luka

Well-known member
"Hysterical women are not the future of poetry, this is not the language of nature, this is sentimental whimsy. It proliferates like bind weed."

My Friend Jim Clarke.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I don’t know if this serious or not but it’s certainly not true.

Men have a much greater propensity to treat the poem as an object with mechanically interlocking parts than women, in keeping with the wider interests of the male sex.

I've delivered this challenge to all of my literary friends: find a female poet whose 'thing' is technical virtuosity, who privileges form over content.

None of my buddies has yet found this rara avis.
 

jenks

thread death
You said: the neglect of form. That just isn’t true. It’s just hyperbole.

Off the top of my head - Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Fiona Benson. All interested in form.

As for ‘in keeping with the wider interests of the male sex’ I don’t even understand what this means.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Many more men than women like trains, cars, go into engineering, STEM, cut up breaks and reassemble them etc.

I don't want 'interested in form'; I want 'writes an entire collection of nonsense written in a new verse form just to show off' or 'writes a novel in sonnets', that sort of thing.
 
I once caught a flu which put me in a high fever, and when I was brought some soup and bread to eat became convinced that my task was to separate the food out into its constituent molecules and place them in heaps, sorted by type, at the foot of the bed.

In a half-awake state another time, when someone else entered the room and tried to wake me up properly I felt that I was a telephone network and that they were trying to route a call through me to some receiver, but the call could not be connected.

I had a dream on another occasion that I was trying to debug a computer program, and the problem was that a buffer in memory kept filling up and needed to be cleared. Nothing I did seemed to fix the issue. Then I woke up and realised I needed to empty my bladder. Nothing I could have done in the dream would have resolved this problem (at least, not satisfactorily). I often think about this when I see someone desperately trying to solve a problem (usually something physical, like being overtired and stressed) by fretting, anxiously and circularly, about a symbolically displaced analogue of that problem, convinced that if they can only get that right, everything will be sorted.

I think about this quite a lot and you’ve made it clearer for me ‘the symbolically displaced analogue’ of feeling sick, or smacking out on a strong E ... thinking you’re at work endlessly repeating the same task. Maybe we think about school and exams in dreams in this way too, as we process the stress and anxieties and tensions of the body
 

luka

Well-known member
"if there's a signal out there, it’s being filtered out. Shamans, occultists, sick children and other thought-criminals seem to pick up on the signal when the stars are all aligned. It's a fleeting state, but it's driven forward our evolution in ways we don't quite understand."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"Dear Mother, I hope I'll be home for Christmas, but as long as these sentimental women get all the grant money, there'll be a battle to fight with my quatrains. Lots of love, your boy Jim."
 

luka

Well-known member
Jim made the amateur mistake of following loads of 'poets' on Twitter and Instagram, presumably in the hope of breaking into 'the scene' but actually just getting all indignant about all these dilettantes getting grants and residencies and book deals.
 

luka

Well-known member
its very important in life to realise no one will let you join their party. You're the wrong sort. They can smell it. So don't humiliate yourself by trying.
 
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