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

I thought you sounded like you fancied yourself Doggie.

so mykle, where do you stand on modernism?

or how about kristevan rhythm theories?

Cat and dog eh? I usually wait a few years to let the cream float to the top cat. This is just my way of saying that I don't really try to keep in touch with who's painting with excrement or creating jewellry for elephants or writting poems using a pallette of less than seven words. Mostly, I feel we are in an age that feels it needs to be different just for the sake of it. Artists who can no longer shock because their audiences have become unshockable turn in desperation to the ridiculess. A bunch of myopic shepherds with their technicolour sheep, wandering aimlessly in search of pastures new! As for Kris Evan dog, I haven't heard any of his theories since the Big Breackfast.

*throws flowers at mykles feet

Have I invented a word with ridiculess. To deserve ridicule but not to be ridiculed? I'm sure there is some worthy stuff out there; the trouble is that the difference between the sublime and the ridiculess (and probably the ridiculous too) is so small sometimes. Kitsch is becoming the norm as sensitivity is lost and subtlety is seen as faint hearted. The name of the game is hype, tell the poor sucker anthing long enough and loud enough and it will be believed. The age of the quick fix is upon us and can only get worse as the Munchkins of the mobile phone start to exert their brain-damaged influence. Talent will become even less important while look will reign supreme. Thanks for the flowers dogstar I've put them in water.

please explain kristevan rhythm theories, I have not heard of this before

one of Kristeva's major concepts is that of the 'semiotic': >> "the basic drives recognized by psychoanalysis as they discharge themselves into language PRIOR to any actual linguistic signification." (rhythm and tone) << rhythm exists despite any signification process in a language system. words are not constants in terms of meaning, they do not retain the same meaning between one usage and the next, between one day and the next, between one person and the next. the meaning of a word is added to and rearranged on a personal basis continually. rhythm is something that emerges regardless of meaning, before the system of signifying language takes us over. rhythm is something that stems from within, signifying language is something imposed.

that seems quite an obvious idea, how is it contrary to usual ideas/techniques? I mean, it doesn't sound new to me. One thing I have noticed, people do not respond to poetry which has rhythm and subconcious resonance, but has no specific meaning.

*folds away deckchair and listens to V interesting conv......* LOVE love LOVE this thread.....

sure they do mark, that's what SOUND POETRY is all about...

Do you think people write better poetry if they have an understanding of what has gone before ? It's a lot easier to kill your parents if you know what they look like. As a non-poet, I agree with one assertion Dogstar made, which is that rhyming poetry has been responsible for some of the worst crimes against poetry. Writers who sacrifice meaning and craft for the sake of a rhyme. Not having to rhyme gives writers the freedom to actually express what they intended, rather than being locked into words that happen to fit the rhyming scheme. Having said that, when it is done well, it works. How many truly memorable poems don't have any rhyme ? (I would cite that one of Carol Ann Duffy's about the onion) There's a nice line I read recently - "We all learn poetry by the seat of our pants, being bounced on adults knees as a child and being told nursery rhymes. "

well can you give me some well known examples of sound poetry? it is true that the worst poetry on the net is usually by people that try to rhyme and force it, but it's also true that these people are more likely to evolve into better writers of all those capable (Jim Nasium is an obvious exception of course). But, maybe we are coming up against a more important question, what is it that makes bad poetry? How do you really tell good from bad? John Hegley's work for example? Oh, and while I'm at it, my recent cherry "Soap", seems to be it has a lot of the hallmarks of bad poetry - but maybe I'm wrong?

i can't give you examples of well known sound poetry because hardly anyone pays the slightest bit of attention to it. i have a little antholgy if scottish concrete and sound poems which incorporates the ludicrous to the sublime. worth checking out tho...

*Slinks out the room and snaps pencil in half, thoroughly ashamed to be a rhyming poet...*

so, doesn't that prove my point, people just dont respond to it. But then, maybe it's being done wrong. I have found that poetry of this nature is almost keyed in to a specific brain pattern, i.e. it's written for the writer and virtually no one else will quite be in the same place. The problem is each brain has diiferent sets of preferred pathways, no two are the same, even twins are different, so a poem based on word tonality and id undercurrents may cause discordant turbulance for the next reader. The trick it to find the universal threads that we all have (if there is such a thing).

i dont think anything IS truly universal. meaning can not be fixed to any word, meaning is unfettered completely. it is by avoiding exploring and probing things that we can attribute a stable sense of identity to something. nothing has stable identity in itself, everything is difference. i am me not because of my me-ness but because i am not you. put down that wankytalkometer this instant, it wont do you any good. at best we aim to strike a chord in someone else but this brings us back to psychoanalytical theories and notions of projection and identification that suggest we are simply looking for ourselves, to shed the feeling of being separated and to ultimately sate our desire and be whole. essentially we just want to be loved. except for the vogons of course. dont tell fay i mentioned the vogons...

Now who's in the late 70's?

damn!

andrew, i would reckon that shakespeare's must be the most quoted and memorised poetry of the last dew centuries, most of which is not rhyming...

Well what if we try to think in phrases instead of words, ignoring meaning. If we then discard the written word, pen on paper etc (our minds do not need them, when we think in langauge terms it is not visually), then we can discard the idea of words as individual elements, take away the spaces between them. If you then start to string words together to form a sort of compound phrase, still ignoring meaning, you should discover that some words, sounds, work well together, others do not. If try to base poetry on the affinity that words have for each other, what is produced, what could be produced? It is like music, as you follow a melody your mind feels and wants certain notes to appear in certain places, I mean, a musical phrase ending in a minor chord is like a sentence without the full stop, expecting more. I believe this principle applies to words, as sounds rather than language elements. I see so much writing that is discordant that I suspect few people see poetry like me. As I see it, if we write a phrase that is balanced in this way, it is more pleasing for the subconcious (sp?) and makes better poetry. (I have tried to explain this thoery to a number of people now and must admit it has not really sunk in with anyone, so it may be just me that sees words in this way.) If thats just wankytalk, then so be it.

yup, wankytalk. Here is more of the same: If you mean to say that words and phrases can be pleasurable to listen to irrespective of understanding their meanings, then yes.. lyrics, speeches, opera etc in foreign languages. Sometimes knowing the meanings of the words/phrases detract rather than augment the pleasure. However poetry.. for me this starts of as a set of ideas, of a particular state of meaning, literally felt as a balance of emotions. Now comes the job of transcribing this into words and phrases.. the aim being to get as much of that particular play of meaning (ideas) into as few words as possible.. words of course are chosen for their emotional impact (and this part is necessarily cultural).. and turns of phrases selected to convey as many of the ideas required to tell the story in new, innovative ways... other elements such as fonts, punctuation, spaces sometimes brought in to the fray.. Alas, a process that can only be partially successful at the best of times.. one that always leaves me disatisfied. Reading poetry for me is the reverse process, trying to recreate the meaning from the word play.. and I have to enjoy both the meaning and the skill of transcription, and sometimes one or the other is so new (to me) that it blows me away.. so poetry I would define as squeezing as many related ideas as possible into as few words as possible to convey a particular moment of experienced emotion (a story). Anyone else care for a definition?

Well I write poetry as an expresion of raw thought, an impossible task but I try. And I read poetry for a visceral reaction.

i put it to you, m'lud, that we can never truly express ourselves. we can only perpetuate the language system already in place... it predates us, it shapes up, it dictates every language response we will ever make... even if we try to make a new word, a new sound, we can only do it in relation to that which is already known to us, which already has been imposed upon us. every thought or feeling can only be whittled into a word that can't truly sum up what it is supposed to... the author IS dead, decentred at the expense of the system... language "is the world that has been pulled over your eyes".

as do i..... but poetry that makes no sense? Not for me. Neither is opera, possibly for the same reason..... ive tried and ive tried.. i love so many different forms of music, and feel that i SHOULD like opera.... But how can you follow a story, when its in a language you dont understand? Not to mention the ear splitting sound.... its a bit like celery. No matter how many times i try it, its still revolting ( to me ) and i cant understand what makes people enjoy it.....

Pavarotti's spine-tingling voice?

yep - definitely tingles my spine andrea...... and goosebumps my arms..... and hurts my ears..... sorry :o(

Oh well, takes all sorts, L.

I'm not saying it makes *no* sense, it is designed to make sense to a different level of perception. Most poetry is aimed at the concious mind, what I propose is poetry for your subconcious mind.

liana, maybe you're not putting the celery in the right place...

Are you suggesting that she put it somewhere other than her ears?

now theres a novel thought dogs.....

dogstar, if something shapes us, how can we feel an otherness from it. Does that make sense? '.. that we cannot truly express ourselves..' '.. can't truly sum up what it is supposed to....' We are the system. The system is not static though, we change it every new day. Thats what 'real' poetry/art is about, personal discovery and re-invention.

no... the system of language is in place before we are born... we are not only taught it but forced into it by parents, family, teachers, to say nothing of the discoures and ideologies of media, tv, papers, advertising, politics, whatever... Language colonises us. All you need to do is compare one foreign language with your own to realise that no 'thing' or abstract quality has any quintessential meaning that can be defined in a word. Words have no REAL value, no fixed meaning.

dogstar, agree with the whole of that statement (would settle for Words have a RELATIVE value which changes, as opposed to NO value).. apart from the first word which should read 'yes'. An infant is a mindless entity (relatively).. in that it appears to live in the emotional sensual world of the here and now, responding instinctively (in a pre-programmed sort of way) to external stimuli.. notice how children flip from one extreme emotion with all the symptons of real distress to complete happiness on the promise of an ice cream, say. Adults can achieve this 'mindless' purely sensual state (hedonists seek it all the time) when experiencing real fear/pleasure eg in the form of a bungy jump, climax, blind terror or through the use of 'mind blowing' drugs. Read neuroscientist Susan Greenfields ' The Private Life of The Brain' where she puts forward her ideas on the workings of the brain and conciousness in general - fascinating. In time laying down neural connections and associations through our experiences and the aquisition of language we interject a layer of 'meaning' in between our emotional responses to the outside world and thus aquire a 'mind' or 'personality' as we grow into adulthood. Any parent care to disagree with this? Now I am not saying there are not some pre-designed bits that we aquire from our genes and which pre-dispose us in a certain way, but I generally believe that our brains are flexible to overcome (control) most pre-dispositions if we build in the correct experiences.. thats where things like counselling come into play. So, back to my point, and it is a subtle yet important one I feel: If we are the product of our experiences, and our choices, and understand ourselves to be so, then it does not make sense to denounce the 'system' as the 'system' is indeed what allows us to have this conversation in the first place. Without the system there is no 'us'. Just to reinforce that the 'us' of today is not necessarily the 'us' of tomorrow and that's where 'art' comes into play.

now this is an interesting thread erm there was something about poetry being for the higher appreciations, what wittgenstein terms the differentiated sense. i'd disagree with that, music surely is, since music works on a different non cogniscent level of the brain - you love music but dont understand how. wagner's operas like tristan and isolde were said by nietzsche to have a salvatory effect beyond poetry and also visual art, so i guess the argument tying in with reflections of here and now would be an attempt to determine what function poetry might play as a modern discourse, and whether a discourse does indeed necessitate rhythm and rhyme akin to music. if we agree with nietzsche then poetry might contain echoes, or perhaps resonance not even related to echoes of music. as far as im concerned, poetry is contemporary if it moves you? hopkins' poetry is 100 years + now but far more moving to me than anything written in last thirty years, same with a lot of classical/nonclassical music styles (rachel's, rodan, godspeed) of the last thirty, far more relevant to how we live today than any pop theres ever been doggie mentions sound poetry, i'd recommend kurt schwitters (sic) who in the 70s popularised the idea, don't really think much of it myself. any discussion about semiotics in modern poetry usually throws up roland barthes "mythologies" first which id recommend as being far lighter reading and very entertaining to boot. wittgensteins stuff about phil of language can be found in "hermeneutics reader" which is very worthwhile. oh, and russian formalism; robert graves' "the cool web"

It seems to me that there are several kinds of language some learned some intuitive. Body language, can express much and gesture can express more. The written word has not got the benefit of inflection etc. - at least not usually - but if the words are spoken to a present audience they can be embroidered as necessary. The difficulties of getting your point across increase exponentially with the size of your audience. The more precise your language the less people who are likely to understand it until you move from the esoteric into the obscure. Simplicity is elegant but open to a wider scope of interpretation. So should we use words as sign posts or attempt to use them to draw a map? An age old question which resulted in Zen Buddhism - realising that words were in adequate they rely on the direct transmittion of enlightenment. Silence is golden.

can you all start again? I lost the plot when the long words started. sorry.

The point of rhyme is to help you remember. In 14 hundred and 92 - Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I can't remember all the rest, but I can remember I passed the test. Poetry was around long before printing and is a great Mnemonic (aid to memory). Later it became useful to write important or beautiful thoughts down in rhyme not just to aid memory but also because it had become an art form - they didn't have computers and TV, so they developed artistic pastimes. They still got pissed but they weren't worried about tripping over the cables or what they might be missing on the gogglebox. Clever and talented people tend to subtle, yet complex things and so poetry became a medium of intellectual and emotional expression. Like all the arts poetry had suffered in the last few years. There are too many distractions, less dedication and a willingness to consider anything new, or out of the odinary, as art. The argument now becomes is WAM (Mozart) still relevant to modern music: have Blake, coleridge or Kipling anything to say today? The great composers can't be beat, Beetoven wrote deaf - what a feat. Kipling's fine if you don't want rhyme. Marcel Marceau if you want a mime. Raps OK - but will it stay? I'll take Coleridge any day. Both influenced by drugs anyway. So what else have we got today? Bob Dylan, maybe Timothy Rice Dylan's powerful, Rice is nice Kristofferson's my poet of today, Puts over his message in an eloquent way. I've done enough - I've started the list. So send in suggestions of who the muse kissed.

"It don't mean a thing, If it ain't go that swing."

What does the panel think of The Moody Blues?

I love Knights in white Satin (sic). * smile * Pity he alway wears that old track suit. Hahaha.

I shot the Marshall - so I would not get in debt you see. *sticks tongue out at Suelynn*

Spider, we are not just products of our own experiences and choices but also of other people's experiences and choices. Language infects and controls. The concept of the homosexual is a marvellous example... I have a friend who loathes homosexuality. she thinks it a crime against nature, doesn't understand that the act itself was only outlawed in the nineteenth century because it clashed with a Victorian ideal. Society, through the use of language, suddenly demarcates a certain individual as being out-with the realms of normality and acceptability. It ostracises said individual and sets in motion a pattern for bigotry and hatred (to say nothing of isolation, angst and despair) that we are still feeling the repercussions from today. The idea of labelling someone thus has nothing to do with judging someone on their merits as a human being, it is about inflicting power upon a people to maintain politics, sensibilities. It is a state of being constructed in language.

Is that the Clapton or the Bob Marley version dear tracksuit?

* gulp "

stop it you two... you're giving me the horn again

* gulp, gulp *

point of interest, 70 years today duke ellington and his band recorded it dont mean a thing looks like this thread died, oh well back to playing silver machine in my van over and over till another interesting one starts up.

I’ve translated a famous sonnet into a tone poem. Does it not lose something in the translation? Form is important, rhythm is important, but meaning is everything Shall Ike compere the two-ass hummer’s day? Though wart maul of lea hand, more temper hate. Ruff wins douche ache the darling butts off ‘em, eh? Handsome hair’s lisa fall to shorted ate. Some thyme, two hot thee aye off evan’s heinz, Hand off tennis his galled complex shunned hymned; & every fir from fir sum time decal lines, By chancer nay chores chain jing core sun trimmed; But thy eat earn all sum or shall knot fade Gnawl whose puss session oft hat furred how oast; Nauseal deaf brag thou wand a rest in is shade, When in neat earn aligns two time thou go west: So long gas men can breathe or eye scan sea, Soul on cliffs this, hand biscuits life toothy.