HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: HELP NEEDED (Is poetry luxury?)
From: conrad@kryton.UUCP (Konstatin Kalikanzaros)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 21:37:48 PST
Organization: Paradox Alley F&SF BBS 805-492-8789

wachtel@canon.co.uk (Tom Wachtel) writes:

> casteley@phil.ruu.nl (Eric Casteleyn) writes:
> 
> >   I recently overheard someone say that poetry is a luxury item. In-
> > tuitively I disagreed, but I've had some trouble putting together a 
> > definitive article to prove him wrong. Maybe he was right. Maybe I'm
> > stupid. I sincerely hope the latter.
> 
> 
> 	if you need an argument
> 	the other has won it
> 
> -- 
> 
> Tom Wachtel (wachtel@canon.co.uk)

Shear defeatism!


____________________________________________________________________________
Reality is for people that can't handle Science fiction.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: ralph@wixer.cactus.org (Ralph Cherubini)
Subject: Poem--Speechless
Organization: Real/Time Communications
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 13:03:19 GMT


                                Speechless

                When I'm with you
                I have nothing to say
                as if every word previously uttered
                had been a step towards
                disappearing into the next
                into the final beginning of our lying together.

                Speechless
                am I still myself?



-- 
ralph@wixer.cactus.org
cactus.org!wixer!ralph
From: benge_kl@lrc.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Question...
Date: 4 Nov 92 14:03:02 EDT
Organization: Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC

Question...
===========

I know what year Columbus set out
To sail the ocean blue.

I know that Gen'ral Wellington
Beat Napoleon at Waterloo.

I know what NaCl means.
I know what a byte is.
I know the difference between a metaphor and a simile.
I even know how to hang a ceiling fan.

I wish I knew something useful.
Anything worth knowing.

I wish I knew where Happiness lives.
I wish I knew how to make Her love me.
I wish I knew what sex feels like to women.
I wish I knew if childbirth is worth it.
I wish I knew if I have an everlasting soul.
I wish I knew if there is a God who loves me.

I wish I knew what Man is for.

Why does the world ask me to accept
All the important stuff on faith?

Is it afraid to tell me?

                                          KLeb the NoMad

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: gardabr@unix1 (Gard Eggesbo Abrahamsen)
Subject: Reality Close
Organization: University of Trondheim, Norway
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 15:09:38 GMT

       Reality Close
====================

  She fucks me
  just by standing there
  virtually trespassing
  every part of my body
  and my wildest fantasies
  accross 100 feet
  of empty air

  now she does it again
  pumping the shit out of me
  and she's not even close
  so why should I say hello?

                Gard 11.11.1992

C&C welcome!
From: wachtel@canon.co.uk (Tom Wachtel)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: Air Collusion
Keywords: colly-wobbles, Colonel Blimp
Date: 10 Nov 92 10:34:23 GMT
Reply-To: wachtel@canon.co.uk
Organization: Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd

cecilw@access.isc-br.com (Cecil Williams) writes:


>                        Air
> 
>               Where has this air been,
>               that fills my lungs each breath?
>               What past could this one breath reveal?
>               Does it often climb to stratospheric     
>               currents, then back to ground as breath
>               for another? Has this breath
>               ever been a warm beach breeze
>               under a pale moon sky in Havana,
>               or a bitter Siberian mid-winter's gale?
>               Has this air ever dashed round wildly
>               riding the eye of a storm?
>               Did Tutankamon or Jesus Christ           
>               or the Bhudda ever breathe this air,
>               now mine for one moment? 
>               Whose breathe was it yesterday?          
>               Will it be your breath tomorrow?            
> 
> 
>                            11/06/92
> 
>               ---------------------------------
> 
>               Cecil Williams  |  Liz Haight
>               Spokane, WA     |  Valley Falls, NY



	where that what does
	currents for ever under
	or has riding did
	or now whose will
	your breath tomorrow


-- 

Tom Wachtel (wachtel@canon.co.uk)
From: benge_kl@lrc.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Regrets
Date: 6 Nov 92 14:50:00 EST
Organization: Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC


Thanks for all the feedback, guys.  I was almost afraid of being snubbed
on my first time out.  Some of you said you wanted to see some more, so 
here I am again.

Regrets
=======

I remember once,
A long time ago,
I used to love my feelings.
I used to play with them
And bathe with them
And stroke them--
Even the porcupine of hatred--
All day long.

And then came the age of coolness.
Suddenly, everyone I knew
Either didn't have feelings
Or chose not to show them.
Either way, I was out of place.
So I took my feelings out in the backyard
And buried them.
I planned to come back and get them later.
I really did.

The next day, I saw something surprising.
My feelings had grown
And were about to dig their way back up.
I wasn't nearly ready for them yet,
So I dug a deeper hole and reburied them.
I did that every day for years.

And now?
Now, I'm ready to get my feelings back,
But there's a problem.
They're now at the bottom of a terribly deep pit.
I can't see them, they're so far down.
I can hear them, though,
Scratching at the walls
And screaming.

I am afraid of them.
I can set them free.
But will they still be the playful creatures I remember?
Or will they kill me in revenge for imprisoning them?
I would kill me.

Sometimes,
Not all the time,
But sometimes,
I think that's why I write poetry.
To set them free a little at a time.
In my own way.

Or are they already free
And forgiving me
A little at a time,
In their own way?

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: sswieren@nyx.cs.du.edu (stephan swierenga)
Subject: Las Vegas Samurai
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix @ U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 21:03:58 GMT

posting for a friend, he says c&c is welcome...

======================================================      

                Las Vegas Samurai


        A woman so wild with sorrow
        Confused at her existence
        confused at the existence
        Putting sex red on her lips


       The Las Vegas lounge date
       in Samurai Harlem
       He forgets the quiet friend's
       celebrity shakes the crowd

      
      The icebox late night
      pretty red toenails
      extracts the packaged prize
      a surprise bumping in the night

      Fucking like mad dogs
      the cigarette plight
      leans on the darkened icebox
      images churning for all ever

     The nest package asphyxiates
     the cloned hair piece
     of dime store lives
     musing on freedom in other places


  Hajii

==================================================
sswieren@nyx.cs.du.edu
From: nikolay@husc10.harvard.edu (Philip Nikolayev)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: Thoughts
Date: 8 Nov 92 18:28:55 GMT
Organization: The Kremlin Wall of Harvard
In-reply-to: ramakris@gn.ecn.purdue.edu's message of 8 Nov 92 14:29:37 GMT

ramakris@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Balaji Ramakrishnan) writes:


> Thoughts

> What's in a poem That ain`t in a rhyme What's in a chime That makes
> it ring all the time It`s thoughts like these That make this world
> so sublime

> Neither music from 106.7 Nor the noise from the fan Can stop the
> thought I just expressed Every thought is unique That`s lifes great
> mystique

>                                       --- Balaji

How unique, and how banal. This is not a contradiction.
Everything is unique; most things are banal. What I like
about this poem, though, is the Freudian slip in the last
line. 'Mystique', contrary to what you seem to think,
does not mean 'mystery'; but the word describes the poem
itself very accurately.

Why is all poetry _about_ the uniqueness of anything -
about every moment being unlike any other; about any new 
home being something different; about beauties inimitable,
et cetera - always such unpardonable trash? 

I'd suggest that you flush your thoughts, and stick to ideas.

Philip Nikolayev
nikolay@husc.harvard.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: moh2@quads.uchicago.edu (Kateri/Mary Anne)
Subject: Perils of Habitual Skepticism (c&c welcome)
Reply-To: moh2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 15:53:18 GMT

Perils of Habitual Skepticism

At times I almost envy you your confidence.
Your serene assurance that
after years of struggle and confusion,
you have arrived at
The Truth.

I'd like to take refuge in the wisdom of the ancients,
claiming that "I know only that I do not know".
Refute your belief,
assert my intelligence in knowing myself ignorant.

But the doubting Thomas doubts even that,
and my mind is swamped in half-examined certainties,
no less real for being impossible.

A realm populated by ghosts of the truth;
a morass of hidden byways and paths to revelation.

Drowning in this quicksand, lacking the aloofness of pure skepticism,
Or the support of belief,
I am easy prey to despair.

If only I could believe!

I can almost wish that.

*****

M.A. Mohanraj
November 4, 1992
-- 
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.  One
path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.  The other to total
extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
						 - Woody Allen
From: root@bing.UUCP (Administrator)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: mornings
Date: 6 Nov 92 05:14:02 GMT
Organization: Bing's Rubber Chicken Factory -- "Our clucks are boneless."

mornings

she gets up before the sun
sits at the kitchen table
reads the bible
foreign religion written in
familiar language
yes the bible is printed in korean too

she speaks broken english
gets better at it everyday
and as the sun catches up to her
the first rays run across her face
making dark lines along her wrinkles

autumn leaves fill the back yard
a great big oak tree sheds them
like a dog shedding hair
the rough lines in the bark of that tree
and my mother's quiet strength
tells a story only the autumn can tell.

11/6/92
bhb

--
Bing H Bang                                  +---------------------------+
Senior Systems Analyst                       | This is my home computer. |
National Data Corporation, Atlanta, GA       | I do not speak for NDC.   |
uucp: gatech!warlord!bing!root               +---------------------------+
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: sswieren@nyx.cs.du.edu (stephan swierenga)
Subject: Then Darkness
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix @ U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 21:12:53 GMT

 posting for a friend, hey says c&c is welcome...

==========================================================

       THEN DARKNESS

   A  spectacle of diamond juices
   bedazzle and hypnotize
   on the empty street;
   early, when no soul speaks.

   The blue smoke careens down the waves' edge
   turning into snake-kings beneath the surface
   grasping the club of power wet and sunken
   and a ring of perpetuity sits idly

  Twelve numbers in the mists of velvet robes
  lost lives of grey bubbles dissolving
  into the atmosphere of the dark city
  The card of life indistinguishable in the clear water

 Time pieces strewn aside
 No more cares for them
 No more time to keep
 No more

The mist envelops the gutter
the audible rush of a city stream
Splashing like a country river
Then darkness...

Hajii

==============================================
sswieren@nyx.cs.du.edu
   
  
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: cweir@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (Corey Weir)
Subject: Wicked Ways (C&C welcome)
Summary: Just a poem...
Organization: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 17:35:31 GMT


                      Wicked Ways of the Aardvark
                      ---------------------------

              A yellow bus drives quietly through the night,
              The platypus could swim for days,
              A young mallard's perilous, treacherous flight,
              Cows, unaware, do silently graze,
              All is peaceful in the world it does seem,
              There is nothing to go wrong,
              All is hushed and all is serene,
              Except for that damn bison that persists to
              rollerskate around my coffee table, playing
              "Swanee River" on his ukelele.
              That's just the trouble with buffalo,
              No self control,
a             Sublime as jello yet not quite as pudding.


                                                   Corey Weir,
                                   Poetic Wheelbarrow: Not your ordinary
                                                       cup of liver, is
                                                       it?
                                                     

                                              cweir@morgan.ucs.mun.ca



Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: rapu, rapu, how i love ya / Marek (was Re: Urdu Ignorance (part II))
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
	<1992Nov10.171548@IASTATE.EDU>
	<1992Nov11.002958.1608@news.acns.nwu.edu>
	<1992Nov10.214920@IASTATE.EDU>
Date: 10 Nov 92 22:58:14

The Stanford University Libraries use the Library of Congress system
but has not modified the catalog entries for older books using Dewey
Decimal.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: sheilah@wam.umd.edu (Sheila Herndon)
Subject: Adrienne Rich
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 15:02:27 GMT

Here is a poem by Adrienne Rich. I think it is interesting. I met
Adrienne Rich when I almost had a poetry class and the teacher read
one of his/her poems. (Pardon, but I am not sure if Adrienne Rich is
a male or female name, I guess I should get clues from poems, but 
I like not knowing. call me strange)

It's from "Diving into the Wreck: poems 1971 - 1972" The poetry teacher
read the title cut.

I want to read the first poem, often I only see first poems becuase
I cannot concentrate enough to finish the book. Anyway:


	Trying to Talk with a Man

	Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

	that's why we came here.

	Sometimes I feel an underground river
	forcing its way between deformed cliffs
	an acute angle of understanding
	moving itself like a locus of the sun
	into this condemned scenery.

	What we've had to give up to get here --
	whole LP collections, films we starred in
	playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
	full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
	the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
	afternoons on the riverbank
	pretending to be children

	Coming out to this desert
	we meant to change the face of 
	driving amoung dull green succulents
	walking at noon in the ghost town
	surrounded by a silence

	that sounds like the silence of the place
	except that it came with us
	and is familiar
	and everything we were saying until now
	was an effort to blot it out --
	Coming out here we are up against it

	Out here I feel more helpless
	with you than without you
	You mention the danger
	and list the equipment
	we talk of people caring for each other
	in emergencies -- laceration, thirst --
	but you look at me like an emergency

	Your dry heat feels like power
	your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
	they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
	when you get up and pace the floor

	talking of the danger
	as if it were not ourselves
	as if we were testing anything else.


					Adrianne Rich

	Rich, Adrianne. _Diving into the Wreck_, W. W. Norton & company, Inc.
		New York. 1973.

I like to read it first as a woman talking to her husband. Then as a husband
not talking outloud but worrying in his mind to his wife. Then I like to
change you around a lot, and say it is all of humanity, the husband or his
wife, the speaker is married to humanity, or to the bomb. and so on.

It makes you very vunerable to explain how you read a poem.
-- 
I am always wrong. Don't believe me ever.
stark raving sane  sheilah@wam.umd.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: HELP NEEDED (Is poetry luxury?)
From: conrad@kryton.UUCP (Konstatin Kalikanzaros)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 21:29:45 PST
Organization: Paradox Alley F&SF BBS 805-492-8789

wprovinc@zeus.calpoly.edu (William E. Province) writes:

   Attribution accidently deleted
> >
> >Once a math teacher asked me how I was so quick at solving one of
> >the problems, and I told her that after I took geometry I learned
> >how to think (this was back in high school) after - she told me one couldn't
> >_learn_ how to think.
> 
>    I disagree with this, at least in the context of the discourse of
> geometry.  In a larger context, this person might be right.  Learning
> something requires thinking, thus if one had to "learn how to think",
> you are left with the chicken-egg paradox.  (Which happened first :
> Were you originally able to think and thus were able to learn, or did you 
> have to learn how to think?  Thinking/Learning, which came first?)
> That doesn't mean that the statement is wrong, for the two processes
> of learning and thinking might be built one on top of the other,
> acquiring more and more of each other as more learning/thinking is 
> performed.  It still leaves some difficulties though.  
> 
>    Back to geometry.  The problem that I have with your teacher's
> statement is that she did not address what you had meant, rather it
> addressed the words that you used.  Somehow, after taking geometry,
> you learned of certain patterns that exist in the world.  You learned
> that it is indeed possible to learn new concepts by using methods
> that you have used before.  What you had done was learned the pattern
> of a particular form of learning.  Your instructor was addressing 
> the larger context of "learning to think", which is probably not
> really what you had meant.
> 
>    -- bill
> 

   I had a similar revelation when I took algebra for the first time (I
had alredy been a programmer for over 6 years before this happened) at
the age of 26.  My high school years were totaly devoid of any real
useful education short of my electronics classes.  I beleive as Bill
stated that the teacher was merely reacting to the words and not
thinking her/himself at the time.  I discovered a lot more reasons for
things being, and being the way they happened to be!  So in fact the
semanticaly correct statement is I learned a new WAY to think.  A way so
radical as to be an awakening akin to thinking itself.  Does anyone else
remember at what age they became sentient?  Though since leaving high
school I have learned only one real important thing:  The day I stop
learning will be sometime after I die!  
conrad



____________________________________________________________________________
Reality is for people that can't handle Science fiction.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: zen@death.corp.sun.com (d)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: asdf
Date: 12 Nov 92 17:02:03 GMT
Organization: savage hackers
NNTP-Posting-Host: death.corp.sun.com
In-reply-to: lichter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu's message of Thu, 12 Nov 92 02:26:04 GMT


In article <1992Nov12.022604.22450@cs.ucla.edu> lichter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Michael I. Lichter) writes:
>    I'm not blind to irony, but "nigger" carries some pretty heavy
>    baggage, and as a white person it's one that I steer well clear of
>    in my speech or writing.

  Why?  If it's so emotional, it seems like it might be a useful tool,
eh?  And what difference does it make what your skin color is when you
use the word -- isn't the *way* you use it a bit more important, or do
you think that it's ok for an individual to make jokes or insults about
themself, their clique, country, whatever, but not for others to do
likewise?  Why isn't truth truth, no matter who speaks it?

 -- d
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: marek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski)
Subject: Re: asdf
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois.
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 07:58:14 GMT

zen@death.corp.sun.com (d) writes:

>  Why?  If it's so emotional, it seems like it might be a useful tool,
>eh?  And what difference does it make what your skin color is when you
>use the word -- isn't the *way* you use it a bit more important, or do
>you think that it's ok for an individual to make jokes or insults about
>themself, their clique, country, whatever, but not for others to do
>likewise?  Why isn't truth truth, no matter who speaks it?

Several issues come to mind:  1) context-sensitivity, 2) relativity of
meaning, 3) taboo, 4) absence of truth as such, 5) cultural awareness,
6) cultural permissions, 7) shared experience within a totem.

Some of these overlap.  There's enough here for a dissertation but I have
to go to work later today.  I think you owe yourself to think this through,
though.

				-- Marek

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: klaus.gerken@synapse.org (Klaus Gerken) 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: New Poems
Date: 11 Nov 92 20:04:00 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: SYNAPSE BBS - GATINEAU, QUEBEC - 819-561-4321
Reply-To: klaus.gerken@synapse.org (Klaus Gerken) 

Dried up roses on the mantle shelf
By candlelight glowing, the good wine is spilled
There's a face in the window, all that remains
Of gold rings and diamonds, so little was gained
The rain beats the city like a forty-night storm
The rivers are flooded and the roses have thorns
There's nothing but shadows where shadows are born
     And the curtain is torn...

The room is so empty that the chill casts a stone
The brutal perception: a child lost alone
The sky is on fire, the room is too hot
The telephone rings chilly - to answer, or not?
The wind is so hollow, the music collects
The scars of commitment, where commitment is blessed
By the one's who are homesick, by the one's who are torn
Between the lonely living, and the hopeless in death's storm
     And the curtain is torn...


Copyright (c) 1992 Klaus J. Gerken

---
 . OLX 2.2 . This tagline stolen by Off-Line Xpress!
              
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: kt1@hera.cc.bellcore.com (tellefsen,karen a)
Subject: The Lady's Reply
Organization: Bellcore, Livingston, NJ
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 15:49:59 GMT


The Lady's Reply

You wrote again to waste my time
A letter filled with sticky rhyme
Hyperbole and outright lies 
Described my lips, my cheeks, my eyes

She basks in beauty like a dream
Her eyes like pools, her skin like cream
I'd say it's more like cottage cheese
With eye bones filled with moldy peas

You claim sweet love's all you require
'Tis carnal favors you desire
Your syrup did not pass my test
So go away, persistent pest
From: daq@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Doug Quarnstrom)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 04:30:39 GMT
Subject: Re: poets
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
From: westphal@iscnvx.lmsc.lockheed.com (Dorothy Westphal)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Thanksgiving moan
Date: 13 Nov 92 18:34:31 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Lockheed Missiles and Space Co.

A table-bound turkey named Tom
Longed for childhood, his old friends, and Mom.
   "I choose to eschew
   Where I'm heading to;
I'd rather return where I'm from."
-- 
Dorothy Westphal, Sunnyvale, Calif. % Just when things are going your way...%
westphal@iscnvx.lmsc.lockheed.com   %               they get even better!   %