Free verse № 80728
Captain Cannibal
Murder!
Have you ever heard the like
As they always do in stories of a shipwreck found at night?
Where survivors are floating for days on a raft;
I remember the ghastly bits on the mast
Where the last surviving sailor had helped eat the whole crew;
He claimed he was the captain it was a good joke too,
Depends on whoâs the victim;
The point of view counts for a heap in such things,
Youâd laugh yourself sick to know what it brings
Starvation holds water better than your boat,
When every plump and tender sailor keeps your stomach afloat
No roast albatross for dinner
For they gave you the slip,
Your only choice left,
Potluck or the dip
All that last night,
He sailed upon sluggish water,
Covered with rotting flesh,
Rank and stagnant pools of seamen
Whispered by ghosts of dead comrades
Carried on moonlit currents,
All the water black with blood and shadow,
Drifting westward homeward bound
He came so near to broken, but his soul would not sink down
Though he killed them as they lay there,
And gnawed upon their bones,
The tide of might had risen and brought him safely home
56 comments
By Gods, I have a whole boatload of other oddball grammatical anomalies that, apparently, are just waiting to become kitschy and, dare I say, even cool if only I have the personal fortitude to do nothing about any of them for long enough. That's right, I am the future. If that doesn't terrify the ever-loving stool from your body, you haven't read enough of my poems.
On the other hand, perhaps without these brilliant critiques I would still be scratching out drivel on birch bark with a burnt stick.
Why don't we each launch into a thousand-word treatise detailing the riveting minutia of our daily lives? Let us know each other better. Or we can both remain unfashionable, disreputable enigmas. I guess my poetry is just another example of how far I am out of the loop. All I can hope for, I suppose, is the moment when my special brand of poetry takes over the world.
I encourage you to hold your breath for that particular day.
Also, perhaps it would prove beneficial, if we all here at poem ranker, purposely avoided reading many of the âclassicsâ of poetry just so that we can formulate no opinion at all instead of one that is completely wrong.
Please note the means by which I intersperse comedy with tension and respond accordingly.
"However, itâs not all that important for me to convey a particular meaning. Rather I think it better to have the reader find his or her own meaning."
By 'convey' here, Lenore doesn't mean 'convey to the reader after they have read the poeme', it means 'convey to the reader in the poeme itself'.
First I do not feel obligated to make my poetry understood. Believe it or not I could care less about that.
Secondly a majority opinion does not necessarily imply truth.
If it did I would resign myself to the fact that Jesus is in fact the Son of God.
While I do personally get off on being ranked, I get even bigger jollies from the variety of interpretations.
Is it so terrible, unthinkable even, to post a poem with the only intent being to share it? Thatâs not to say that I donât want or appreciate the critiquing, I do. And admittedly I do get off on watching others chew it up and spit it out or savor its juicy center. It is not that I feel I stand alone as you wrote. Itâs that I feel the poem can stand alone or crash and burn depending on the reader. I simply cannot agree that a poet or artist is obligated to make his or her work understood. Is it not enough to paint for the sake of painting? Allowing the meaning to unfold spontaneously and in the end subjectively? Think of Pollock madly lashing at his canvas, painting so fast that there is little time for forethought. Perhaps to some his finished canvas brought order out of chaos and itâs meaning becomes clear. To others it is nothing more than a canvas covered in haphazardly splattered paint. The beauty is lost or found depending on the perception of the beholder. Regardless of itâs intentional presupposed meaning (or none there of). Am I still completely unable to properly describe what this whole thing is all about? I have no plans or expectations for my poems at all and they only exists because it is what I truly enjoy and is probably the only way some brutal hack like me could ever obtain a public stage, such as this.
there has never been an iconoclastic artist who didn't first go through an intense period of learning and absorption, whether in school or self-imposed. van gogh, for example, spent thousands of hours studying paintings, sitting in galleries sometimes looking at one painting for an entire day.
You can't break rules you don't thoroughly know. You can't defy tradtions with which you are not intimately familiar.
That doesn't mean you are required to devote yourself to studying poetry to play around with writing, or that you shouldn't play with breaking "the rules." By all means, go for it! But it does mean that name dropping famous iconoclasts to excuse the inaccessibility of your efforts, as though you were somehow their peer, when you quite obviously haven't gone through the rigorous and intensive learning and training they typically do is inexcusable and will simply result in people dismissing you out of hand.
You see, when you don't actually KNOW the rules, you inevitably break them accidentally, and this shows plain as day, as opposed to when you break the rules for some intent or effect. At least read and absorb Strunk, it's like 30 pages long. Christ.
As an âoutsideâ artist who has been consistently selling my paintings and drawings for the last 15 years, I find your statement insulting and absurd.
The hate (and jealousy) heaped upon outside artists and similar hell-bred poets usually degrade from an honest attempt to raise public awareness of alternative technique to remarkably childish verbal slap-fights or internal circle-jerks that make everyone involved look like socially stunted malcontents. And therein lies the crux of the problem.
It is virtually impossible at any given time to appraise accurately or conclusively artists/poets who have not been dead for roughly a century. In general the most you critics can honestly hope to do is to enlighten your audience as to what an individual artist/poet may be trying to do, and how his/her art relates to the world. But for you to assign any contemporary artist/poet his place (high or low) in history is pure arrogance.
Go ahead and continue to label me for purposes of your own and I will continue to ignore these labels in order to create. Oh and to drop another iconoclastic name⦠Courbet once said âThere can be no schools: there are only paintersâ The same can be said about poets.
I'm shocked! Does this mean the scent of death is upon you?
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
At the end of the day it all comes down to humility. Humility, and a healthy respect for my opinions. Thanks for listening, -10-
First of all, I wasn't talking about your painting, how could I have been, I know nothing of it. I was talking about painting only to continue with your own analogy. I also wasn't, and haven't, commented on this pome. I have no comments for it. The use of language, though there are problems here and there, is certainly far above that of the teeny poets I typically rail on. I could offer comments on language use, but you've hardly shown yourself amenable to receiving them.
I purposely included van gogh in the discussion, because he HAD no formal training (you complete fucking idiot). He did, however spend a FANATICAL amount of time studying and learning to paint.
Secondly, how were able to miss the fact that I was not in any way heaping hate and jealousy on "outside artists" but on the contrary expressing admiration and respect for the great lengths the REAL iconoclasts (as safely judged by history) go to to attain their unique skills.
Judging from your basic ability to put together English sentences, I'm pretty sure you didn't actually read my comment. It would be difficult for me to imagine someone with at least that much ability for writing to have such a complete lack of ability to comprehend my (I feel) rather lucid and level-headed comment.
Huxley's 'nappy' may well be all those things, and more, but there is one thing Huxley's 'nappy' is not: It is not a proof that vagueness is a necessary characteristic for good art. Husks are.
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