The Platonic Blow


sorabji.com: Is it art?: The Platonic Blow
THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016).

By Spider on Thursday, March 20, 2008 - 10:03 pm:

    Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

    I have a really hard (*pffft* that's what he said!) time believing Auden wrote that thing. Auden just may be the most boring American poet this side of Robert Frost, but he's not a *bad* poet.

    The internal rhyme might have seemed like a good idea at first, but in the end shared chief responsibility for the poem's horrible-tude with the mind-bendingly bad euphemisms.

    "The firm vase of his sperm"?

    "THE TOWER OF POWER"?!

    Christ Almighty, dudes. There's better Torchwood slash being furiously penned by teenaged girls as we speak than that.

    W.H Auden? For serious?



By droopy on Thursday, March 20, 2008 - 11:30 pm:

    that poem has been floating around for years. usually no one has really taken it seriously, but every so often it crops up again.

    i don't like every word auden wrote, but i don't consider him as boring as frost. a couple of my favorite poems are by auden. i also don't consider him an american - he's an englishman who moved to the u.s.


By Spider on Friday, March 21, 2008 - 09:39 pm:

    Hmm, I did not know that.

    Which of his poems do you like?


    I did find this. Which...I guess proves he did write it? It was kind of confusing.

    I did love this, though:
    Again, my issue with it isn't that Auden couldn't have written it because he wasn't a gay or something, it's that the poem just isn't all that good.
    EGGZACTLY.

    But, see, then when I embarked upon some forensic comparison, I began to believe that, yes, Auden could be capable of such excrescence.

    I can believe that someone who wrote
    ...Others say, Law is our Fate;
    Others say, Law is our State;
    Others say, others say
    Law is no more,
    Law has gone away.

    And always the loud angry crowd,
    Very angry and very loud,
    Law is We,
    And always the soft idiot softly Me.
    ...
    wrote
    ...
    Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
    I couldn't move. I didn't know what to say.
    In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
    "Will you come to my room?" Then a husky voice, "O.K."

    I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
    He told me his story. Present address: next door.
    Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
    Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.
    ...


    Looking through a handful of his poetry, I see the same short sentences, the same rhyme schemes...

    And then Wikipedia provided this quote:
    Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".[13]
    That would explain how his narrator could look upon a 3"-wide cock and not run screaming. So much for realism.


By Nate on Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 01:51 pm:

    I've never seen anyone run screaming from a 3"-wide cock.


By droopy on Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 02:30 pm:

    speaking of auden and genitals. auden aged badly - by which i mean his face had deep, craggy wrinkles by the time he was an old man. someone, i can't remember who, once said, "if that's what his face looks like, imagine his scrotum."

    here are some auden poems i came across online (commas make it unlinkable):

    http://books.guardian.co.uk/greatpoets/auden/0,,2260112,00.html

    the first auden poem i ever came across and liked was "as i walked out one evening". when that "suffering" discussion was going on, i found myself thinking about "musee de beaux artes" (though i've heard one person say that has some of the most fatuous first lines in all poetry).


By Spider on Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 06:07 pm:

    "Musée des Beaux Arts" is a good example of my trouble with Auden -- his ideas are interesting and well worth exploring, but his syntax falls short of the mark.

    Well, in my opinion. And it's not like I could do better.

    Other poets use short, blunt sentences to good effect -- Mark Strand, A.R. Ammons, even Leonard Cohen -- so it's not that.

    I don't know.


    The first line in his wiki entry is "Wystan Hugh Auden...was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[2]"

    That makes me want to bust out the cat macros that say O RLY?

    Hell, I'll do it myself: OH REALLY?


    I do like "Secrets," though.


By droopy on Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 07:00 pm:

    i liked "secrets", too; that site up there was there first time i'd ever come across it.

    can't anyone edit a wikipedia entry if they want? maybe you can get on there and change the "many" to "some", or maybe "many with no taste".

    i honestly don't know what else to say about auden. i've never *loved* auden; he's just a guy who has written a some poems (among hundreds) that i've found interesting. i certainly don't have the high standards that you seem to have. to me, "musee..." is informal or conversational and happens to say something that i've thought myself.

    but i get a kick about how worked up you're getting about this.



By Spider on Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 11:44 pm:

    Well, it's either get worked up about Auden;

    or,

    complete a vocab quiz, design an online public access catalog, study for another quiz, search for articles on file sharing in libraries, write 10 min. worth of discussion questions, evaluate five thesauri, assign subject headings to ten books, create an authority record for an author, and write a project interim report.

    All due Tuesday.



    So, I think I'll contemplate the bad gay porn. :)


By Spider on Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 11:45 pm:

    Hey, I just noticed Mark fixed the time stamp.



By Dr Pepper on Sunday, March 23, 2008 - 07:50 pm:

    I liked Henry David Thoreau; the Thoreauvian way of life.


By Dr Pepper on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 09:37 pm:

    SO, sorabji is so quiet at this time again?


By Dr Pepper on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 09:38 pm:

    Spider, you got that right, Mark surely did fixed his time, mine is less than a hour but 5 min ahead of time.


By J on Monday, July 27, 2009 - 01:28 am:

    Wow I just saw Dr.Pepper has been here over a year,did he ever really get a FUCK YOU,YOU ASS? Huh?


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