regarding some deleted poem...	28-Mar-04/10:59 AM
I know I've never given you any reason to listen to my babble, but I do love the 'original edit' and consider it one of your best poems. Maybe there's a compromise that keeps the amphoras and the frescos. Please consider it, anyway.
regarding some deleted poem...	28-Mar-04/5:20 PM
OMG! The best poem of the year! THIS IS SOOO FUCKING GOOD!!!!!1!!!! You think I'm kidding?! No, man, I'm totally fuckin serious! The writer of this should be fellated by the man* or woman of his choosing WHENEVER THE FUCK HE WANTS!!! Bravo and bravo!
Re: Old Glory by Richard	29-Mar-04/7:57 AM
I figure you must be ignoring me because of that whole cliche-count business a while back. That's fine; it's your prerogative to only pay attention to positive comments and ignore negative ones (which aren't really what you'd call 'constructive criticism' anyway, am I right? I mean, the positive ones are obviously constructive, since they make you feel good; and the negative ones are obviously best ignored, since they make you feel like a waterlogged 18th-century cliche-dictionary opened to the entry 'stool', am I right?) But, you see?! That's exactly why I'm writing to you now! I feel I've misrepresented myself to you - like we've gotten off on the wrong foot here. So, I want to make amends by talking a little bit about your poem here and why I gave it a three. You know, constructive criticism like. The first thing is that I tend to feel like poetry shouldn't be a compendium of trite phrases. In fact, I really believe that poets should try REALLY HARD not to say ANYTHING that has ever been said before. Now, when I said something like this in an oblique manner on one of your earlier posts, you responded to the effect that if you eliminated everything that HAS been said from one of your poems, you'd be left with nothing. Now, this is not obviously the case with all poetry. Um, my posts are a bad example, but there are even posts here which cannot be reduced to two words by removing cliches. I'd even say there are posts on this site which come pretty close to perfect clichelessness. So it can be done, even by relative hacks. Remember, this is only my theory of poetry. Some people think cliches are great: Jimmy Buffet, to name one, and John 'Cougar' Melloncamp. But it's all about theory here, anyway, so you might as well take mine into consideration along with everyone else's and your own. So next I'd suggest that if your poetry is, as you point out, reduceable to two words, then it might be on account of your subject-matter, which judging from your posts here and on your homepage falls into such broad categories as "Love", "Despair", "America", and so on. I don't mean poets shouldn't try to write about those things, but they would have to be more careful doing it than, say, writing about ducks with AIDS or appropriate beard materials for homemade Negro Jesuses, since so many people have written about Love and so on before and hardly anyone has written about ducks and Jesuses - sadly. So, my recommendation to you would be to comb through this piece for anything which you might have heard anywhere else, which shouldn't be hard since practically everything here is cribbed from Wal-Mart bumper-stickers (you know the ones I'm talking about!) and then to replace every cliche with some original expression. That's all. Oh, and if your response to this is that this already says everything about America that you can think of or feel then you are SERIOUSLY underestimating America's range and beauty, my friend! What about FRENCH-FRY-SMELLING? What about CHARTER-BUS-TOUR-TAKING? What about BARELY-CONCEALED-HOMOEROTIC-TENDENCIES? I do hope you'll think about it. Thanks for your time! - zodiac
Re: The Punk With The Stutter by Joe-joe	29-Mar-04/12:02 PM
Hey Joe-Joe, I'm having trouble finding your name on the New School homepage. Could you post the address? It's Robert Daltry, by the way.
Re: A country called Cha by richa	30-Mar-04/6:43 AM
I'm sorry, I don't get using beared instead of bore, or why it's called char in the poem and cha in the title (seems char is better for both). I'm sure you had a reason; I just can't see it. The rest is better than ever.
Re: post-rock messiah by jsd	30-Mar-04/8:19 PM
Good morning and welcome to poemranker! I thought I might take a crack at being nice to someone on his/her first day and not giving 'em a hard time - you know, razzing the new kid and all. Hey, speaking of crack, do you like Jim Morrison, because this poem kind of reminds me of him in several ways? Write back and let me know what you think!
Re: Astronomical by DeadtotheWorld	31-Mar-04/8:27 AM
Running a Bible-Code-inspired equidistant letter search on this poem, I found: 7 instances of the word ANUS, 248 of ASS, 10 of ARSE, 12 TWATS, 5 CUNTS, 1 LORD, 1 SATAN, 1 PENIS, & 1 GUFF. I now firmly believe that though you may be dead to the world, you're utterly alive to the heavenly wisdom of Jesus. We'll be in touch.
regarding some deleted poem...	31-Mar-04/9:29 AM
Hi. I did a Bible-Code equidistant letter search on this and found some interesting things: 231 occurences of ASS, 17 of ARSE, 56 of CUM, 6 TWATs, 5 of LORD, 2 of ANGEL, 29 GAYS, 2 MUFFS, 1 SUCK, 2 BLOWS, 1 JESU & 2 SATANS. Call me crazy, but I would like to suggest that your 'stream of consciousness' is a telepathic bat-phone straight to the underground lair of Jesus himself.
Re: A wicked rose grows in God's grapevine. by SupremeDreamer	31-Mar-04/3:16 PM
This is almost exactly the same poem as your last one, only not as good. I'd understand if you were trying to perfect the form, but then I'd be obliged to tell you you're not doing it very well.
Re: Over Simplification by Richard	31-Mar-04/3:25 PM
Since joining poemranker, I've often noticed a tendency among posters criticized for writing cliches to make all their following posts entirely out of polysyllables, and I was wondering if you could explain to me why that is. All you've got now is a thesaurus-dependent gabble that would be absolutely hilarious read aloud, in addition to being (admittedly) about nothing or nothing new. The best line of this is made of common one- and two-syllable words. I bet you won't guess which one I mean.
Re: A Dangling Poo by zodiac	1-Apr-04/3:43 AM
<VERSE THREE - In Whiche Our Hero Concludes His Adventures in a Moste Curious Fashion!> Now your thighs are wet with a sweaty gruel, The scent's intense, yeah, but I'm one stool You can't pick off with paper so you'll Have to M*A*S*H me, babe, cause I'm Klinger. Cause I'm not gonna drop or disappear - Except, perhaps, if it wasn't so queer, (Which I hate) you could make like Richard Gere And push me back in with One Finger (-Answer, I mean, or Bachus or Shuushin - Now come on Everyone, & start the confusion!)
regarding some deleted poem...	1-Apr-04/4:32 AM
This is the best of your posts. I meant what I said before, though I originally suspected Jeremi or one of the British. Consider that a bonus compliment.
regarding some deleted poem...	1-Apr-04/4:57 AM
Each of these lines should be cut in half, or thirds, or whatever. "The one your mother wouldn’t let you wear inside the house" should be deleted.
regarding some deleted poem...	1-Apr-04/5:10 AM
Please say 'saw' instead of 'envisioned'. Thank you.
Re: Shampoo and Condition by Luzr	1-Apr-04/8:58 AM
I have so many questions about this one. Please write back if you're still here.
Re: A Dangling Poo by zodiac	1-Apr-04/6:42 PM
I wish I'd used 'chronic' for the rhyme instead of 'Hashanah' -- or, alternately, 'marijuana', 'Madonna' or 'Hosannah!' instead of 'colonic'. I just feel like it's a letdown after the great opening rhyme of 'being one' and 'penguin'. Which do rhyme down here, incidentally.
Re: Almost One by thepinkbunnyofdoom	2-Apr-04/11:24 AM
By my rough count, the next time lydia evelyn or CLS responds to an unflattering characterization of her physical appearance or personality with "How did you know?" will be the 50th. We should plan some sort of commemoration. A party, perhaps.
Re: Red Dress Wearing One Boot Cowboy by Lenore	2-Apr-04/8:21 PM
Are you familiar with the short story "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx?
regarding some deleted poem...	3-Apr-04/2:29 PM
"tiny wet fists - countless upon leaves, metal, asphalt and soil" is pretty good and reminds me of the last time Tiny dry-fisted me and how I wished there'd been a little more moisture involved. "Days beneath this late March shower remind," is nice, too, although it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to spend days beneath the same shower, and I wish the phrase had led more naturally into what they reminded you of. I would definitely hyphenate "long absent" for the obvious reason that I think hyphenation is the shit. And I agree with Lenore (!) that the last four stanzas are the best, and do you really want to start with "the black depths" of anything? I wouldn't.
regarding some deleted poem...	4-Apr-04/11:20 AM
"hammy down dress"!!!! That's superb! Then you bring in Denny's to complete the image! PS-Speaking of Denny's, last night I got hilariously drunk playing a drinking variation of the Scrabble-like board game Upwords with my wife, who creamed me by forming 'Eurorail' with all of her tiles for a nice 20-point bonus on her way to a handy 50-point victory, despite that I'm in grad Poetry School and she's a mere special-ed undergrad. The point of all this being that this morning, quite screamingly hungover, I drank about three shots of Kenyan espresso and decided to take my lunch at Taco Bell, today being a Sunday, which is post-church redneck dress-up Taco Bell lunch day in my part of the south. This turned out to be a SUPREMELY BAD IDEA, compounded by my copious use of 'Fire Sauce' on my three Burrito Supremes. My only comparable experience so far is the time I rinsed my toothbrush with tapwater in Mexico City and went through a roll of toilet paper EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK (this part of the story is true, incidentally.) What connection does it have to your poem, though? you're bound to ask. Well, oddly enough, while I was weakly evacuating the last of my flaming bowels in the Taco Bell men's room, I heard a Click, Err, and saw that the door of my stall had swung open, revealing a stocky sunburned man in what was a relatively-muted Datona 500 t-shirt for the local population (it being a Sunday, after all.) He introduced himself as the father who I never knew and then, without a further word, proceded to bugger me in my still-burning asshole for AN INSANELY LONG TIME. My point being that my story is considerably better than yours because where mine discourages people from doing immoral things, yours encourages it (ie, accepting rides from strangers in the hopes that they'll be a long-lost father you never knew), though both stories must inevitably, realistically have the same painful conclusion. I would strongly advise you to consider that before posting along these lines again. Barring that, I'd strongly advise you to accept the next ride offered to you by a stranger and SEE IF I WASN'T RIGHT!!!!!