Re: Dictionary Lesson by Dovina	16-Nov-04/8:05 AM
Oh God! Math poems! This will make the approximately the millionth time the following message has been posted on poemranker. ..... 1) The converse of "I love you" is not "You love me". Its converse is nothing, or at best "If something is you, then I love that thing," since converses are mainly useful for altering if/then expressions. 2) None of the three main transformations (converse, inverse, contrapositive) can transform "I love you" into "you love me".
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	16-Nov-04/7:56 AM
I hope you got richa's point. Robert Frost already knew about good fences being good neighbors, being the most colossal bigot, sexist and generally crotchety cunt ever. He just thought it would be good to use a stupid character like his neighbor to teach you. Why? Because he thought you were stupid, too.
Re: a comment on Jesus by Dovina	16-Nov-04/7:47 AM
No it doesn't. In all seriousness, how can you be so dense? At any rate, the point of my "mockery" was that you've created an absurdly small number of black-and-white categories to group everyone into. I'm for the creation of so many particularized categories that the term "categories" becomes useless for describing them. If I've "categorized" your poetry as "somewhat prone to describe everything in terms of a few rather extreme or polarized categories, so that almost every conclusion contained therein is wrong or simplified to absurdity, but not always," then I'm exactly in line with my philosophy, while you're a floundering guff.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	16-Nov-04/7:38 AM
Thank you for listening to me, really. Now that we're on the same page, I'd like to point out that a) shallow and dirty snow doesn't immediately suggest to me (or anyone else, apparently) "traces of the thing covered - pain", so I think you missed the mark; b) taking the parallels in the metaphor HisJokes/HisPain, HerMissives/HerPain across the stanza break was really fucking confusing. I'm still not sure I get it; c) And you've got about 4 pains and 4 things hidding by the time you get to the "such are the jokes" part, where the metaphor effectively stops and the metaphor-explanation begins. My suggestion: Just straighten it out. Make his pain something that's actually covered by the snow on the ground, like the ground. Make her pain something that's actually surrounded by your limbs/missives. Something like, Snow on the ground shallow and dirty [Covering the frost-scarred ground or something.] Black limbs sagging frosty and white [Clutching a piece of hard blue sky or something.] Such are the jokes that cover his wounds... That is all.
Re: a comment on Jesus by Dovina	13-Nov-04/4:05 AM
Your a colossal simpleton. And congratulations on making up a world in which everyone is either a Christian, atheist, story lover, poet, humanist, logician, drunkard, or teetotaler. After a moment's consideration, I've decided this is what's wrong with all of your poetry.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	13-Nov-04/3:58 AM
You're not understanding me. And I'm not setting up a straw anything. That's just something dunces and richa say all the time when they're getting criticized. All I did was replace your images with poems with abstract titles according to what you said they represented. And it didn't add up. Or it kind of did, just all mixed up. Don't take my word for it. Try this: print a copy of this poem and write above each line whether it represents jokes, his wounds, missives, your wounds, or nothing. See what order they come out in, or if the nothing lines even fit with the metaphors at all (hint: they don't!) To be doing it right, you should come out with either Image(jokes) Image(his wounds) Image(missives) Image(my wounds) Such are the jokes that cover his wounds and the missives surrounding mine ----OR (and this is a stretch)---- Image(jokes) Image(missives) Image(his wounds) Image(my wounds) Such are the jokes, etc etc etc. If you don't have that, it just doesn't make any fucking sense. People try to fit it into a Jokes, wounds, Missives, wounds structure and get "crusty and clean" snow being his wounds and "tan earth" being your wounds and HOW THE HELL IS CRUSTY SNOW SOMEONE'S WOUNDS???!?! Trust me, ANYONE is going to back me up on this. Oh, wait, I've forgotten. You don't trust the opinion of any person on this site except that moron Dan Garcia-Black. Well, take a jump down a manhole, then. I might as well be talking to a fucking vegetable. Sheesh.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	13-Nov-04/3:40 AM
Robert Frost would not say that. And he never learned anything from anybody. You can argue with me if you'd like, but I should tell you I know more about Robert Frost than you know about all other writers put together.
Re: a comment on A Child Learns (haiku) by poetryman	10-Nov-04/11:44 PM
We know you. You're the 2270th of you here. "hopefully you don't write like you talk" was the giveaway. An gentleman would have checked. PS-Now you will look at one each of our poems, give them zeroes and vague tetchy comments, get bored with the site, leave. Hurry along, then.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	10-Nov-04/11:25 PM
PS-I'm full of spelling errors today. It's cause Yasser's dead. There were actually people wailing in the street this morning.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	10-Nov-04/11:23 PM
Sorry, none of it holds together. Now you seems like you're trying to make it: Image(JOKES) Image(MISSIVES) Image(HIS WOUNDS) Image(MY WOUNDS) JOKES, HIS WOUNDS, MISSIVES, MY WOUNDS. Not only is that a totally unnatural construction, but it falls apart or is inconsistent all over the place. Like how in stanza 2 you have either "Black limbs sagging frosty and white" or "frosty and white Tan earth hidden". Jesus. The best fix is to change lines 3-4 to be an image for his wounds and lines 7-8 to be an image for your wounds somehow related to the "black limbs sagging". You see? The black limbs are now your missives. Which is good, because they reach out but in a sagging weak kind of way. Now ask yourself, what are they surrounding? Not tan earth, and earth doesn't seem really wounded anyway. It has to hold together. Anyway, it should be easy from there. Limbs can surround any number of things that represent wounds, like - I don't know - shattered birdsnests or sections of sky or something. You lose the "closer to the ground" thing then, but that was kind of irrelevant anyway; it can just as easily be who's higher up.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	10-Nov-04/10:54 PM
You turd! QUESTION: If a stich in time didn't save you nine, what would it do? Would you even know?
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	10-Nov-04/10:47 PM
Dimtard is not your word. Stop using it now.
Re: a comment on An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	10-Nov-04/10:44 PM
You misspelled ensure. Maybe you're right, Dovina. It's not about absolute smarts or ignorance, here, since clearly the dimmest among us is as likely to think he's smart as anyone else, and to think everyone else is dim. It's more about whether you can take being called "A perfectly shaped football-sized turd of illiteracy couched in a rather damp briefcase" (or something such) and having your glaring errors nestled around your ears like so many meat-laurels every time you log onto the site, until you either meet to our demands or find some way to justify ignoring us.
Re: An Afternoon Walk by Dovina	10-Nov-04/12:33 AM
Maybe I've just not taken enough time on this (I haven't), but I don't immediately see how the imagery is supposed to work. Either a) the "shallow and dirty snow" and "crusty and clean" snow are the jokes, and the "black limbs sagging" and "tan earth" are the missives; b) or the "shallow and dirty snow" and "black limbs sagging" are the jokes, and the "crusty and clean" snow and the "tan earth" are the missives. There's no other way around it. If a), how are his jokes both "shallow and dirty" and low, and "crusty and clean" and lofty? And how are "black limbs sagging" and "tan earth hidden" missives? The limbs, maybe, reach out - that works. But the earth is the opposite; it's passive and hidden. Sure, you can be reaching out and being passive and hidden probably, but not in metaphor land. Choice b) seems more likely. You get "shallow and dirty" and kind of desparate limbs reaching out and sagging for the jokes. But then you get clean tree snow and hidden earth for the missives. How are either of those missives? And aren't they still opposites? Go ahead, tell me where I've gone wrong.
Re: A Spring bird in November (Edit) by Sasha	10-Nov-04/12:26 AM
The definite articles throughout - but especially in the first line - are hideous and a waste of space. With the same syllables I could have said, oh, I don't know, Against flat, skin-white winter skies, Against glass-hard November skies, On unforgiving surfaced skies, - and so on and so on, without the presumption of "the". And "flies and plies" is a little too sing-songy, even for a song. Even "flies; it plies" would have been better, though not much. Drop the "flies", I say (*snicker, snicker*) and get an adjective before "bird".
Re: a comment on A Child Learns (haiku) by poetryman	9-Nov-04/11:48 PM
He means the middle line has eight syllables, rather than the correct seven. Googling "haiku", "children" and "nature", I found a bunch of sites (like this one: www.eliteskills.com/z/24904) full of you spouting about how the Japanese think children are the highest form of nature, and nothing else. So I had the Japanese girl sitting next to me google it in Japanese and got even less. Now shut up. People who say haikus have to be about nature are full of ripe turds anyway.
Re: a comment on Smoke by zodiac	9-Nov-04/1:17 AM
Weird. I checked, and my other posts avg 23 words per sentence. This one's only 15 or so. Maybe it's trying too hard to sound foreign? Or like Wilfred Owen?
Re: a comment on A Better God by Dovina	8-Nov-04/11:53 PM
I imagine He would like it.
Re: a comment on A Better God by Dovina	8-Nov-04/4:06 AM
Maybe. But I can't get past the idea that God would just say to you, "I'm perfect. Surely I know what's the best way to respond to prayers. And anyway, there's tons of prayers I don't answer and tons of great things I do for people who don't pray. It probably seems kind of higgledypiggledy to anyone who isn't perfect." How do you argue with that? Anyone?
Re: a comment on Fair Dianne by Dovina	8-Nov-04/4:03 AM
I love people who say things are in their own or other people's natures. I could kiss you now.