Re: a comment on Middle-Aged White Woman by Dovina	10-Apr-05/9:50 PM
I am openminded about the past. I don't think the past should have anything to do with the present situation - which, as I see it, is pretty much: Black people still don't have freedom or equality of pay, opportunity, education, or power across the board. Sure, my greatgreatgreatgrandparents, had they been rich enough, would have enslaved yours, but also my grandparents are racist, belittle minorities, and deny them opportunities. My parents belittle minorities and deny them opportunities. And tons of people in my generation, myself probably no exception, continue the problem by often-unnoticeable actions. What I was trying to point out is that Dovina's thinking (in the poem) that the problem's solved now, was solved years ago, and she had nothing to do with it is simply nuts. Who needs to go back even a generation to find crimes/persecution against black people? And at the very least, I'd say Dovina has very few black friends in the outside world. Besides, what a preposterous suggestion - that one side's history of (and continuing) institutionalized oppression can be "balanced out" or "made up for" by black people whupping white ass for a while! If an intelligent black person's ever seriously considered it, I'm a stuck pig. And besides, black people have been ignoring white people in their verse, culture, etc, from the beginning. Only a Eurocentrist in the extreme would even imagine she had a place in black verse to be belittled. (For Dovina: Disagree? Consider checking out Gullah culture, Hoodoo culture, Slave culture, Jack Tales, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, and hip-hop, to name a very, very few.) In short, I don't think you're going to give up your friendship with Dovina because of this poem, because I think you see, as I do, that Dovina doesn't really mean to be offensive; she just doesn't know very well what she's saying. That's all I'm trying to point out to her. Really, I've got no beef with Dovina except that she doesn't express herself very well. All things considered, her heart's pretty close to the right place.
Re: a comment on Middle-Aged White Woman by Dovina	10-Apr-05/9:32 PM
1) Only a Californian would think that. Maybe you live in Santa Barbara County (black population: 2%)? How did the bad black people you've encountered give rise to this poem? I'm genuinely curious.
Re: MOMENTS From A Madman's Mind by PsydewaysTears	9-Apr-05/10:56 PM
You can't be amidst a mind. You can be amidst minds, or amidst the wrinkly lobes of a brain. PS-congratulations on staging the return of napkins to poemranker. It's been a while. -10-
Re: science by whispern_smoke_wisp	9-Apr-05/10:51 PM
You're wrong. Dogs do love humans. They've evolved to love humans. They evolved that way because the pack-behavior and imprinting that help them find food and fend off predators in the wild reacts well to a different-species dominant male (i.e., a human owner). Jared Diamond writes extensively on the topic in Guns, Germs, and Steel, before going on to discuss how zebras, though pack-oriented, have never been successfully domesticated. Nor even very well tamed, except by the eccentric Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, who once rode a zebra-driven cart into Buckingham Palace (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/tring/history/history.html) PS-I propose you think dogs don't really love humans because they have reasons for loving us, while you expect love to be somehow, I don't know, unconditional and profitless for the lover. That's just crazy.
Re: a note on content by not_a_philosopher	9-Apr-05/10:47 PM
You don't have more than a middle-schooler's familiarity with poetry, do you?
Re: a comment on Middle-Aged White Woman by Dovina	9-Apr-05/10:46 PM
Incidentally, it was 40 acres and a mule, not ten. Both of you tear up your Minority Membership/Discount Cards. Now.
Re: a comment on Mixtapes (or We Always End Where We Began) by philn	9-Apr-05/10:33 PM
Yeah, we know. That's exactly what John Cusack thought in High Fidelity. So it's just not a very original idea.
Re: a comment on Moments (or) Suicide by Dovina	9-Apr-05/10:26 PM
"Internal punctuation" only means punctuation that occurs in the middle of any sentence, i.e., commas, semicolons, colons, and so on. Yes, there is a tradition in poetry of not always punctuating at line-ends, but that's not it. The "internal" doesn't mean "in the line".
Re: a comment on Moments (or) Suicide by Dovina	9-Apr-05/10:21 PM
Better grammatically. Except I don't think it's a just worth. Still, you've dealt with that well enough; the narrator's obviously supposed to be a suicidal loser.
Re: Middle-Aged White Woman by Dovina	9-Apr-05/10:18 PM
This is among the top, oh, five most disastrous things you've ever written. Some questions: 1) What "freedom", "authority" and "power"? Oh, you mean the Black President. Or maybe you mean for the oppressed in your poem to be Middle-aged white women, and the oppressed group men who would be secretaries but (until recently) were denied the opportunity. 2) Are you being ironic? 3) Do you know? 4) If you are, do you really mean the exact opposite (like ironists tend to do)? 5) Have you ever read Margaret Atwood's short story "Rape Fantasies"? You should. 6) Do you think you can still be friends with al-naafiiysh, blacksoul, and jroday after this? 7) No vote.
Re: a comment on Moments (or) Suicide by Dovina	8-Apr-05/6:00 AM
Then I think the sentence is unnecessarily jumbled to the point of incomprehensibility. It starts off well enough "My life reviewed and judged like this might be considered in some dark hour not just bunk" is fine, and seems to get at the point you want to make, which from what I gather is that people SHOULD do it in suicidal moments, but don't. Even adding "but as in this ordinary time" works - your life might be considered not just bunk but as [it's considered] in this ordinary time [i.e., worthwhile]. But you can't say, for example, "my life might be considered not just bunk for its just evaluation" which is grammatically, semantically, or whateverally equivalent to what you're saying. Do you see what I mean? To parse even further (but keep the grammar) you've got "My life might be considered for its evaluation". There's the problem. You can say "My life might be considered for its just value" or "My way of evaluating my life might be considered a just evaluation", but your life itself isn't being considered for evaluation. At the very least, you'd have to change "for" to "by" - and that's neither poetic nor particularly meaningful. Me, I'd change evaluation to "value", "worth", or "valuation".
Re: a comment on Make Music in Your Heart by Dovina	8-Apr-05/5:38 AM
I mean, I understand the need to build people up with some nice comment or a bit showing you get how clever they are, and in real life I do. But I don't think poemranker users care very much what anybody says to them one way or the other, so it's not like it matters. And personally, I don't think making music is a very nice metaphor for writing. Sorry.
Re: a comment on Hard Rock by Dovina	8-Apr-05/5:34 AM
Um. Do you?
Re: a comment on Prayer For The Church by sliver	8-Apr-05/5:31 AM
I doubt even sliver would suggest that. All things considered, I think he's about two comments away from saying God preknows the number of people who will pray for a certain outcome, which happens to be the exact number he requires to provide that outcome, which happens to be the outcome he wanted anyway. And then we'll all be swimming in it. Consider: Far fewer people prayed for Terri Schiavo to be spared the indignity of lifelong tubing than prayed for her to continue her tubed and vegetable existence, but God went for the detubing anyway.
Re: Church of Puerto Vallarta by James Rykelangeli	7-Apr-05/6:35 AM
Consider making more, shorter sentences.
Re: Hard Rock by Dovina	7-Apr-05/6:22 AM
I used to think "Jesus, how lucky I was to have been born in America in the twentieth century and not in Africa, the Dark Ages, or outer space!" Then I realized what a stupid thing it was to say that.
Re: a comment on Make Music in Your Heart by Dovina	7-Apr-05/6:16 AM
You just think that because we don't make comments like "How nice it is to make music as a metaphor for writing" just to show how ace we are for getting it.
Re: a comment on Moments (or) Suicide by Dovina	7-Apr-05/6:03 AM
By the last "evaluation", do you mean something like "value" or "worth"? If so (and that's not at all clear) maybe it would be better to use the word "valuation" instead. PS-I don't see why you don't have to judge your life by all the times that weren't Moments. I imagine if I were some total slob with no Moments except for achieving a single spectacular "arrival", which also happened to kill me. Would I go to heaven?
Re: a comment on No Worries by Dovina	7-Apr-05/5:44 AM
Oh, so can we define closed-mindedness from here on as: "Closed-minded people refuse to consider a proposition for reasons other than its content OR for reasons related to its content"? Hey, thanks a lot.
Re: a comment on Prayer For The Church by sliver	7-Apr-05/5:37 AM
I see what you mean. By the same token, looking at why I'm wearing a striped shirt under a plaid sportcoat, courderoys, and sandals on a balmy summer day in the MidEast is going to lead nowhere. You could try addressing it from my position, but that would require squatting bareassed over a two-inch wide hole in the floor while feebly trying to force your raisin'd insides into some kind of productive motion. And I wouldn't recommend it if it's at all avoidable. The validity of prayer is mostly that it makes people prone to illogic and feelings of powerlessness feel good. No one's denying that. Considering, though, that this argument's about Jesu's Gethsemene prayer, and He's neither of those, it's just not very relevant. re the last bit: Oh... Well it's been nice talking to you. Sort of.