Just back form a trip, & tired this ay em, but I kinda have to agree with Max, Bill. Is there a way to suggest all that beauty without naming it such?
And ‘sockets’ doesn’t work, really…
Though I certainly get the main thrust of the thing; living it…
Doug
On Aug 13, 2014, at 4:33 AM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> poetryetc at this time of year is always quiet, I seem to remember -
>
> holiday and travel time for the northern hemisphere…
>
> Otherwise I expect by now someone would have wondered aloud whether
> pouchily
> and
> springlessly
> were maybe uncomfortable coinages from Bill.
> But let them pass…
>
> I have some difficulty with eye sockets changing
> probably because for me a socket is made of bone.
> The turn at line nine is welcome, yet -
> eight lines of ‘concreteness’ seem to me to call for a turn
> that does not lapse into a big abstraction -
> Hopkins poems have similar problems shifting from the experiential to the abstract.
> Is there a way for ‘beauty’ to be held over until we can sense what might bring it to mind.
> Lines ten to twelve don’t quite do this.
> Choughs? fussing and fossicking?
> sinister birds with sharp beaks.
> For you, Bill, but not for me.
>
> (Earlier today in the park I noticed a dead magpie - handsome but very dead.)
>
> Oddly I am about to post a verse snap with ‘beauty’ in it.
>
> Max in Melbourne
>
> On 13 Aug 2014, at 8:04 am, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Compensations
>>
>> Cheeks hang baggy.
>> Face spills onto pillow.
>> Eye sockets fold and droop
>> forgetting former close bone cling
>>
>> Skin sags pouchily from shoulder
>> bone, as if from Brahman cow.
>> Muscles think before flexing,
>> withdraw springlessly.
>>
>> Yet beauty still bounces,
>> choughs fuss and fossick.
>> And tonight - so they say,
>> The moon will be Super.
>>
>> bw
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuation 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Something else is out there
godamnit
And I want to hear it
C.D.Wright
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