people who don't hear themselves talk

[rinue]

I'm back up to about 70% or 80% mental function, whereas a couple weeks ago I was at around 50% according to my subjective evaluation.

I'm making feints at a longform(?) poem of national or international mourning that is full of loops because the pandemic event hasn't ended and my place in it could change. I'm blindly holding the nose of the elephant, so to speak.

As part of my thinking process, I've been looking at other famous national grieving poems, which I often have to search for sideways (looking up poems about the Vietnam War or the AIDS crisis or the Easter Rising), and which is a broad enough searching that I wind up reading a lot of poems that aren't what I'm looking for - poems that are about specific grief and individualized experience and trying to preserve a memory of a specific moment or person.

(There is for instance a poem Tennyson took 17 years to write about how he misses his friend. It has 132 chapters, because he kept adding to it, and in its final version the first two stanzas are an apology to God for still missing his friend even though God has to have had a plan. So that's now on my time machine list, to go back and tell Tennyson it's ok to yell at the sky, that death is indeed incomprehensible.)

One of the "oh of course" irritations I've run into and should have seen coming is that I'm turning up newly viral "old" poems about previous epidemics that claim to be from the 1800s or 1918, which I can immediately recognize are thoroughly contemporary writing. They feel relevant to now because they were written this year, and someone backdated them to make them seem spooky or important. Old poems don't use those techniques or cadences or have that view of society. Those are new poems! I can find their still-living authors using search engines!

I feel like I run into this way too often, into people who are convinced they hate contemporary art and contemporary poems, but who are in fact totally alienated by older speech patterns and structures and philosophies. Which makes sense! But goddamn.

Comments

[sovay]

One of the "oh of course" irritations I've run into and should have seen coming is that I'm turning up newly viral "old" poems about previous epidemics that claim to be from the 1800s or 1918, which I can immediately recognize are thoroughly contemporary writing.

I guess that's the occasional poetry equivalent of attributing all inspirational quotes to Abraham Lincoln, but jeez.

(I am fascinated how people always want things to be older than they are, as a guarantee of authenticity.)

I'm glad your brain levels are coming back up.

[rinue]

I bet if one of us was to make a canto out of lines from Abraham Lincoln speeches and title it "A Poem By Abraham Lincoln by Sovay/Rinue" it would do numbers.

[sabotabby]

I think I'm spared a lot of suffering by not reading viral poetry. I might have been the only person to find the inauguration poem good for such a young poet but the gushing over it a bit cringe, and anything I see that's posted on FB is just going to make me mad.