Stranger Music<\/i><\/a> from the bookshelf and reacquainted myself with the world of blank verse. It’s a scary world, actually. But one I very much enjoy. <\/p>\nThe words, if you’re inclined to care about such things:<\/p>\n
The only poem<\/b><\/p>\n
This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me<\/p>\n
It’s not Sappho or Chaucer, but it is … something. I can’t quite place how I feel about Leonard Cohen. There are some of his poems that just give me a quick punch to the gut and make me sit down and smile. There are others that piss me off; “Is this it? This is shit!” But I get that. Not every poem a person writes is going to mean something to any- and everyone. Some things people write are meaningful only to the authors themselves, and perhaps to the select few people on the planet who happen to be in a similar situation. The hedged language makes sense. The metaphors aren’t over-wrought. Etc.<\/p>\n
So it goes with Cohen. His poetry is very specific, yet comes bundled with meanings that can be extrapolated again and again. I’m not sure I can explain it much better than that. <\/p>\n
Funny that the other day as I was digging through my inbox, trying to discard the extraneous stuff, I found several poems I’d written that I’d sort of forgotten about. Here’s one I actually kind of like, from mid-2006:<\/p>\n
Dulcinea<\/b><\/p>\n
I had you at nothing
No words
A flash of leg, perhaps
funny
I remember laughing
But I knew what I was doing
Priming the pump
so to speak
A pump that was not mine
and that I did not want
at the time
because I was busy
my hands in a trough<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[for Wednesday, July 25] My vacation from the internet earlier today (Wednesday) was actually quite nice. Granted, I was practically under house arrest while I waited for the landlord to call me back, but it was still a very quiet, contemplative morning and afternoon. I fetched Stranger Music from the bookshelf and reacquainted myself with the world of blank verse. It’s a scary world, actually. But one I very much enjoy. The words, if you’re… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[234,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-project-365"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-oT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a><\/p>\n