ur opinion on this poem i wrote about sensory issues
(Not titled yet)
The fuzziness
The confusion
Of the maze of convention
The chirps and screeches
Sucking cognition like leeches
Little by little
Weighing you down
Till you explode
It’s called overload
What I go through each day
No matter what I do
No matter what way
I try to go by
Expecting the unexpected
So I don’t jump
There’s no method perfected
To stop the pain
That’s going to come
Like a jolt of electricity trying to get to my brain
Through my ear
That’s what I get when all these sounds I hear
The sounds you ignore
That most can filter out
To me a whisper can sometimes sound like a shout
Especially when there are hundreds of whispers all around
Millions of different types of sounds
All at the same time
Without a rhyme
Just a mumble jumble
Of sounds all around
Nowhere to escape
Not knowing when the final blow
Will go
And knock you off the rim
And when you explode and have complete overload
I think contemporary language is very confusing when it comes to capturing the meanings and the full depth of things around us. Odd isn't it: we can do a sketch of something and tell immediately how well this represents what we see, but language, it's much harder to tell straight away, because there's a lot going on in it.
I like your poem, by the way,because it highlights this problem. Everything runs off at a tangent when you try and describe it accurately as a sensation, or a thing in itself. Our language is not up to job unless we really bend its conventional parameters.
Robert Graves really got into this. He came up with a slightly romantic vision of a much simpler language he ascribed to the Bronze Age people. He thought maybe this language was more connected to the real world of the time than ours is today. For example the letter V might originally derive from the V in the flight of a flock of wild geese. It's sound might have been the noise of the down-push of their wings and the echo of their call just on the edge of human hearing. It got all clipped and shortened when a new, necessary language absorbed its original qualities . Who knows ? They never really wrote anything down, it was an oral tradition.
If you can find a bit of silence in your head listen to the alphabet and listen real hard, the phonetics of the letters are comprised of multiple sounds and have real depth to them like musical notes, it s worth spending a day just doing that, because so few people even know what the stuff they "think in" actually sounds like.
The point is we couldn't have a language that directly related to concrete reality today because we need so many abstract ideas. Abstraction explains stuff in one way but seals us out of its full meanings in another.
Today we hear the buzz of confusion because we associate so many random sounds with our language.
Hundred years ago in rural Ireland, they heard the " bee loud glade"
Its in part the language we use to think with that shapes and forms what we are trying to comprehend. Most language structures fragment meaning and our ability to relate deeply . That's why it can't gather "everything" up, organize it and and generate an the unified field of the depth of meaning we actually need as human beings.
Language is like a program full of bugs that haven't been worked out of it . Poetry is a really good debugging exercise for language.
Go and have a look at how Basho, the Japanese poet found a solution to this problem. It's one solution, not the solution BTW. He learned to use inner silence to listen.
Any art form requires skill and insight and at least some originality. Language is a tool and has its limitations but all tools have their limitations and it is amusing what can be done within those limits. For instance:
THE CONCERT
Impatiently the clock’s baton
Taps the music to start up.
The orchestra is tuning.
I’ve heard a growling stegodon,
The fluting zip of positron,
The whine of humming magnetron,
A loon’s tragic crooning.
The melody’s been fugitive,
The theme wholly evasive.
The direction’s inconclusive.
Anticipations are abrasive..
The composer is a mystery,
With a foggy, misty history
Evoking mass confusion
As to the true conclusion.
The orchestra should soon commence.
The piece, of course, will be immense.
And, hopefully, it will make sense,
For up to now the tune-up has been looney.
The clash of motivations
With experimentations
Is amorphous, a shapeless hapless discord, a din.
The band is ready, waiting,
The baton anticipating.
The time has come for the music to begin.
Or
POET’S WORLD
Poetry is a landscape, wild,
Where brilliant colors flash
To glow in brilliance, fertilized
By random rubble, powdered ash
Of burnt out hope, energies beguiled
By ideals, loved and hates never realized.
No man can decide that this terrain
Shall not support this or that inflorescence.
Word and thought intertwine in random clasp
To erect growths of permanence or evanescence.
Gods and golliwogs stumble, somewhat insane
Through this world no single mind can grasp.
| Similar Topics | |
|---|---|
| A poem I just wrote about sensory issues/meltdown |
15 Jul 2013, 9:10 am |
| can I get ur opinion on my poem about sensory issues |
02 Mar 2010, 10:43 pm |
| What's your opinion on this romantic poem I wrote? |
21 Jul 2013, 6:27 pm |
| A Poem I wrote |
14 May 2010, 4:42 am |
