Stupid high school poetry

[Darth Gojira]

My brother and I were looking at his old English lit. book. We came across the works of William Carlos Williams, and the poems were nonsensible.
What ever happened to poems making sense, anyway? Is there a law against it. Feel free to post poetry rants here. Anyone encounter a poem(s) that made no sense whatsoever but had to explain at school?

[Spanky The Dolphin]

I wrote a free verse poem for Creative Writing in high school...

...it was a single sentence that ran for at least an entire page.

But I printed it out and handed it in without saving it.

[Darth Gojira]

I wrote a free verse poem for Creative Writing in high school...

...it was a single sentence that ran for at least an entire page.

But I printed it out and handed it in without saving it.

I think I still have a ballad I wrote for English 2. "The Ballad of Ramesses". Hey, I couldn't think of any other topic! Now how about the crap you had to read?

[Zoink]

I'm not much of a poetry fan. The only poem I remember from high school is "The Road not Taken" by Robert Frost. I figure, that poem along with "Please Don't Kill My Antelope" is enough poetry knowledge for the time being.

[Zaia]

I'm not much of a poetry fan. The only poem I remember from high school is "The Road not Taken" by Robert Frost. I figure, that poem along with "Please Don't Kill My Antelope" is enough poetry knowledge for the time being.

OMG I KNOW THAT POEM!!!!!!

The original's in English, but he had it translated into Spanish? Isn't it something like, "Please don't kill my antelope, my antelope is my friend" or something? I think I posted it in one of the poetry threads here in OT.


Oh, and my love of poetry was spawned from my Brit Lit class in high school. I love the romantics especially, but most of the poetry we studied was GORGEOUS. I can list some of the poets and their works if you want to check it out to see if you've been deprived or if you just have bad taste.

[Zoink]

OMG I KNOW THAT POEM!!!!!!

! Mi antelope es mi amigo !

You don't forget a line like that! That poem is going to be burned in my mind for all time.

[Zaia]

And now *drum roll* so none of you have to be without, I proudly present.....

"Please Don't Kill My Antelope"

Please don't kill my antelope,
He hasn't bothered you.
He hasn't kicked you in the shin
Or spit inside your shoe.
He hasn't bitten off your nose
Or stomped on your rear end.
Please don't kill my antelope,
My antelope's my friend.


And now, the master of poetry, Rick Walton, would like to thank Alberto Jose Miyara of Argentina, who translated the poem into Spanish.

"No Te Metas Con Mi Antelope"

No te metas con mi antelope,
que no te hizo ningun mal.
No se tomo tu bebida,
no se comio tu cereal.
No hizo sus necesidades
en el frente de tu casa,
y cuando hiciste una pizza
no hundio la pata en la masa.
No lo insultes ni le pegues,
o te las veras conmigo
No te metas con mi antelope,
mi antelope es mi amigo.




There. Bring that into your English class, dude.

[Zoink]

That poem speak to me, makes me want a hug an antelope.

[InnerBrat]

I read some of my favourite poetry of all time in Grammar School - our GCSE set text was Narrative Verse, which included classic ballads like The Highwayman The Lady of Shallot and The Lion and Albert

[StimNeuro]

I read some of my favourite poetry of all time in Grammar School - our GCSE set text was Narrative Verse, which included classic ballads like The Highwayman The Lady of Shallot and The Lion and Albert

The Lady of Shallot was a good poem. Our teacher loved it so much that she had a painting of the Lady on the wall and a recording of the poem being read.

[Larz]

Tokers live and tokers die,
But in the end we all get high
So if in life you don't succed
Fuck it all and smoke some weed

Thats probably the only thing that my friend J.D. ever taught me (other then how completly fried we was and how stupid smokeing weed really can make you...)

[Andrew J.]

I've never understand the allure pf poetry, and I've never read a poem I really liked.

[HemlockGrey]

I like *good* poems. I hate abstract crap; i.e. a bunch of words strung together

I live
I die
In the shimmering waters
Of your soul
Why is the darkness
Always around me
Inside, like dirt
Under my fingernails

See? Were that not satire, I would kill myself for writing it.

[Saurencaerthai]

Poetry is charged writing. It usually tries to say the most using the least and can be taken at so many levels. It is metaphor, so therefore it can often go off on what might seem to be obscure tangents. Whether or not it's good writing, though, well, that's all up to opinion.

That's probably the best definition of poetry I've heard so far.

[jenat-lai]

here, yas can have a look at my poems if ya want...

www.geocities.com/jenat_lai/Poems.html


meanwhyle, I give you this... the ultimate in long! poems. By now deceased Australian poet, Kennith Slessor. Take a look at the second stanza, and the last stanza, it's an Awesome discriptive piece about Sydney Harbour at night. The rest is a long discription of a life, and some places in Australia. I believe it was voted favourite poem by an australian author at some poetry convention in 1998.


Five Bells
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
is not my time, the flood that does not flow
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From a dark Warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells

Deep and dissolving verticals of light,
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice Night and water
Pour into one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
in air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

Why do I think of you dead man, why thieve
these profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought,
Anchored in Time? you have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name,
Yet something's there yet something forms it's lips
And hit's and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

But I hear nothing, nothing... only bells,
Five bells the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud:
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but I forgot,
And all have now forgotten - looks and words
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(as now you'd cry if I could break the glass)

A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton and Melons and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes and how Tahitian girls
are brown and angry-toungued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry toungued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join,
So Milton became melons, melons girls
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something had just run, gone behind grass,
When, blank and bone-white like a maniac's thought,
The naphta-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in Darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.
Five Bells.

In Melbourne you appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-pawns of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left all without use
And without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
'At Labasa room 6 X 8
On top of the tower; because of this very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room - 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs
Guns, Photos of many different things
And different curioes that I obtained...'

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piery
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
Those funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, The flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, The waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.

I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died. I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or siezed it back, might I not hear your voice?

I looked out of my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackrel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.

Five bells.

[DPDarkPrimus]

My favorite poem is "Ozymandias", but that's an old poem, from 17th century.

[Zaia]

I read some of my favourite poetry of all time in Grammar School - our GCSE set text was Narrative Verse, which included classic ballads like The Highwayman The Lady of Shallot and The Lion and Albert

The Lady of Shallot was a good poem. Our teacher loved it so much that she had a painting of the Lady on the wall and a recording of the poem being read.

I have a poster of the Lady of Shallot, I have a framed poster of the Lady of Shallot, and I have a recording of Loreena McKennitt singing many of the verses of the poem of "The Lady of Shallot."

I like it too.

[RogueIce]

My favorite poem is "Ozymandias", but that's an old poem, from 17th century.

Isn't that the one about the guy who had all the monuments made, but in time they withered away, and it's all about how fame is fleeting and stuff? At least they way my class intepreted it.

I remember that stuff, last year mostly in Brit Lit English IV H. It all does make sense, on some level, when you stop to think about it. Even the most nonsensical ones could be pretty interesting when you try and see what they really mean.

Of course, my English teacher seemed to have far more fun with it than we did, but some of it was still pretty cool (like The Tyger, and some others I just can't remember right now).

[Darth Gojira]

I like *good* poems. I hate abstract crap; i.e. a bunch of words strung together

I live
I die
In the shimmering waters
Of your soul
Why is the darkness
Always around me
Inside, like dirt
Under my fingernails

See? Were that not satire, I would kill myself for writing it.

Same thing here. Ever read the work of William Carlos Williams? One his poems basically says "I'm sorry I ate your fruit". This is suppossed to be LITERATURE!!!!! Here's another work of his:
The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


I rest my case