Perspective

[Delta40]

Around memories
in the overgrowth
of missing golf balls
and last year's pussy,
snails and slugs
smear their silvery trail.

Now the blinds are down,
tis all hidden from
your kitchen window view.

Around thoughts
in the offshoots
of pink tipped sausages
and discharged eggs,
fragrance and fats
flavour my juicy flow.

[Bewlay Brother]

I feel like there is a lot of meaning in this poem, and the meaning isn't nearly as grotesque as some of the imagery. And I like that. Though I have a hard time knowing where to start in finding the meaning of it, so the main thing that matters is my immediate emotional reaction to reading the poem.. and that was being grossed out by the "pink tipped sausages" line. I think it would be better if the emotional backlash was prompted by other areas and essences of the poem. So, maybe take some of the "oomph" out of that line? Because I don't think it is one of the better lines or concepts in the poem but it overpowers everything else. Just my two cents.

[Hawkman]

Oh dear, Delta - can it be that JB and miyako between them have got you obbsessing over your sex-life and genitals? Seem to be a lot of heavy sexual allusions in this one.

Fragrancy should be fragrance btw. Sex and breakfast or is it at the barbie? I'm afraid I don't get the 2nd stanza reference, if it's a quote, but it fits well into the poem.

Live and be well - H

[Delta40]

Edited.

[MorpheusSandman]

You just love these bipartite poems that work in parallel, don't you? What I'm trying to figure out is how we're supposed to connect "snails and slugs / smear their silvery trail" with "fragrance and fats / flavor my juicy flow"! But I love the weird eroticism in the piece.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I'd try to find a replacement for "'tis" because it's discordant with the otherwise contemporary diction of the poem and switchesone's attention for a moment from the poem to the maker of it.

[Delta40]

Don't worry, it's a passing phase.

[Twota]

I love it.

I like the 1st stanza lots.

[Delta40]

You just love these bipartite poems that work in parallel, don't you? What I'm trying to figure out is how we're supposed to connect "snails and slugs / smear their silvery trail" with "fragrance and fats / flavor my juicy flow"! But I love the weird eroticism in the piece.

Are you suggesting the 'rules' of free verse (which I note Juniper Woolf claims there are none in another thread) dictate these two lines connect? Or like Vagantes said, have you just become a bad reader

[miyako73]

I had not seen someone write "sausage" in a poem that came out so beautiful until I read this one.

[ShadowsCool]

Weird but imaginative

[MorpheusSandman]

Are you suggesting the 'rules' of free verse dictate these two lines connect?

Not the rules of free verse, but the rule of parallelism, which isn't unique to verse or free verse. What I mean is:

Around memories
in the overgrowth

…

Around thoughts
in the offshoots

“Around (plural noun dealing with the mind) in the (noun dealing with vegetation, starting with a preposition)”

of missing golf balls
and last year's pussy,

…

of pink tipped sausages
and discharged eggs,

“Of (adjective, adjective, noun associated with male genitalia) and (adjective) (noun associated with female genitalia)”

snails and slugs
smear their silvery trail.

…

fragrance and fats
flavour my juicy flow.

“(Noun) and (noun) (verb) (possessive pronoun) (adjective) (noun)”

So there is parallelism across the two main stanzas in terms of the syntax and even what’s being described. That the last two seem not to connect in content, but do connect in syntax, is an invitation for a reader to interpret what the connection is supposed to be. It seems that what’s being connected is the, errr, “liquid” of the snail with the “sexual liquid” of the speaker.

[Delta40]

Paralleslism aside, as far as syntax goes, what do you think of Chomskys persistent emphasis on the central feature which he calls 'creativity' in language? So I'm a competent speaker who can produce a meaningful sentence which has no precedent in my earlier linguistic experience as well as the fact that you can understand the sentence immediately, though it is equally new to you. So both our competencies must consist in our mastery a set of generative and transformational rules.

Generative in that it undertakes to establish a finite sytem of rules which will suffice to 'generate' in the sense that it will adequately account for the totality of syntactically 'well-formed' sentences that are possible in a given language.

Transformational in that it postulates in the deep structure of a language system, a set of 'kernel sentences' which, in accordance with diverse rules of transformation, serve to produce a great variety of sentences on the surface structure of a language system as well as a large number of more complex derivatives from the simple kernel sentence.

(I have quoted this in places)

[MorpheusSandman]

I haven't read Chomsky, so I'd certainly have to read up on those terms to form any meaningful reply. Most of my readings on language philosophy are from the post-structuralists, but even then as it mostly relates to aesthetics and literary theory, which is a bit different than Chomsky's linguistic philosophy. Any recommended reading, or do you want to try and rephrase?

[Delta40]

here is a very small example from my poem.

Now the blinds are down.

the blinds are now down

the blinds are down now

are the blinds down now?

down now, the blinds are.

down now are the blinds.