against it, completely undermines everything these people did in their original creative modern and revolutionary contexts. these boys were looking forward - however much they evoked the past they were living in their 'here and now'.

Above post should have read 'neo-classicists'. I dropped my ci. That won't do at all. Oh dear, i AM pedantic...

*gives Dogstar a HUGE round of applause*

rubbish! the use of rhyme and rhythm does not sacrifice meaning, not when you do it properly (which so few people do these days). Have a look at the work of "sneak" if you want to see how it should be done.

mark, if you read Kristeva you might understand that rhythm for one thing is something independant of language as a system of meaning. rhythm exists in the human psyche BEFORE language gets its grubby paws on it. if you want to convey a rhyme scheme or rhythm first and any potential meaning (ie a relationship of signifier and signified) second, then fine... but you have to be aware that this is exactly what is responsible for much of the most utter tripe ever to be passed off as poetry.

who? my point is that if you learn to write classic poetry properly it eventually becomes second nature, you dont have to try to rhyme, you just do it. anyway, the worst part about amateur rhyming poetry is not so much the rhyme but the lack of rhythm. Rhyme without rhythm is just bad rap as far as I'm concerned, and rap is the lowest form of poetry

one does not learn to write classic poetry... something in time becomes classic. if you mean 'classical' then by its very nature it is either ancient or defined by restraint or conservatism... which is fine in genteel circles or old people's homes but there is a big bad world out there where it just doesn't cut the mustard. as for rap - one has to recognise that it is infinitely one of the more creative approaches to pop music in terms of lyrical content. or perhaps we could have top of the pops given over to the all new aeolian harp dance troupe with their faithful sound simulation of coleridge sleeping in his chair... look to the past, appreciate it and take from it what we can. but we have to bring it kicking and screaming into the present day otherwise the culture dies.

Yes, but who is doing that? I don't know a single poet today who is doing anything revolutionary. And the top prizes go to poems written with a classical background, using whatever form happens to be fashionable at that moment. In many espects the poetry world is as bad as the art world without any of the innovations. For example artists such as Turner and Picasso were trained as tradional painters and produced many conventional works before the forms that made them famous. If you dont have a grounding in the basics how can you expect to progress or evolve into something new. It is true that a keyboard player in a rock band need not be trained in classical piano to do his job, but it may make him more versatile and interesting to listen to.

picasso is the quintessential example of someone who learns the rules and then not only breaks them but never stops breaking them. i think one will find that more often than not, classical music lacks a certain triple beat, the swing that characterises jazz and makes one want to move one's hips, to feel ALIVE...

*clasps handbag on Fishs behalf and hotches deckchair*

Surely you are both right. The role of the Artist is to educate and enlighten and often the best way to do this is to shock your audience. To do this you need to create a framework using an existing set of rules so your audience can relate then you can break new ground.

an Artist? is that anything like an artist? the idea of shock is to wake folk up to the fact that our predecessors were shocking. except for the ones who kept looking backwards. they were dull as @!%£. insert smiley here. no really.

No! An artist is nothing like an Artist but they think they are. Since you seem to be fond of music and use it as an analogy. A good musician first establishes his/her audience, then perfects his/her unique style, then experiments and grows, hopefully taking the fans along and expanding their horizons. Occasionally the Artist gets too involved with technique and starts to lose fans - just because something is technically difficult does not mean it is automatically entertaining. Often there are artistic cul-de-sacs that leave pockets of fans stranded, milling around not sure how to proceed. The great thing about the past is that, usually, only the best stand the test of time! As the man said "First there is the Tao, all else is opinion."

I'd say that the "here and now" is more impotent then either the past or the future. The past has depth and colour, the future inspires, the "here and now" is nothing more than going along with the flow. I think the problem with poetry today is there is too much "pop" poetry, like chart music, following the trends rather than setting them. I just don't see any ground breaking poetry arround.

mykle, i would suggest that any musician ought to first learn his craft. establishing an audience before one can play anything worked for the sex pistols and [insert your favourite boy/girl band here] but it hardly extends into the world of actual musicianship. now really, it must be time for your afternoon nap... mark, chaucer was 'pop', shakespeare was 'pop', mozart was 'pop'. i think you will find that simulating ancient literary trends is more akin to 'going with the flow' than the revolutionary movements i have tried to bring your attention to. if you give in to the domination of your parents you remain a child all your life. if you break away and find your own pad, then you establish yourself as something independent. likewise if you just fit in with a psyche that encapsulates an advocation of capital punishment, slavery, bondage, women and children as subclasses and a world in which the banana had not been introduced, you are seriously devoid of the modern sense of justice, love and sex, and banana sandwiches. sounds seriously wanting to me. no wonder your here and now is 'impotent' but perhaps the less said about that the better.

I see no revolution, you had better repeat yourself. As to Chaucer, Shakespeare and Mozart, I agree and am not a fan of any of them. As to my parents, well you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Why do you assume that a grounding in the literature of the past has anything to do with family or school, everything I have read and learned has been since then and independently. Show me a revolutionary poem and I'll guarantee you it's been done before, and probably better. In my opinion the majority of the poetry world is blind to the possibilities of change and all they do is recycle. I think this is because so many people have been blinkered to the older classics, I mean if no one has heard of the BeeGees then a cover version of Tragedy is fine, but we should all know it's not new.

let us go then, you and i, back to the beginning. you say you like blake. when he wrote something like LONDON he evoked a conscience that condemned the inhumanity prevalent in his contemporary society. but he had at least one eye squinting at his present day. i suggest that this is the very reason that he became posthumously credible - if he had just fannied about seeing angels dangling in trees all day long then no one would have paid the slightest bit of attention. as for parents - i was speaking generically of how one generation REPLACES the next. one has to symbolically kill one's predecessors in order to take their place. if you do not take their place then life stops, or at least your life might as well have never happened. as for covers - go compare hendrix's cover of dylan's all along the watchtower and tell me that he doesn't make it newer and fresher than old dylbob's original. and perhaps you can discuss what aspects or works of chaucer, shakespeare and mozart it is that you don't like... i will be glad to put forward my arguments as to why the likes of coleridge and wordsworth ought to be strapped into their mythologised armchairs and kept there...

I've changed my mind, I think we should dispatch the old authors to the graves they rest in, and all the silly celebrations of Shakepeares birthday and Burns Night and all that. But even so, I don't see anything new happening out there...

* yawn * yawn * tawn * yawn * yawn * yawn * yawn * yawn Sorry - what were you saying Dogstar? Something about how lucky string pushers like Hendrix were to have poets like Dylan to wrire for them. Yes, I agree!

mark, changing your mind? i mean to say, CHANGE? *shivers* and mykle, gosh what a persuasive argument you DO put forward. does mummy know you're on the internet?

Yes and so does Dracula and the Wolfman!

By the way Dogstar, you're making the mistake of thinking the Sex Pistols were musicians when in fact they were actors engaged in a full time rendition of Rebels Revisited.

mykle try READING my posts. smooch.

I try Dogstar but they are the only thing that seems to be able to send me to sleep. Is this smooch similar to smouldering or is it you snogging the back of your hand for comfort?

no mykle, it's just that you really turn me on...

Ah! You've heard about my affectionate tongue of renown. * smile *

gosh no. i just find something about clueless folk deeply erotic.

*sidles in with jaffa cakes*