Pull Me Through The Temples, Pull Me Through The Wine - Targets 4, 1960

[ROC]

Exactly.
People like what they like and define things later to suit themselves.
You can even suspect something is crap and still love it - what did Nietzsche say about the necessary not being contingent on truth?

Ornette also plays the trumpet and violin - badly - but I still love his music.
Cecil Taylor recites horrible, mumbling poetry - but he's still a crazy genius.

Bukowski wrote some shit, but one in ten, one in fifty? Who's to say?

It's when people talk as if they have the monopoly on the truth that I start to worry.
Like we even know what truth is!

 

[Paul B.]

whenever i am reading a poem - and suddenly it becomes obvious that what i am reading is supposed to be a poem - i notice the repeated use of certain letters or words like "like" - or any and all of the "tricks" - when i see this obviousness occuring it makes me ill, and i turn the page or go on with something else. "my love is like a red red rose..." - once said, needs not be said again. i am for avoiding the sideshow antics unless, perhaps, those antics are used to prove some point - or, possibly, in a new and original way. otherwise - i just want to hear the voice of the writer im reading come through - i dont want all his or her high learning and creative writing classes clogging up the stanzas. i dont think im going out on a limb here saying this. it seems pretty much to be what bukowski talks about. am i not getting my point across? same thing goes with movies and paintings and all the other arts. i just hate bullshit. das ist alles.

paul

 

[hoochmonkey9]

i just hate bullshit. das ist alles.

I hope so.

 

[Paul B.]

yeah shithead - thats it for me.

bye bye

 

[hoochmonkey9]

ending a rant against bullshit with a foreign phrase just smacks of bullshit.

 

[wayne]

the buk would be proud of these threads .thank you gents now for a nip of the grape.

 

[hobart]

People with university literary educations - here's where I alienate half the forum members, I suppose - tend to give more weight and validity to things that are obtuse and impossible to understand.

Whoop-tee-do, I have a degree in Literature. I had a professor that once told an entire class, "If it don't move ya, move on."
What moves me is obivously not gonna always move you or you or even my mother.
What is a shitty poem? One that reeks of nothing. No emotion, no raw intensity, no blood and guts, no screaming from the deep untold dark places in your bulletridden soul. To me anyway.

Every writer has the "shits". The greatest do and the unknown do. You do and I do.

You can compare poems from different times, years, books side-by-side and say this is better and this line is great and this line sucks. The discussion afterward is the key. Why does that line speak to me and not to you?

Metaphors and allegories and all the tricks of the trade aside ... "If it don't move ya, move on."