On some faraway beach (doomsurfing remix)

[philip john]

Hello Matt,

Two nice haiku - the first one has a lovely line-break on 'grow' for the double meaning.

The second one is a bit difficult for me to grasp - it comes across as clever word-play, but can be read as humorous nonsense I guess.

There might be a missed opportunity on the second line-
watching the trees grow - watching ..... trees grow, for bit of imagery, perhaps a species that ties in with 'surf sounds' ?

Thanks for sharing................Philip

[Sorella]

They are coming -- So crazy: dry writing mixed with fun trivial snippets. I adore "There are rumours of a free plastic pen. These are likely false."

The sonnet is bang on! Exactly how it feels to be uninspired, and sonnets seem to add structure, sense, even elegance and certainly lend a hand with the sharp end of your poem

More later. Always interesting in your thread.

Sorella

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Dunc, Brian, Jo, Cameron, Danny, Steve, Phillip, Sorella

Thanks everyone!

Brian, thanks for flagging the typo in the sonnet.

Just one haiku today ...

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

picking over
my future bones
morning seagull

[kristalynn]

Great haiku! Just love "evening shadows."

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

A simple approach, two references to time (serving as stand ins for kigo). The images have an interesting relationship, and make sense in context, not merely arbitrary.

BrianIs AtYou

[Dunc]

Matt

Arrgh, Cap'n Mandala the Pirate on some desolate Caribbean shore? The image has a disturbing edge that's just right.

Regards / Dunc

[JoKingly]

Kudos for amplifying my already intense dislike for seagulls.

Jo

[scraps]

Hi Matt,

Nicely done - it captures that feeling I have that since all seagulls seem identical - maybe none of them have ever died.

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Andrea, Brian, Dunc and Steve

Many thanks for reading and fluffing! It's much appreciated.

So, I've spent a lot of time looking out of my window this past year ...

-Matt

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Across the street, and at the same time projected upside-down onto my retina, a squirrel leaps from a shaking branch and lands on the top of a row of garages. No one can truly know what it is like to be a squirrel, but I want to believe this leap is a moment of joy, a gap in the huddled moments of flea-driven twitching and predation anxiety, and yet, knowing life as I do, I suspect otherwise. A year now, and I have seen no one use these garages. Cars are left in front of them, but never inside. The corrugated roof of one has started to collapse inward, opening up its insides to the sky. No one knows exactly what it is like to be an unvisited garage with a slowly-crumbling roof, but many of us, I think, can relate. Heidegger says that truth is like coming across a clearing in the forest. The garages sit in a clearing in the forest of houses that populate the other side of the road. Through this gap in the house-fronts, over the tops of these garages, the backs of three tall houses are unhidden to me, up here in my third-floor flat. All external pipework and overgrown back-gardens, and festooned with precarious first-story extensions, they were not designed for public view, and they have no façades -- and this, surely, is some kind of truth. It is also a curiously intimate view to have from my window. Let us not even pretend: everybody knows exactly what it’s like to be a house whose private parts are unexpectedly exposed to a stranger’s gaze. Just as everyone knows the fear of years of slow, lonely decay as the wind and the rain come in, and everyone wishes for a few drops, just now and then, of the joy that this squirrel might possibly be feeling as it nails yet another jump.

.

[Dunc]

Matt

Alētheia ─ 'Truth', 'reality' ─ and the power of a suburban outlook to touch the chords of melancholy; the squirrel as no more than a possibility of relief (but their energy and quckness convey joie de vivre just as you say) and the personified garage as a personal take on decay, Nice weaving of the ideas, the bringing on of the wrap-up. Deft uncheerfulness, as it were. ("not never" in line 4?)

Regards / Dunc

[Cameron Clark]

This reminds me of your wale beached in the Thames poem, it has that same quality of N-reflecting-on-nature-to-reflect-upon-n's-self narrative voice. Certainly, when we reach the garages and every sentence builds upon the last is where the poem really startles. You can safely keep this one, I think, it is one of your week's best.

Hope this helps.

[scraps]

Hi Matt,

I really liked this one - especially the repetition of 'no one really knows' and the wonderful image of the roofless garage in a clearing in a forest of flats like Heidegger's clearing in a forest - goddamn, that gave me chills. Something about structures with no roofs - old abbeys, churches, garages, - the act of walking inside and expecting a roof but seeing the sky is especially celestial.

Steve

[JFN]

Matt, I'm sorry it's taken so long to get back. What prose poem book is it? I could do with reading up on it at some point too, see if I can elevate these Sevens drafts.


I like your sonnet on poetry, and the pox reference immediately puts me in mind of Shakespeare, which is canny for the sonnet. It does raise that age old question of when something becomes art or poetry, and whether there can be poetry in the straightforward use of language. The idea of painting the void any colour other than black works well in putting the idea into a more concrete image.


Really like the break on grow in your first haiku. It allows the first image of growing trees to sit before the subsequent lengthening shadows set in. Very nice.


It's not often I read a haiku with the same endword on two lines that works, but you bet full of holes works really well. It's humourous, but there's more to it than just humour.


There is something disturbing about the bones haiku, something ominous and foreshadowing. The gull is so much more effective than the often reached for vulture, and will work with your other ocean based poems nicely.


You paint the view in Alētheia very well. It's bleak, even down to the realism of the squirrel's joy being potentially non-existent. The self-referencing lines like knowing life as I do brings us deeply into N's mindset. I think it works really well. I'm fond of unhidden as well, which alludes to the development of the buildings over time far more than revealed would. One of several very well chosen words.


Glad to have finally caught up.


John