Meaning & Value

[Expatriate Poet]

Monday Love wrote:

If I want to convey to you right now some truth, I will do everything I can to put the argument before you as nakedly and clear as I can possibly present it.

Monday

THE MEANING AND VALUE OF REPRESSION

Who's this naked giant then
...........peering in at your window

with the huge brown phallus
...........pressed up against the pane,

the half-tumescent glans
...........like some rude Cyclops’s tongue

or thick-set paleolithic fruit
...........in puris naturabilis displayed
 
and mounted on the slippery
...........slide the shocked members
 
gape at as their meals
...........get laid upon the table?
 
He has no shame, this sly
...........weighted thing towering

above the high tree tops—
...........the great trunk of his gnarled

sex and trumpet foreskin
...........making all the cultivated

thoughts that dine in private  
...........so much fast-food small-talk.

But oh, how the air out there
...........shines attendant with delight,

hiking up those warm kirtled
...........skirts to reveal Galileo’s secret

so profound only such obscene
...........dimensions ever fathom it!



(Honte, honte, honte, dear friends, Christopher)

[Monday Love]

huge brown phallus pressed up against the pane


Best image in poetry ever

[Expatriate Poet]

Monday Love wrote:
Aimee N. definitely has it going on.  Hot chick w/ erotic poems.  Naughty, yet sensitive; sexy, yet learned; chatty, yet profound; worldly, yet academic; with her third-world traditionalist family hating on her american singleness, freedom and sass. . .    You go, girl!

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

 I predict she'll get bored with the kind of chatty lyric she's writing now.   She'll beat a hasty retreat towards more serious forms.  The little dog will give way to twelve or thirteen kids, metaphorically speaking.
Monday

Dear Monday Love,

   You're so destructive sometimes, you know. This sort of talk is so demeaning for a start--like the time you chided an earlier female poster for having been "de-educated"--and she never returned, as I remember--and we needed her too!

But it would seem to me you not only have an issue with poetry now  but with girls!

I posted the previous poem for you, you know—but you ignored the WOMAN in it altogether and immediately went on to poke fun at a girl. I almost turned off the lights again at that, but I think I'd rather talk to you about it.


Dear Monday Love--you do such good work on this site, and we're all so privileged to have the chance to read so much of you--which goodness knows is certainly never dull! But much too often it's your private Big Boy that gets dropped on our threads, and the ashes keep piling and piling up. Well, I’m an old man and I have no reputation at all, and partly for that reason you should listen to me. You can’t step on my toes because I don’t have any, it’s as simple as that, nor can you open my closet living as I do in a place that has none. But I’m serious about poetry all the same, and I can talk to you if you’ll listen.

And I say you not only have an issue with poetry but with girls!

That's why I posted the previous poem for you, Monday Love, as the quote so elegantly demanded. Not surprisingly you ignored the WOMAN in it altogether and chose rather to celebrate the PHALLUS--and of course to poke fun at the girl.

But I felt the woman in this poem was so overwhelmingly attractive and uncomplicated that she would actually illuminate you and quicken your being, that she could speak to who you were and where you were going. Now I begin to think you never let poetry speak to you at all--even the dwindling handful you regard as o.k.

Because what I've never seen you do is listen to what a poem actually says that might be of value to you personally. You read with such disdain and critical detachment, almost as if you were judging a small town dog show that neglected to shovel up its poop. But even a common poem can talk to you, you know--it mustn't be asked just to stand up on its hind legs and rhumba, or jump through a hoop to please you.

That's what that silly little poem might have been trying to tell you, in fact--that like an average scientist you restrict yourself to the empirical evidence before you, as if the universe could tango without the human value that gives meaning to it.

Christopher

[Monday Love]

Christopher,

I have no toes to step on either.

Do I have an "issue" with "girls?"    Perhaps, I do.  "Girls" is a big topic.

I loved her poem.    I summed up her schtick in a few words, but that doesn't mean I don't dig it.


Monday

[Expatriate Poet]

Expatriate Poet wrote:

 That's what that silly little poem might have been trying to tell you, in fact--that like an average scientist you restrict yourself to the empirical evidence before you, as if the universe could tango without the human value that gives meaning to it.

And I could have said that better too, Monday Love: "that like a modern scientist you restrict yourself to the empirical evidence before you, as if the sun could tango without the poetry that orchestrates it."
Christopher

[Monday Love]

Christopher,

Empirical evidence is all we have.  The rest is speculation.   But I must say, I'm not good at riddles.   What specific 'evidence' am I missing?

Monday

[Expatriate Poet]

Monday Love wrote on Feb. 20th in response to a poem by Simon Dedeo,

Simon,
Thanks for your reply.  You are engaged with poetry, as few others are, and I like that.

*        *        *        *        *        *        *        *

You have perfected the ability to produce complex universes with just a few words, and this is admirable on a certain level, but unfortunately this process tends to implode upon the reader as it expands triumphantly in your own mind.

Your first stanza, for instance, is a triumph of density, a testament to the power of words: "altitude of I" contains so much interest and meaning that the reader hates to move on to subsequent lines, and this 'hate' is what trips you up, 'hate' born out of admiration and love.  Temporality is overtaken by the combining possibilites of your referents to such an extent that your poem is held hostage by it; you've loaded up the train with such freight ('eye fountain' alone buries the mind in poetic-associative radiance) that the poor poem cannot move.   By the time we reach "the video-loop of star-gesture" we are pinned to the floor by your magnificence and are begging for our lives.

Monday Love wrote today in response to my remarks:

Christopher,
Empirical evidence is all we have.  The rest is speculation.   But I must say, I'm not good at riddles.   What specific 'evidence' am I missing?
Monday

So you can deal with riddles like "the altitude of I," "eye fountain" and  "the video-loop of star-gesture," even when they are, in your own words, "a triumph of density," yet you can't read what the air reveals beneath its skirts or how the sun tangos.

No, dear Monday Love, you're so good  at reading riddles you can no longer read the plain facts, what's more see the value of meaning. Face to face with simplicity, you beg for your life indeed!

And we've already been there, you and I, haven't we. I asked you so nicely to believe in what you've got, and you're still besotted with the combined possibilities of the referents you haven't!

Christopher

[Monday Love]

Christopher,

I'm missing your larger point.  

There is a "woman" in your poem which is meant to open up my eyes.  

I am now in your doghouse because I 'poked fun at a girl.'  

Are you talking about Aimee N.  or the woman in your poem?

Could you be more direct?    

I really do want to know.

Not all souls are enlightened in the same way.   I'm afraid I may never be enlightened, but if you could help here, I'd really appreciate it.

Don't be polite.  Let me have it.

Yours,

Monday

[Expatriate Poet]

On Feb 23rd Monday Love wrote to Thewayitworks:

If I want to convey to you right now some truth, I will do everything I can to put the argument before you as nakedly and clear as I can possibly present it.

Expatriate Poet replied with a quirky little parable in the guise of a poem. In it a group of diners in a highbrow museum cafeteria are shocked by the size and configuration of the penis of a huge naked giant who is peering in at them through the window. At the same time the air outside is reacting to the giant’s endowments by lifting up her skirts to reveal her own.

The parable is called "The Meaning and Value of Repression," and the air’s pudenda are referred to as "Galileo’s secret."

Monday Love responded immediately by posting:

"huge brown phallus pressed up against the pane"

Best image in poetry ever!
Monday

In quoting the Feb 23rd remarks above concerning the way in which he conveys the truth "nakedly," Expatriate Poet omitted Monday Love’s subsequent paragraph--which indeed may have been the reason why so many dislocations ensued in the following exchanges.
 
This is what Monday Love went on to say:

There is only one reason why I would clothe my argument in an additional argument, or 'poetize' my argument to you right now, and this reason is not a positive one, but a negative one; it is a reason entirely based on human fallibility.  That is, if I feared you, or if I longed to deceive you in some way, or I felt that you would never understand or comprehend the essence of what I am saying, or if I wanted something from you, or felt overwhelmed by some emotion, or I was trying to impress you with word-play or rhetorical ability, only then, would I add to my writing any feature at all which is termed 'poetic.'
Monday

So there we have the problem in a nutshell. For Monday Love poetry is never more than "an additional argument" in an informed discussion. Poetic discourse is not only not a positive method of communication for Monday Love, but is based entirely on what he calls "human fallibility." In other words it is a lesser vehicle for those who are incapable of saying what they mean in plain prose.

Inferior, inadequate, incapable as it might be, the little poem "The Meaning and Value of Repression" is stating unequivocally that however BIG your discourse appears to be, there is always something else out there that knows how to deal with it even better than all that Mister Bluster!:oops:

So the battle lines are drawn now, and we know that Monday Love is going to go for the naked truth everytime. Indeed he very proudly asserts just above that there is in fact no other truth but the empirical/imperial dick--which is how men have always felt, I guess, and why women have testified since time in memorial they're so slow!

This is how Monday Love drew up the lines today.

Christopher,

I'm missing your larger point.  

There is a "woman" in your poem which is meant to open up my eyes.  

I am now in your doghouse because I 'poked fun at a girl.'  

Are you talking about Aimee N.  or the woman in your poem?

Could you be more direct?    

I really do want to know.

Not all souls are enlightened in the same way.   I'm afraid I may never be enlightened, but if you could help here, I'd really appreciate it.

Don't be polite.  Let me have it.

Yours,

Monday

Dear Monday Love, sadly enough, poet/woman that I am, I can only let you have it yet again like this:


OLD FOREPLAY FOR NEW WOMEN INCLUDING MEN
 
O, how wrong you fierce suitors have it
stripping off the dark, secret wraps
that lighten length and breadth  
and scenery on earth—
the furtive root grabs downward
only because great tentacles of hot
rival might lift our silt-lapped
limbs much harder still,
like sunlight
prying up the whole orchard's sap!

No, the weight of things is just
another flight,
like Leda’s modest thighs
giving plain wings the chance
to sanctify earth's godliest yearnings.
 
As the arrow by the playful string
the heady soul is ever fired by
the archly absent body—
draped arabesques of trembling skin
and shining pubis so defying gravity
even the most upright Jove
or holy Galileo
bearded like our father's angel
tumbles to the maiden yet again,
so hotly does the dreaming quiver
fletched in abstract plumage
hunger
even for a single pomegranate kiss
that scatters weight
like rubies!

I admire you, Monday Love, I really do—and I’d love to know who you are as well, with your big heart and fragile voice. Indeed, I feel sure you know exactly what I’m talking about but feel you must guard yourself at all costs against the possibility there might be nothing left to say.

You say speech lords it over writing—I say, speaking as a poet, true, but in much the same way that men lord it over women all over the world!

So here's the metaphor: I live in a part of the world where women have no rights at all, where domestic violence, including rape, is not a crime, where a man can take as many wives as he can afford but a woman cannot sue for divorce, even on the grounds of failure to contribute to the support of abandoned children, and where 75% of husbands are regularly in the brothels to boot, coming home with Aids as the prize. Yet ask any man, woman or child in this culture, who is control, Mum or Dad? Everyone knows the answer—and everyone feels sorry for the son.

And the irony of ironies is that you, Monday Love, good Son of Urizen that you are, can write with breathless ease about the delicious female "schtick," as you call it, in Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "Miracle Fruit," for example,  or the masculine extravagances in Simon Dedeo's "GutCult" poems--yet you're tongue-tied before "Galileo's secret!"

Christopher



P.S. Dear Monday Love,
I could list ahead of time all the literalist reductios I know you will introduce to make what you will surely call my "arguments" look silly. You'll ask me if I'm suggesting that women read/write/talk about poetry better than men, for example, or that women are deeper/more spritiual/more perceptve than men, or that you have to be a woman to understand what I'm talking about.

My answer to all those sort of questions is simple, but it comes in two parts: firstly, in this day and age what I'm saying need have nothing to do with gender any more, mine, yours, or anyone else's. Secondly, and even more importantly in this post-modern quagrangle, I'm not making an argument but poetry!

If you want to answer you have to answer not me but the two poems-- because it's not about my schtick but their shlock!

C.

[Monday Love]

Dear Christopher,

Well, now we are getting somewhere.  You are beginning to make me understand.  I knew you would, because you are a person who wants to understand; I could tell that about you.  

I think you may have misunderstood: I did not understand Simon Dedeo's 'eye fountain.'  There is nothing to understand there; it is mere spectacle, and this certainly has a place in art.  I don't think Simon is interested in understanding, or he doesn't think poetry is necessarily made for that; he wants spectacle and novelty and sensual interest.  'Eye fountain' is a wonderful thing, but if you heap spectacle on top of spectacle, you end up with confusion; that was my criticism of him in a nutshell.

Your poetry is far more didactic than Simon's and you are obviously a far more didactic person.  The imagery in your poems is used for a purpose--I can tell that much.  Understanding can tolerate spectacle and even give enthusiastic consent to it, but it can never be its ally or friend.

I think we both understand that I am hyper-suspicious of Poetry, I am one of the few living persons today who pursues aesthetic wisdom within the actual context of Socrates/Plato.  Call me crazy, but that's what I'm doing; that's where I'm coming from--adapting as much as I can to the present day so as not to be dogmatic--and I am sincere; I am not waving Plato around to be a rhetorical bully, I really believe this stuff--and I think you got stung, you weren't prepared for that, but that's OK, I know you were hurt, but you can take it, and now you are coming at me and showing me who you are--spectacle and understanding are battling it out, as they usually will do, and I'm curious to see who wins, in this instance.  

"A large brown phalus pressed against the pane" and "shocking highbrow diners in a museum cafeteria" while the air outside "lifts up her skirts" to reveal her genitals, called "Galileo's secret," is spectacle.

It is far different than this:

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

There is no spectacle here.  It is all anti-spectacle.  It is august understanding.

As I said, spectacle does have its place, but it belongs to the fancy, not the imagination.  The child who is bored at the musuem may imagine a giant looking in the windows, a naked one to fright the morals of blue-haired women and old men in suits.  But such a thing can only exist in the mind of the boy; it is not real.  But 'solemn temples' and 'the great globe itself' are real, even though, they too, will 'fade,' but this 'fading,' too, is real.  

Now, the naked giant might be 'real' in the sense that it represents the power of sex, and the symbol does have a universality which we can understand, but it might also represent a thousand other things, or it might be plain spectacle--there's the rub: spectacle in poetry demands the understanding come to its rescue, and so everything is ruined; the spectacle cannot exist on its own, for the poetic reader naturally finds himself straining for something more--what does this mean?--and so the spectacle is not finally spectacle, because it needs the understanding's help and the understanding's annoyed because it hates to be used in this way, and it's really not sure how to behave, for after all this is spectacle's turf, not its own.

So I think your earnest desire to express the truth in poetry, with poetry, to reply to my philosophical doubts with poetry itself, is the act of a kamikaze fighter, it's a great sacrifice on your part, an act of desperation and love, a madness, if you will, you are a poet and you are mad.  

You sacrifice poetry in a gallant, explicit manner; you put it on the altar and chop it up.  You kill it for the spurt of blood, for the lust of the shock and the spectacle.   I don't think your aim is the silent, starry contemplation of a Galileo; you are rushing up to the wall with both guns blazing.

For normally, the poet uses guile and deception and ceremony, the insidious tricks of the trade to draw the reader in; one assembles an audience, one sends out flyers and notices, one gets them in the  planetarium in a ceremonial way, a book signing, a classroom reading, or some event--why look at how Shakespeare does it: he puts his poetry in the mouth of an actor, upon the stage, telling the audience directly, "this is all fake, y'know?"

You, on the other hand, insert the poetry of spectacle into your speech, into an exchange with me-- who plays philosophy slowly, sadly, like a whispering lute, and who keeps his ear always to the ground.  You do this, not because you love poetry, but because you need to sacrifice it on the altar of understanding; you are a priest in the middle of a ceremony, the painted glass of a thousand and one tales wrapping your tower round.

You live in a place in which the customs are strange, etc etc   I think cultural differences tend to be exaggerated.  People are the same everywhere.  In political extremity, in luxury and ease, all human beings respond accordingly.  All the races are the same.  All people are the same.  I will not be convinced otherwise.  You wrote, "where a man can take as many wives as he can afford..."  It is the same everywhere.  Hollywood stars in America have as many women as they wish.  If one has money, one simply does not obey the morals of the middle class.

Frankly I don't care where Aimee is from or what gender she is, or what she looks like; it is data for book sleeves and I mentioned it because it will always be important to publishers and the whole worldly crew; we should not deny what is real, of course, how can we?  As for her poetry, her strengths are accessibility and passion; I don't think she uses the language particularly well; I find her closer to soap opera than Shakespeare, but she is better than most.

Your poetry is very masculine and chest-beating and muscular.  It is like Simon's, it is like 99% of contemporary poetry in that it is obscure dazzle--there are riches within the obscurity, no doubt,  if the reader takes the time to study it, but poetry is not study!   Poetry's job is to be lazy and pretty.  Aimee's strength is very simple: she is clear.  She is naked. Do you know what Aimee (not the person, the poet) would do if she were here right now?  She would laugh in both of our faces.  

The more direct your poetry is, the more you get away from human fallibility as the reason for the (your) poetry.   This fact is an unspoken law which every reader senses unconsciously.   Clarity of expression (and this requires honesty) brings all the drama back to where it belongs: in the poet-as-prospero-within-the-poem.

I am not saying you are totally obscure, Christopher.  I am only warning you that you should not love poetry (as heroic amunition) quite as much as you do, even though I admire your impulse, I must confess.

Poetry is getting better.  The quasi-religious pomposity of Mark Strand is giving way to the clear, sane, window of Billy Collins.  A healthy reversal is occuring.  The poet's mind is learning to get out of the way.

Monday

[poetastin]

Wait--are you really saying Collins is the picture of health?

:shock:

If so, you better sign me up with the genital-waggling giants!

 

[Briggs Seekins]

"Wait--are you really saying Collins is the picture of health?

If so, you better sign me up with the genital-waggling giants!"

I have to concur. I don't believe that tepid, gentle satirists like Collins shine any bright, clear lights of truth.

[Monday Love]

Wait--are you really saying Collins is the picture of health?

:shock:

If so, you better sign me up with the genital-waggling giants!

 

I'm not saying Billy Collins is the Holy Grail, or the goal of 2,000 years of poetry; in the relatively small window of time and place which is late 20th century American poetry I think the pendulum swinging from pretentious, obsure dreck to something which is grounded, observant, witty and comprehensible is a good tendency, that's all.

All poets and poetry, even the best, are one step from the abyss.  Collins misses often, and misses badly.  

I just re-read the 1991 volume of Best American Poetry, edited by Mark Strand; I did not find one exceptional poem.  There is an OK poem by Gluck, an OK poem by Justice,  a pro-sex, dick poem by Dobyns, but not one really good poem in the whole book.   The 1988 book (Ashbery) has 4 good poems, the 1989 (Donald Hall) has 4 good poems (with 3 that almost made it by Oliver, Olds (a nice sexy one) and Marie Howe) and 1990 (Jorie Graham) just 3, "When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone" by Kinnell, a Yusef Komunyakaa and a James Tate, but Mark Strand for the 1991 volume found no good poems that I can see.  The latest Best American Poetry edited by Collins has at least 20 good poems.   So I think there's hope.  I feel like maybe things are getting better.  

I just read the latest "Poetry" (March) however, and the commentary is good, but the poems are awful.  There is one translation of Sophocles (fragments from the lost plays) translated by Reginald Gibbons which sounds exactly like Whitman--which I thought was cool.  But the poetry in general--really bad.  DH Tracy writes good reviews: I like this: "get-out-of-criticsm-free-card."    Conor O' Callaghan writes a nice review of the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, but at one point says Percy Shelley did not write any great poems.  Wha...?  Blarmey.

There's a lot of poems from those early BAP volumes from just a few really over-represented magazines, like Oblek and Sulfer, the experimental style of which I really don't like.  It's like John Ashbery only picked from Oblek and Sulfer.  

But if you prefer genital-wiggling giants, that's totally cool.  

I think Christopher Woodman's poetry is good.  I'm glad he's here.

[Expatriate Poet]

Dear Monday Love,

And I'm glad you're here too, for sure.

I came to the site at the end of November after a disastrous bout of disillusionment which left me gasping, to put it politely. You all picked me up nicely, and made use of some of my comments in a useful way too, and that was a god-send. And though I quit once in total exasperation with you all, I'm back now--and you, Monday Love, have welcomed me personally, so I feel at home here at last!

I've read your last post with great care, Monday Love, and could launch into a riff of my own, particularly on your take on the Shakespeare, but that would be succumbing to the bad habit of this site--to veer away from talking about poetry to talking about talking about poetry. And I'll turn off my own lights if I begin to do that myself I feel sure.

So I'd like to protest Monday Love's assertion that my little parable-poem, "The Meaning and Value of Repression" is "obscure," which it's not, though there is a distinct possibility it may be saying something he's never thought of before. The poem is very easy, in fact--as Monday Love said himself, and I quite agree it could have been thought up by a child--or at least by a pubescent child, let's say--with a big itch!

No, what I want to do is to steer Monday Love (and Poetastin and anyone else who's interested) toward looking at what the poem is rather than what anyone else would like it to be. I certainly won't try to tell you what the poem "means," because if I felt I could do that I wouldn't have been honest to have offered  the poem to you in the first place--which I did only to facilitate the discussion about empirical evidence vis a vis poetic evidence. Indeed, had I been able to express what the poem had to say in plain prose I should have done so from the start--otherwise I'd just be fooling around with your hormones!

So here are a few observations Monday Love hasn't yet made--and his failure to do so would seem to me disingenuous if not positively malicious--i.e. would suggest he doesn't really want to see what, in fact, the poem is saying.

Look, the poem is extremely easy--and fun too ("spectacle" for sure)--but for three glaring anomalies, the title, the address to the high-brow diner/reader, and the introduction of Galileo Galilei just at the moment you're expecting the full Monty--or should I say the full Matilda! Indeed, without those anomalies the poem would be puerile--which could be introduced as yet another anomaly, of course, to be sure.

So let's have it, Monday Love--1.) meaning, 2.) value. 3.) repression, and 4.) Galileo Galilei--that'll be enough, as the other anomalies will immediately fall into place along with them.

I said at the end of my last post:

If you want to answer you have to answer not me but the two poems-- because it's not about my schtick but their shlock!
C.

We've got just one of the poems in our life-class just now--naked as the day she was born (though she's still under-age, I confess--I've only been working on this poem for 14 years!). She's much too young to represent "the power of sex," as Monday Love suggested--she's far too unselfconscious for that as well, as if that were all, why bother?

(I'll tell you why this poem is NOT about "the power of sex" in another post, but some brave individual out there has got to face the facts of those anomalies before I'll entertain you anymore!)

Christopher

[Expatriate Poet]

DELETE--inadvertently the same message posted twice--there must be some meaning in that, like the sitegeist telling Monday et al to get down to the facts!
C.