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Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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DWill

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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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My "24" (before somebody beats me to it). I'm not very much with this poem. It seems like a trance.

Dylan Thomas - Twenty-Four Years

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance as long as forever is.
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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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Want to laugh, I haven't read this poem yet either! I just found it and figured I'd better post it - what other poem am I going to find with a 24 in it. Although, I see DWill found one.

24/7
Alan Shapiro

The one cashier is dozing—
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn’t her.


Only the edge
is visible of the tightly spooled
white miles
of what is soon
to be the torn off
inch by inch receipts,
and the beam of green light in the black glass
of the self scanner
drifts free in the space that is the sum
of the cost of all the items that tonight
won’t cross its path.


Registers of feeling too precise
too intricate to feel
except in the disintegrating
traces of a dream—
panopticon of cameras
cutting in timed procession
from aisle to aisle
to aisle on the overhead screens
above the carts asleep inside each other—
above the darkened
service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,
so everywhere inside the store
is everywhere at once
no matter where—
eternal reruns
of stray wisps of steam
that rise
from the brightly frozen,
of the canned goods and food stuffs
stacked in columns onto columns
under columns pushed together
into walls of shelves
of aisles all celestially effacing
any trace
of bodies that have picked
packed unpacked and placed
them just so
so as to draw bodies to the
pyramid of plums,
the ziggurats
of apples and peaches and
in the bins the nearly infinite
gradations and degrees of greens
misted and sparkling.


A paradise of absence,
the dreamed of freed
from the dreamer, bodiless
quenchings and consummations
that tomorrow will draw the dreamer
the way it draws the night tonight
to press the giant black moth
of itself against the windows
of fluorescent blazing.
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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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DWill wrote:That was a neat trifecta, giselle. It also makes 3 Neil Young songs that have been used in the month. You know, I don't recall hearing "Powderfinger," but maybe I just can't hear the song and will have to listen to it. I had an inkling that Milton had a 23 poem, but couldn't zero in on it. It's a good one, too, but I like Milton anyway. Speaking of Neil Young, I got into browsing through youtube videos yesterday and saw him doing "When the Levee Breaks" with Led Zeppelin. He was pretty ferocious. Made me appreciate his versatility. C, S, & N couldn't match him there.
Ditto what he said, giselle. I enjoyed your selection. I love Neil Young's song Old Man. DW did you mean this Milton -

SONNET VII.

ON HIS BEING ARRIVED AT THE AGE OF 23.

HOW soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear
That some more timely happy spirits indueth.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot however mean or high,
Toward which time leads me and the will of heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great taskmaster's eye.
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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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That's the same poem that giselle posted. It's formatted as a conventional sonnet in your posting. Now....for 25...let's see. Got it. It's just one stanza from Tennyson's long poem "Maud" (923 lines--anyone want to take it on?)

Ah, what shall I be at fifty 220
Should Nature keep me alive,
If I find the world so bitter
When I am but twenty-five?
Yet, if she were not a cheat,
If Maud were all that she seem’d, 225
And her smile were all that I dream’d,
Then the world were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.
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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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DWill wrote:That's the same poem that giselle posted. It's formatted as a conventional sonnet in your posting. Now....for 25...let's see. Got it. It's just one stanza from Tennyson's long poem "Maud" (923 lines--anyone want to take it on?)
As in read it and discuss? You know me, I'm game for just about anything.
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25 has been the hardest number for me so far. In fact, I think I have a poem for every number for the rest of April. I am amazed at how good I've gotten at breezing over the pages and spotting numbers in poems. I found my 25 in a book that somehow, most like a daughter, made its way onto my shelves. The book: 108 American Poems of Protest, The Writing On The Wall ed Walter Lowenfels. The poem: Award by Ray Durem.


Award [A Gold Watch To The FBI Man Who Has Followed Me For 25 Years]

Share
Well, old spy
looks like I
led you down some pretty blind alleys,
took you on several trips to Mexico,
fishing in the high Sierras,
jazz at the Philharmonic.
You've watched me all your life,
I've clothed your wife,
put your two sons through college.
what good has it done?
sun keeps rising every mourning.
Ever see me buy an Assistant President?
or close a school?
or lend money to Somoza?
I bought some after-hours whiskey in L.A.
but the chief got his pay.
I ain't killed no Koreans,
or fourteen-year-old boys in Mississippi
neither did I bomb Guatemala,
or lend guns to shoot algerians.
I admit I took a Negro child
to a white rest room in Texas,
but she was my daughter, only three,
and she had to pee,
and I just didn't know what to do,
would you?
see, I'm so light, it don't seem right
to go to the colored res room;
my daughter'
s brown, an folks frown on that in Texas,
I just don't know how to go to the bathroom in the free world!

Now, old FBI man,
you've done the best you can,
you lost me a few jobs,
scared a few landlords,
You got me struggling for that bread,
but I ain't dead.
and before it's all through,
I may be following you!
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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

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Ah me, I do have a missing number after all! I am without a #27. The only poem with 27 that I've found had a 22 - another number I could only find one of. No worries, I've a plan for the 27th if I do not find a poem to post. I have three poems that are linked in the way they are structured around numbers. All three remind one of a nursery rhyme or children's poem.
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Well, how about my 26 now. I'm not as likely to be able to post it tomorrow as today. It's actually a good one, as any Phillip Larkin is likely to be. Longer than others of his I've read. Heavy-duty, too. From my point of view, Larkin left himself nothing about which to lament when he became really old. I mean, 26 is just a baby, after all, and all the world is before you.

On Being Twenty-six
By Philip Larkin

I feared these present years,
The middle twenties,
When deftness disappears,
And each event is
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt,
And turned to drought.

I thought: this pristine drive
Is sure to flag
At twenty-four or -five;
And now the slag
Of burnt-out childhood proves that I was right.
What caught alight

Quickly consumed in me,
As I foresaw.
Talent, felicity—
These things withdraw,
And are succeeded by a dingier crop
That come to stop;

Or else, certainty gone,
Perhaps the rest,
Tarnishing, linger on
As second-best.
Fabric of fallen minarets is trash.
And in the ash

Of what has pleased and passed
Is now no more
Than struts of greed, a last
Charred smile, a clawed
Crustacean hatred, blackened pride—of such
I once made much.

And so, if I were sure
I have no chance
To catch again that pure
Unnoticed stance,
I would calcine the outworn properties,
Live on what is.

But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall

At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,

Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.
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Here is my 26, not sure I quite get it. I'll have to read over a few more times. The poet is Jackson Mac Low.


Twenties 26

Undergone swamp ticket relative
whist natural sweep innate bicker
flight notion reach out tinsel reckoning
bit straddle iniquitous ramble stung

Famous furniture instant paschal
passionate Runnymede licorice
feature departure frequency gnash
lance sweat lodge rampart crow

Neck Bedlam philosophaster rain drape
lack fragile limitation bitartrate
fence lenghen tinge impinge classed
Fenster planetary knocked market

Glass killjoy vanity infanta part song
king cleanse vast chromium watch it
neat intense yellow cholera
ornithology insistence pantry

Torque normal fax center globe host
yammer ratchet zinc memory
yield texture tenure Penelope
reed liter risible stashed incomprehension
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OMG--those are words, but as Wordsworth said (not exact quote), "by what species of courtesy can we extend it the name of poetry?" Maybe it's some kind of metrical exercise or is supposed to be a word collage? I always thought a poem needed more than three or four verbs. A preposition or two would be nice as well.
Last edited by DWill on Thu Apr 26, 2012 6:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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