Bad Poetry
I have been terrible at updating this site, and in being creatively generally, not only since the start of this year, this new decade, but a little while before. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block exactly, it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve certainly had a dearth of creative output. Well, I’ve been writing my dissertation, but that’s only been here and there. No, I just haven’t been inspired for a while, and I’ve been busy, well, busyish. What have I been doing? I’m currently addicted to two games for a start: Forza Motorsport 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. The first is, as the name implies, a car game. I’m not even that into cars, a few months ago I couldn’t tell an R8 from a Veyron, a Dino from a Testarossa, but somehow I’ve been addicting to driving around in virtual sports cars, and it’s time-consuming. The second of those games is an epic fantasy game of the really geeky sort, with elves and dwarves and mages and such. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of that sort of thing, though I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s such a well-made game that can’t help but love it. Girlfriends take up time too, but I can hardly complain about that.
I don’t think I’ve read or watched anything of great inspiration lately either, not something that’s made me want to go off and write or even write about it. The last really great movie I watched was Let the Right One In, which I highly recommend, but otherwise I seem to have just been watching b-movies and comedies and such, oh, and I watched Forbidden Planet finally, but I was tired and half-asleep by its end, and somehow it wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for: I rather prefer the implausability and exaggeration of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars.
As for reading, I just a few minutes ago finished Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s a very short novella, and it has the typical Capote flair in the writing, but there’s something about his writing style that’s kind of boring. It’s hard to explain, but stuff that is consistently good can be boring, and with Capote there’s none of the wordplay or sudden flights of fancy in Joyce or Woolf. It’s like with those latter writers they really feel what they’re writing, but Capote seems more like he just developed this rather masterful manner of expression and from that base is able to just churn out stories. The plot also seemed a little ridiculous, with a sixty year-old woman running away from her sister’s house to stay in a tree-house for several days with her sixteen-year-old nephew, from whose viewpoint the story is told. The characters seem a little too colourful to be plausible, only a little, mind, but it was a little too much for me. Capote, I’m also going to point out, was good friends with Harper Lee, and there was speculation for many years that he actually wrote, or largely wrote, To Kill a Mockingbird and put it out under her name. To Kill a Mockingbird I think is quite different from what Capote work I’ve read, and far superior, so I don’t see how people could have believed that.
The other book I finished recently was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the classics of Russian literature. I’ve never read a Russian novel before, and the only Realist novel I’ve read was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which did not compel me to read to its conclusion. I was rather disappointed with Crime and Punishment also. For a start, there was a lot of authorial intrusion, which irks me, though I doubt the average reader is even aware of the term. It basically means the author interjects opinions into the text, even though the author is this ethereal voice that exists beyond the text, on a different ontological plain if you want to get poncy about it. Modernist literature doesn’t do that, primarily because the Modernist movement was a reaction against the Realist fiction of the previous century. (This is what my dissertation is about, so I’ve been learning more about this lately). So authorial intrusion, I find, kind of takes one out of the story, because it’s like the director of a film jumping in with comment suddenly out of nowhere. The characters also seemed to lack psychological depth, or at least the psychological depth I like in Modernism. It’s debatable whether that’s true or not, but it would be accurate to say that in Realist fiction characters are defined through action and in Modernist fiction characters are defined through thought. I prefer the latter. So, yes, I saw the book through to the end, and I did feel a certain amount of intrigue waiting for the next twist of the plot, but every twist never quite satisfied me, and even I felt the title seemed unjustified: there was neither that much crime, nor that much punishment.
I’m starting a new Virginia Woolf book tonight though, so that might at least make me happier, though it will be Night and Day, her second novel, so not quite as ‘modernist’ as her later novels. Anyway, since there’s been so few updates recently, and really, I have nothing new to show, I thought I’d drag out something old, from the archives you might say. So, in a minute, I shall paste in some poetry I wrote when I was a teenager, and a young one at that. Bad poetry, of course, the sort one does write as a teenager. I’d like to think I got marginally better over the years, but poetry has never been my forte. And, if you’d like, you can use the following three examples as instructional aids in how not to write a poem. Really, if you ever write anything resembling this, I recommend not showing it to anyone with any semblance of earnestness, only perhaps as a novelty five or more years afterwards.
No more than human
No need to speak,
there’s an eternity of words,
and sensations,
in every touch,
and with every touch,
millions of sensory neurones tingle,
as the heart flutters.
Slowly, nervously,
(anticipation makes the blood flow faster)
the covering is pulled away,
and, like candy,
no matter how beautiful the wrapping,
the inside is always sweeter,
expected and proven.
Every curve flaunts its perfection
in the soft ambience of the clouded sunlight,
the eyes know it,
the fingers know it,
the tongue knows it,
no more than human,
no less than love.
Love has no glory
Once upon a time,
Distance was our only division,
But love could not prevail,
You made too deep an incision
We had something once,
That distance could not take,
My dreams are still of you,
But the truth hurts when I awake
You took it away,
With his love that you returned,
Now we can’t go back,
Our crossed bridges we have burned
I hold on still,
To that distant memory,
It was only ever a dream really,
Love has no glory
Ropes and strings
Time like a spool
A reel ahead
A straight path laid out in
Red string
Two hearts tied together with
The strongest rope
Unbreakable
The strings just strengthened
The bond
Until
They got so tangled
There were too many of them
We lost sight of the rope
We weren’t sure whether it was still there
Any more
Or whether it was just the tangled
Spaghetti strings
Tying us together
Strangling us
Now came the scissors
The blood
The hurt
Cutting everything
Down to that central rope
It was still there
As strong as
ever
And if, for some reason, you liked reading these, perhaps in the way that I enjoy watching really shoddy, low-budget horror films, there’s plenty more where it came from. Just let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to post up some more. I might even dig out a few old teenage stories about vampires and angels and such for your delection.
P.S. My girlfriend illustrated Glitter and you can see the pictures over at Victoria Stitch.
Tags: bad poetry, Crime and Punishment, dissertation, Dragon Age, Forbidden Planet, Forza, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Harper Lee, horror, Invaders from Mars, James Joyce, Modernism, Night and Day, poems, Poetry, Relationships, Teenage, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote, Virginia Woolf
