DetailsThe poem, its numbers, and the conversation.

Early Morning

Member since 2004 · Posted 2 Mar 2004 · Edited 3 Mar 2004 · 18 comments

This is how God feels insulated warmth Thickly shaking off dream feathers Blessed timeless blisses Yesterday is an unread chain my skin illiterate & numb. Hungry & dim. Cotton womb aglow insolar Do I dream, wake, wonder? Time returns. The senseless tick Of the clock, is a sequence, a sentence. Bit, bit, I recall The feeling of living skin skin I live in. In the record of my flesh, I find yesterday. I mourn the ignorance of bodilessness. If only I was a feathered angel I was a dream

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3 votes so far. Yours would make 4.3 votes so far

18 comments

[n/a] richa 2-Mar-04/9:51 AM Reply

If you are going to use punctuation use it the way through.

Needs a comma after insulated in the first verse and why the arbitrariness of capitals.

First verse does not make much sense grammatically.

Quite like the idea, the wisdom of an angel, how your wisdom is the age of your body but they are bodiless.

[n/a] fevriere › richa 2-Mar-04/11:28 AM Reply

I was intending to introduce the punctuation and form of sentences steadily through the poem. Does this not work?

[9] zodiac 2-Mar-04/10:49 AM Reply

Wander... wonder? bothers me.

[n/a] fevriere › zodiac 2-Mar-04/11:29 AM Reply

Fair point, me too. Is it cheesy? Could I alter the word order, e.g. wonder, wake, wander, dream - wander, wonder, wake, dream - ?

[9] zodiac › fevriere 2-Mar-04/12:09 PM Reply

My suggestion: get rid of either 'wonder' or 'wander'.

PS regarding the punctuation/capitalization/etc, it makes you look like you don't really know what you're doing, whatever your content/meaning/etc suggests to the contrary. YOU know you know what you're doing, but seeing this I think, hm, kinda amateurish. You might well say, fuck you, I'm going to be immortal whatever I do with my grammar, like Blake - but that's crap. At the very least, get famous first by writing semi-normally punctuated/etc poems, and THEN turn all the crazy meaningless punctuationless/etc crap on, if you still find it so cool.

Oh, and go ahead, attack me on this. I know you want to. Everyone does.

[n/a] fevriere › zodiac 3-Mar-04/9:39 AM Reply

Well, your point is very fair, and probably true. Do you think misuse of punctuation gets a poet rejected? I appreciate how it might look to the critical eye.. Amateurish, messy, hard to follow. If I sorted the punctuation, I don't suppose it will hurt the poem. My teacher suggested getting rid of all punctuation, which I would find preferable to making it very.. *tries not to say conformist*.. Correct. Readable.
And you're wrong, I'm not an attacker. I'm just a debater.

[9] zodiac › fevriere 3-Mar-04/12:33 PM Reply

Based on solely my own (and pretty subjective) experience, I'd say amateur web-posted poetry is currently unpunctuated more often than it is correctly punctuated, and that published poetry is more often punctuated correctly etc etc etc. So it depends on what you're conforming to.

[9] Shuushin 2-Mar-04/10:57 AM Reply

I like the accentuation of key words with the capitalization, and if you did that on purpose, then I'm fine, too, with the punctuation.

Though I know that some will be put off by it - hey this is not sculpting (despite the similarities); where we can't ignore the laws of physics and invent materials and have them hover over the piece blinking in and out from multiple dimensions - this is poetry. And we can very easily fuck with those "laws".

So, having said that I like the mechanics of it - I'm a bit put off by the first line, and therefore the rational for the rest.

I just don't believe this dumbing-down of god-like sensations to a human level (and this is from a guy who doesn't believe in god).

I think it's fixable by making it a lesser diety (stick an article in there), and maybe by shading the perspective a little (not sure exactly how to do that). I may be the only one bothered by it, dunno - it still could appeal to a broader audience.

extra points for style.

[n/a] fevriere › Shuushin 2-Mar-04/11:38 AM Reply

The capitalisation is like an unpunctualised way to give emphasis, like started sentences that finish from unfinished ones.

I know the thing with God is a big step, but it feels careless and reckless and brazen and besides I only really care about God. I can't think of anything else.. I guess, "This is how Gold/Good/flame feels".. I think they'd be weak openings. What does it feel like, first thing in the morning, when you're still a little sleep-drunk and dozy?

[9] zodiac › fevriere 2-Mar-04/12:18 PM Reply

Besides - do you really think we're all so dense that we can't figure out what words to emphasize while reading a poem? Perhaps you should spell them all phonetically, too, in case we poetry readers have trouble rendering all these strings of characters into meaningful sounds. What's more, take a look at the (one) word you arbitrarily accentuated. Feathers? The technique you apply to this poem is mostly leaving words uncapitalized where they should be (ie, insulated, timeless, and blisses.) Is that to say you think these words should be unaccented? Or - wait, here's an idea - maybe you just didn't think about it that hard.

That's not to say this isn't one of the top, say, two poems on the 20 most recent today. I really like several parts of it. So does the fact that I'm getting all this critical mileage out of something so completely unrelated to your meaning give you even a moment's pause? It probably should.

[n/a] fevriere › zodiac 3-Mar-04/9:52 AM Reply

Don't get tetchy about this.

Poemranker has shit poems and great poems, and this is the shitly expressed great poem of an amateur. An amateur! That's what I am. So, I appreciate your criticism and you must expect a small amount of covering-own-arse-style bullshitting. Next time, I will just submit meekly to your abusive eye.

[9] zodiac › Shuushin 2-Mar-04/4:45 PM Reply

Let's take this metaphor a little bit further: If you made an awful, hideous sculpture that had floating bits, would people be interested in it? Probably. People do like floating things, especially if they have flashing lights attached to them somehow, or if they produce loud rhythmic noises. I, for one, would not be that impressed. Even if you could 'fuck' with the laws of physics, you could still pretty easily be a bad sculptor in my book. Especially if you weren't a very good scupltor within the laws of phyisics to begin with.

[9] Shuushin › zodiac 2-Mar-04/5:59 PM Reply

Yeah.. thanks for that...

[9] zodiac › Shuushin 2-Mar-04/6:06 PM Reply

Don't feel too bad. I gave you a ten.

[9] Shuushin › zodiac 2-Mar-04/6:11 PM Reply

Roger that(than-Q) - btw, I like that whole phonetic spelling thing - gonna use that someplace (hey, when a guy writes a poem a day he can get pretty desperate - its actually not a terrible idea. I wonder if it's been done? Musta been).

[n/a] fevriere › Shuushin 3-Mar-04/9:53 AM Reply

EE Cummings, for one.

[9] Shuushin › fevriere 3-Mar-04/10:22 AM Reply

[slaps forehead] oh yeah.

[n/a] fevriere › zodiac 3-Mar-04/9:54 AM Reply

And that excuses a stream of rant? Shut me up with a vote. Great plan.