Osore wrote:
gasmask_colostomy on "Imprints" wrote:
I read this in much more detail last week. Is there an owl? It's a great topic and a smart way to write the poem too.
Thanks! I'm afraid I wasn't evoking any owls there, but I can picture them in my mental map of that imaginary place. There's a wood with hoarfrost on naked, black branches; night falls. There's a small clearing, and you walk there. You hear strange whispers and sounds among the branches, and fireworks suddenly break the eerie
silence. Perhaps you see spectres: strange, shapeless white lights or shadows. Or is it just a fog in the moonlight?
I'm obsessed with this image of ghosts dancing in the woods, but I don't mention it explicitly, partly because it's purely fantastical.
To go back to the owls. They have soundless feathers; one time an owl flew right above my head at night and I was captivated by its bright and mute appearance. It might have been the same owl that had a nest on a tree in front of my house and used to distract me when I was studying by the window. One time two magpies were flying around her, making unfriendly sounds, and she was just sitting there trying to protect herself (and possibly her eggs or young ones) with wings. The other time I saw her swinging on a branch from left to right on a windy and rainy day, saying: ''Hoo, hoo!'' which I perfectly understood.
The saddest story is when I found her eggs crashed below the tree, and later a dead young owl. She left the nest after that and never came back.
Weird that I became pretty sure there was an owl being described in that section "Rustle was incautiously passing...As if something was hiding". Again, I thought I could see its eyes gazing glassily around during the "dry blinks". I quite like that experience when writing gives the reader a totally different - but still very clear - image compared to what the writer intended. Poetry does that more than prose because of its condensed nature, though I've seen it with both.
Osore wrote:
To compensate for telling stories rather than sharing poems, here's a prose poem I translated just to show its chaotic complexity. I won't reveal the theme (which is psycho-philosophical). I'll just say my intention was to paint the sky colours using sounds (which are lost in translation). Pretentious, I know.
The picture seen in the spoiler was made from the photograph I took and covered with fragments from
Puzzle (words in Cyrillic).
PUZZLE
Can you hear?...
Dry attire is being torn by the zeppelins.
Down the blind hoods are swarming while the eyeless are levitating.
And blissful mimicries of gentle, but insensible ribbons are swaying breezily in a departure with a shadow. The call of the entrancing lanterns behind the lighter anxieties of testaments. You, bewitched doppelgängers of gemstone’s reflections!... Sing like the livid wave is swinging. My head is light when it dreams of a steel man. Soared like feathers tickled by the wind that disperses croaks far, far away.
They darken this gloom of miserable trackers.
As if damp leaves murmur, scratching the sleepy fall under the unicoloured threads. Reminiscence of soft sharpness with leaded sigh.
Zestful palletes, paste me vanilla with resin, weepy. Your willow forests waggle towards cold cypress. Do not fade, wait.
White feathers will wing-cover the upset black draperies. And leaves shall still be begged in vain. And they are going to radiate resinously. In vain.
Dirigibles crumple the last velvety intangibilities.
They have never existed. Damned beggars are rotten yields.
We all had been beseeching that way. But now? You nullify the peeled. Or you scream, stripped flare-ups, oh, see – you have fallen, pathetic corpses.
Your head, and mine, and ours! ashy confetti and everywhere the pairs of sockets still warm in the ember have decorated the cypress.
…castanets respond to the willows…neither we are…For the sake of the clarity, the ones in the zeppelin have fallen and their scorched heads ended up dispersed among the trees. Think about explosion with massive fire, think about Hindenburg if you will, or look at two inspiring images I used superimposed at first:
https://pesimum.wordpress.com/2016/12/30/puzzle/.
Well, the note you gave afterwards definitely changed the perspective, because the initial idea (pretentiously describing the sky with sounds) feels a bit content-less compared to that specific imagery you gave with the flesh confetti. As usual, there's a lot going on, most of which has that uncanny feeling, like it's being translated through the mind of someone mentally ill. I know the first time I saw that, I tried to correct your grammar
but now I quite like the blurriness it gives everything, feeling the language like viewing the world without wearing glasses. Two little snippets stand out particularly for me: "Zestful palletes, paste me vanilla with resin" is a crazy cool line that I will take to the grave, and thanks also for teaching me a synonym for 'airship' in 'dirigible'.
Osore on 'Angles' wrote:
After translating some words, I see it begins like someone is crushed on a pavement (although rugby is played on grass), than comes the S1 switch which I'm clueless about (it gives you more tonal options by offering extra pickup-wiring configurations
), and the rest is clearly about a commentator, who probably uses that switch to configure the sound, I guess. I'm horrible with electric techniques.
It sounds good to my ears, it's not forced or overdone, but the theme is light years away from my planet (I'm currently eating ice cream on Europa/Jupiter II
).
Hence why I apologized for the rugby stuff. An S1 switch has nothing to do with electrical wiring, it's a passing move where one player deliberately runs diagonally in front of a teammate, transferring the ball as he does so. It changes the direction of attack instantly, which is why it's known as a switch. The 'centres' referred to are two adjacent positions on a rugby team, who are usually the ones using switch techniques or defending against them, so their "static geometry" refers to the defense being unprepared for the change of angle.
In fact, the whole poem is a meditation on angles in general and not specifically rugby playing, since even what the commentator does while talking ("recalibrates microphone and throat") is a kind of realigning and shifting of angles, as is his metaphor about opening biscuits. I wrote this during a period when I obsessed a lot about architecture, gaps, and spaces; I would usually imagine lines in my head like a kind of graphic drawing, some of which were sane (the line of a beam of light coming down from halogen floodlights onto a pitch) and some of which were not (the lines that shoulder
blades make down into the pavement when you're walking). The poem is a stream of thought that starts with a memory of following cracks in a pavement, then the gritty texture of concrete reminding me of the artificial pitch in the sports centre where I worked, then the imagined game on that pitch, then the commentator of that game, and finally a summary thought.
That kind of writing really appeals to me, because it's a continual flow of thought that operates through (personal) logical connections. It's not like stream of consciousness, it's more a stream of logic. Most of the poems I wrote in that style were after I stole the technique wholesale from Ciaran Carson. I think I mentioned him earlier in the thread, but I want to share another of his poems to explain what I mean about the stream of logic. Also, I'm not writing much these days.
Snow
A white dot flicked back and forth across the bay window: not
A table- tennis ball, but ‘ping-pong,’ since this is happening in another era,
The extended leaves of the dining table - scratched mahogany veneer -
Suggesting many such encounters, or time passing: the celluloid diminuendo
As it bounces off into a corner and ticks to an incorrigible stop.
I pick it up days later, trying to get that pallor right: it’s neither ivory
Nor milk. Chalk is better and there’s a hint of pearl, translucent
Lurking just behind opaque. I broke open the husk so many times
And always found it empty the pith was a wordless bubble.
Though there’s nothing in the thing itself, bits of it come back unbidden,
Playing in the archaic dust till the white blip became visible.
Just as, the other day, I felt the tacky pimples of a ping- pong bat
When the bank-clerk counted my money with her rubber thimble, and knew
The black was bleeding into red. Her face was snow and roses just behind
The bullet-proof glass: I couldn’t touch her if I tried. I crumpled up the chit-
No use in keeping what you haven’t got-and took a stroll to Ross’s auction.
There was this Thirties scuffed leather sofa I wanted to make a bid for.
Gestures, prices: soundlessly collateral in the murmuring room.
I won’t say what I paid for it: anything’s too much when you have nothing.
But in the dark recesses underneath the cushions I found myself kneeling
As decades of the Rosary dragged by, the slack of years ago hauled up
Bead by bead and with them, all the haberdashery of loss - cuff buttons,
Broken ball-point pens and fluff, old pennies, pins and needles, and yes,
A ping-pong ball. I cupped it in my hands like a crystal, seeing not
The future, but a shadowed parlour just before the blinds are drawn.
Someone has put up two trestles. Handshakes all round, nods and whispers.
Roses are brought in, and suddenly, white confetti seethes against the window.