Beat

[JBrower]

can we breathe pure experience
like rhythm? like bass through our feet?
tom-tom fills or timpani rolls,
swelling and rippling
like lake placid blues or
the vibrations of many souls,
people breathing in sync on 747s,
tasting metal in their mouths on Sundays?

or is experience like oxygen?
the purer the breath,
the swifter we're hanged...

and so i stay at home and think tv,
watch it pulse, silver and filtered gold,
all the characters of our stand-in fantasies
screaming from beneath the proscenium.

but my life feels scripted, like a sitcom,
and i'm the star narcissist,
center of the little world;
everyone exists just to please me
and the only currencies are
lingerie and lubrication.

[hillwalker]

Eew - quite a coda.

I have to say I liked most of this - particularly the third verse that does a great job of describing the idiot box.

I'm not sure where Concordes fit in since they have been grounded many years ago - and you already mentioned 747s so there's probably no need to reference another aircraft in the following line..... unlessI'm missing the point.

H

[blank|verse]

Yes, this might be a bit ragged (and I was wondering where things were going after the first two stanzas) but the last two make amends and are winningly subversive.

But why 'think tv'? 'Thinking' seems anathema to most tv, which promotes far more passive behaviour.

[JBrower]

Yes, this might be a bit ragged (and I was wondering where things were going after the first two stanzas) but the last two make amends and are winningly subversive.

But why 'think tv'? 'Thinking' seems anathema to most tv, which promotes far more passive behaviour.

I chose "think tv" because I wanted to get across the idea that the speaker lives his life overthinking/analyzing/etc., but only from a media-saturated background, therefore moving further from pure experience and into experience mediated by television, pop-culture, art, etc.

I'll be the first to admit this is a very rough poem so far, but the ragged-ness at the beginning being resolved toward the end is definitely intentional. I was inspired to write this after doing a lot of reading recently about bob dylan, as well as the beat poets, combined with my own personal conflict at the moment with an ex-lover. I wanted to set up a dialectic, of sorts, between pure experience and mediated experience, with the style of the poem reflecting the speaker's desire for the "pure experience" philosophy reminiscent of the Beats/early Dylan, but being suppressed by his own fears about pure experience and the mental trap that is media-experience

oh, also, "think tv" should set up the understanding of the following part about the speaker feeling like he's in a sitcom. He thinks of his live, his conflicts, his problems, his acquaintances in terms of his own story, his own sitcom, movie, w/e, so as he considers the appeal of living through pure experience, he cannot help but think of it in terms of script, in terms of media

i don't know if that makes sense?

also, I'm considering changing "Concordes" to "Sundays"

[blank|verse]

Thanks for the reply, JB, it appears you've put a lot of thought into this.

It's quite a complex argument you're presenting, like a modern Hamlet in some ways, all thought and no action, and who used the 'proscenium' on which the players performed a play he partly scripted.

Maybe try and think of more concrete, possibly symbolic, things, people, events, narratives in life through which you can express your thoughts. The last stanza in particular is very direct. Sometimes whispering speaks louder than shouting.

Interesting stuff, though.

[PrinceMyshkin]

There was something about that reference to the "star narcissist" that reassured me that no matter how confounding your thoughts might be at the moment, your sense of humour would get you through. I love both the craft in this and those places where you let go of the craft.

[qimissung]

I like it very much. It's a question we will always be asking ourselves. I like the sound of it. "The people breathing in sync...tasting metal in their mouths on Sunday..." Is this the pure experience? Because it doesn't seem as fulfilling as I would think "experience" would be. They do seem to be acting as one, and definitely not thinking. Or is that an expectation I set up for myself?

It is said that wisdom comes from having experiences, then reflecting on them, a sort of everything in it's own good time sort of thing. Anyway, I like your use of language and the ideas behind them.