HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: mcoffin@IASTATE.EDU (Marie A Coffin)
Subject: Rewriting History / Marie Coffin
Reply-To: mcoffin@IASTATE.EDU (Marie A Coffin)
Organization: Iowa State University
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 02:44:30 GMT


		Rewriting History
		--------------------------------------------------
 
		She says:  We never loved each other after all
		otherwise how could we act like that
		we just thought we were in love
		because we wanted to fuck
 
		He says:  I never said I was looking for a wife to
		stay home with the children and cook for me
		you exaggerate where do you get
		these ideas anyway
 
		She says:  Everything was wrong for months
		how can you even think about getting
		back together all we ever did
		was fight
 
		He says:  What was wrong you mean those little
		spats I thought everything was fine until
		one day you just stopped speaking
		to me
 
		They are rewriting history
		rewriting history
		when they broke up they both
		got custody of the past
		and soon it will become two
		disjoint pasts with one
		point of divergence
		in common
 
		Ten years from now they will meet in a bar
		or at a party hosted by a mutual
		friend who has long since forgotten they
		ever knew each other and
		in the interest of seeming
		vulnerable and sensitive
		they will tell each other the stories of the
		dating wars and neither he nor
		she will recognize themselves
		in each other's
		past.
 
 
		Marie Coffin
		April 6, 1992


Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: frank@IASTATE.EDU (Frank A Poduska)
Subject: Re: attempted suicide - twice
Reply-To: frank@IASTATE.EDU (Frank A Poduska)
Organization: Iowa State University
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 13:36:09 GMT

In article <17723@oasys.dt.navy.mil>, sgrant@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Sally Grant)
writes:
> Blood and teeth greeted the police when they arrived.
> No body sprawled on the concrete, life fleeing
...
> Only the red stained sidewalk with

The way I read it he landed on the roof of a car both times.

>  - it's amazing what people will do for their 15 minutes of fame!

Do you really believe this? I don't understand why he used the 4th floor
of a six story building, but *expecting* to live through it is incredible.
Living through it twice is incredible, too, though.

Same day's newspaper:
An article on the prize winning poet's news conference that no one attended.
 
--
Frank Poduska                 frank@iastate.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: ahawks@isis.cs.du.edu (andy)
Subject: -
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix at U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 92 04:37:57 GMT

untitled

secret worlds
seem comforting

and scary

shadows play
with your soul

--


ahawks@isis.cs.du.edu						andy
From: wachtel@canon.co.uk (Tom Wachtel)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: The Business of Poetry
Date: 15 Apr 92 09:29:07 GMT
Reply-To: wachtel@canon.co.uk
Organization: Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd

Sharon Hopkins writes:
> Ahem.  Shouldn't there be at least a *little* bit of poetry here?
> Just a quote or two, even a reference, even a hint of discussion as to
> whether poetry ought or ought not be a cash-crop.  Take a look at
> the Newsgroups: line if you're wondering why I'm picky about this.

Yes. This would be good. Or even if the whole discussion took place in
verse, as was the case in rap's dim past. Or, well, then, at least a
line or two now and again to make the good points better. What a lot of
talking words there are around today... Not many singing words.

-- 

Tom Wachtel (wachtel@canon.co.uk)
From: henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl pillow Henning)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Welcome Back, Wlodek!  part i
Date: 17 Apr 92 01:51:35 GMT
Distribution: rec
Organization: UB


	they called it
	the war on drugs
	thornless roses
	& when the theatres closed
	shakespeare's smiling agent
	told him
	  "one word, babe:
	     sonnets"
	after two daiquiris
	anything sounds
	good with a smile
	an hour later
	or a century the same
	agent told haendel
	  "one word, babe:
	     oratorios"

		(... tinselham)
		kph;  16 Apr 92
-- 
 The violent Russian spring that seemed []	 Karl Prescott Henning
  to begin in an hour and was like the  []  128 Hewitt/upper [] 57 Glasgow st
   whole earth cracking. -- Stravinsky  []  Bflo NY 14215    [] Roch NY 14608
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: csmcm@ux1.cts.eiu.edu (Mary C. McDaniel)
Subject: Six Weeks
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1992 14:33:20 GMT
Organization: Eastern Illinois University

I swear I viewed this before sending it-- but the last line was missing
from the posting.  I also hadn't considered that the accent mark over
the "e" in "cliche" would disappear the letter as well when ASCIed.  Live
and learn.  Here it is again, folks. Sorry I had to post it twice.

--Mary


Six Weeks

1.
How you came to be in a rush of pneumas,
straddled the cloud and the hurricane
that distilled you to reflect the closest elements,
father, mother, strangers 
who could come together in no other way.

2.
How you hung unseen in your dark home,
the web in the corner growing heavy with mathematica, 
addition, division, multiplication,
a language as insubstantial 
as intention or smoke.

3.
How your mother declared you possibility,
your non-outline belied by waves
that washed back a dark blanket to reveal you,
a bullet hole in her womb,
the bloody eye in a yolk eaten for luck.

4.
How you fed off her ambiguity, the bland broth 
that could neither hinder nor inspire you,
you the weaker tide, nature's other cliche,
too full of your small self
to consider, to hope, to pray.

5.
How not even your mother knew what made her choose:
not her real self, its rivers rechanneled
without her consent; but the imagined one,
a fleshy tent tethered in place, the wind
at her hem, a love she could no longer admit.

6.
How you came to learn the elementary,
that the breath goes out as well as in,
loosing you in the company of the unseen,
those other imperturbable souls
that light and lift, and leave reproach to us.
From: stormy@Sun.COM
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Short
Date: 9 Apr 92 22:04:21 GMT
Reply-To: stormy@Sun.COM
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: garthbrooks.west.sun.com

From the outside I am nothing
like the one inside
That "twinkle in my eye...
it's a tear

Stormy
From: melynda@titipu.meta.com (Melynda Reid)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: rec-arts-pain, a prose mumble
Date: 17 Apr 92 02:48:14 GMT
Reply-To: melynda@titipu.meta.com
Organization: Paleolithic Refugia
X-Mailer: uAccess - Macintosh Release: 1.9b1

pain---i witness a friend shudder with pain each time she opens her mouth
       to breathe. the movement of her diaphram shifts her into a realm beyond
       morphine's tender mercy. 
pain---another friend goes to the mountain each morning to seek her husband lost
       in an avalanche. she is fasting until she sees him again. she has placed
       her order for a miracle and will not accept his death.
pain---another friend limps on one leg her baby to be born pressing against
       her nerves; she gives birth to a healthy son.
pain---a woman in my area awakens in a bloody shirt, her only garment, to
       be told she had murdered her husband with the gun he had trained on
       her.
pain---a young child in my neighbourhood hides one eye behind her hair or
       puts her head in my skirt so that just one eye, her good eye shows. her
       glass eye wobbles in its orbit, an everyday sign of that night her
       father attacked her mother with a coat hanger and caught her eye instead.
pain---

metaphor cannot hold the pain i have witnessed. but metaphor can sometimes
provide a way of screaming so that the voice does not give way to stoney
silence. i realise that i only spoke of women in pain. perhaps men too can know
pain and not in purely intellectual or metaphorical ways. but men do not know
the vocabulary of pain that women have endured for millenia. women have voices
and grammar and syntax but our language may be that of cries and silent gasps.
                                   melynda too tired for tears

melynda reid   who wears hats but does not type caps
  eel:   melynda@titipu.meta.com  or  nosc.mil!titipu.meta.com!melynda
  snail: p o box 378 greensboro, florida 32330
From: CCPHIL@UMCVMB.MISSOURI.EDU (Phil Leith)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: RE: Warning
Date: 17 Apr 92 15:31:49 GMT



>>
>>  Warning
>>  -------
>>
  (poem deleted)

>
>   "WAKE UP" ???
>
>Kinda sounds like a ripoff of Jim Morrison to me...... >8)

Really?  What tune?  I've never been much of a Doors fan, not that I
*dis*like them.  Only own a Greatest Hits album... and only for
"Riders".  Sigh.  People *ARE* Strange....

Anyway, the poem came to me when I realized how.easy.it.is to get wrapped
up in the net... how much time I was spending reading rec.aquaria,
rec.arts.poems (just reading the traffic per-day can take a hunk out of
your day, but I like it).  Just thought I might share it with anyone who
might have had the same thought.

It's not as bad as rec.music.gdead.  That's traffic for you.  Hmmmm... I
wonder if there's a rec.music.traffic ?  ;-)

There's a lot of neat stuff in this group.  I read it more for the poems
than for the discussion, although some of the discussion is interesting,
too.  Every now and then I'll have a thought or reaction and post it.
They're not meant to piss anybody off, but I imagine some of them will from
time to time.  Es la vida.  Just my point of view.  That's what I like about
this.  I get lots of people's points of view on life.

My poem was a reaction to a flag that went off in me calling for balance.
Can't spend *too* much time reading other people's points of view on life,
or you'll very likely run out of your own experiences, your own life.  If
your life becomes reading about life, I think you're somehow removed from
the scene.  End up watching your life pass you by as text lines before your
eyes.  You get wrapped up in the net.  Your freinds become faceless teletype
machines as you spend more and more time with them and less and less time
with the people around you - physically.  You forget what life feels like
first-hand, and your observations become extremely esoteric.  But now I'm
getting away from my point.  My point can be best illustrated if you go
outside and walk barefoot in the grass, and feel the bark on a tree, feel
the sunshine on your skin (use sun-screen if you live under 'the hole')
or the rain on your skin, and hug a friend/family member/lover.

Ooops.  Work calls.    Oh, *that*!

                                      - Phil
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: n2412@cray.com (Joe Green)
Subject: Re:  The two planets
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 15 Apr 92 15:08:39 CDT

In article <1992Apr15.172708.11113@uwm.edu> krishna@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Todd A Wardrope) writes:
>   Interesting talk about poetics and politics surfacing now and then on
>thishere newsgroup.  But for all the talk of poetry saving the masses and
>it's effect on our apocolyptic civilization, I ahve to wonder some things.
>Why is the discussion being carried out in such an academic matter ?  I
>don't think any of this name-dropping is going ot impress the average schlep
>on the street.

No-one is trying to impress anybody.  Why project what you would do
onto the discussion?  Why not ask yourself why you believe that
all of this should be immediately accessible to you?  Treat what
you regard as name dropping as a reading list.  Others do.  Why
assume that everyone should be kind enough to explain all the
background behind every phrase?  Some of us would like to --
but a book is required.

You associate "academic" with lifeless.  This is the easy way out.
The caricature serves your needs -- even if it is sometimes
accurate. Why should we surrender the responsibility of
subtlety just so you will think you understand what is said?   





  Why don't you rephrase th eideas you have learne dabout in
>your won words, and expand upon them ?  Marx is dead, you aren't.  (In a
>relative sense of course...)  Why does th epoetry mentioned and written fall
>into this inaccesible manner of speech ?  I don't think poets hiding in and
>behind the veil of academia are doing much for humanity, it seems very
>masterbutory, adn accomplishing little.


Oh bullshit.  This is nothing but the same old yahooism.  You treat
the discussion with the m word and can forget about it.  Maybe
you are missing something.  Maybe there is a reason why you
are in school.  Maybe willed ignorance and persistent
gestures to slobs who think that their intellectual slovenliness
is a gesture toward the comman man is what actually accomplishes
nothing. 


>  In a related note, why no C&C on my stuff ? 
>  later,
>  todd
>
Probably because it is the best stuff since Milton shat in the Forest
of Arden and we are just too mean to admit it.  Let me check.

--
From: v124jw4y@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Benjamin R Pierce)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Breakfast Carol
Date: 14 Apr 92 21:21:00 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41


A Breakfast Carol



A cottage of cheese in a purple-orange land,
By a tree made of leather draped over a hand,
Where walruses waltz to the blare of a band
Of a dozen trombone players waist-deep in sand.

But the music disrupts the routines of the mime,
And the clock doesn't run, so there must be no time,
And an ape in an armchair drinks gin without lime,
In a land without reason, but heavy with rhyme.

And wonders, I tell you, come heavy and fast-
Like the sum of your strange dreams in one place amassed.
As strange to the senses as oysters are vast-
A carafe, and a checkerboard hung from a mast,

And a thing which I cannot begin to detail
Like a cat, like a corkscrew, a bit like a snail,
Like a bicycle seat, and a two-penny nail,
And a raspberry sherbet packed into a pail.

And over this landscape the hanggliders soar,
Manned each by a crew of birds numbering four,
Who, happy that they need not fly anymore,
Talk one to the other of far distant shores.



Make what you will of it--if anyone manages to puzzle out a meaning for this,
please let me know what it is...





                                                        --Ben
From: wachtel@canon.co.uk (Tom Wachtel)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: some blanket this
Date: 14 Apr 92 16:42:29 GMT
Reply-To: wachtel@canon.co.uk
Organization: Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd

=


	some blanket this, all plaid...
	displayed all these old notes
	laid them out, these strewn tunes
	odious idioms all...
	on this old rug
	this hug drug rug, all played out
	still, a tune
	some sing

-- 

Tom Wachtel (wachtel@canon.co.uk)
From: wheeler8161@iscsvax.uni.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: fish sex & jesus
Date: 9 Apr 92 20:59:18 -0500
Organization: University of Northern Iowa

fish symbolize christ
fish represent sex
one must have a liscense to fish
they are expensive
liscenses
most people aren't real crazy about fish
i'm not
people use large nets to catch fish and catch other sea animals at the same
time
we dump oil and chemicals on fish
my little brother has a fish
his name is spike
he's a beta
if you hold a mirror up to the bowl his fins stick out and he gets all pissed
off
i don't think of christ when i look at him
or sex
supposedly
if you hold a mirror up to the bowl long enough
he will slam his head into the side of the bowl until
he kills himself
if you put two betas in the same bowl
and they are opposite sexes
and they think of sex
when they look at each other
and follow through with the thought
the female will eat the male
fish are hungry
there are millions of fish
past the edge of our dock
in minnesota
and we feed them
bread
and they become tame
and will eat out of your hand
and will even jump a quarter
of an inch out of the water
to bite off a piece of bread
when one lies on a raft around these
fish
one may find that these harmless
starving fish
enjoy biting
scabs and nipples
this does not remind me of christ
but sometimes of sex
fish used to dominate pbs
people have lost some interest
in the frenchman
it is interesting
when one thinks of a fish
as christ
and bread
as the body of christ
and of christ eating himself
but resorting to other things
if his hunger
is not satiated
there is a lure
called a daredevil
some versions have
a satan figure
(horns pitchfork and all)
imposed on the lure itself
this symbolizes the victory
of lucifer over christ
i don't think of it that way
though
i don't have a fishing liscense
bears eat fish
i'm not sure what that means
fish eat other fish
i'm not sure what that means either
watching fish
in an aquarium
is supposed to relax
you
and make you think
of jesus
and sex
some people scream
out the name of the lord
while having sex
not many people scream out
the names of fish
while in church
i once read a sign
that said
it is better
to be fishing and thinking of god
than to be in church and thinking
about fishing
i don't have the answer

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
From: comptec91072@camins.camosun.bc.ca
Subject: welcome to reality
Organization: Camosun College
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 18:24:37 GMT

.pg
.nf
.c
^&Welcome to Reality\& (Mike Laur)
.s1
Any dream you have can fall apart
And any love you feel slip away.
That's the way it's been from the start
That's the way it's going to stay.
.s1
Anyway you see it, the picture still looks wrong
Can you paint over an entire world?
Can it be changed by a single song?
Can the difference be made by a single girl?
.s2
It was only yesterday, you were living in a fantasy.
Now your hopes slip away, welcome to reality.
All the new world's have been discovered
And all the mysteries uncovered.
Any hearts out there still yearning?
Any candles there still burning?
Stay with me just a little while
Show me there's still love in a single smile.
Do you have some hope to give?
Do you have a reason to live?
.s2
Living life looking through a whiskey glass
That keeps on getting refilled.
Reliving mistakes from a distant past.
Slowly getting myself killed.
.s1
The foggier I become, the clearer life gets
That's when I pour another drink.
A time will come to pay my debts
Won't let myself feel or think.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Poem--Me--No, You
Date: 14 Apr 92 12:50:53 EST

                               Me--No, You
 
What's at stake?
Must you be right?
Must I be wrong?
Does everything have to be made correct
before the next breath taken?
One lap completed before the next begins?
 
Or can we move like the waves which ride the sea,
and avoid a most awful fate--
freezing into the stasis of absolute positions,
waterfall
stopped
mid-winter.


 * Origin: Connect America #2, Austin, Tx, 512-459-3351 (1:382/10.0)
From: sanu@cs.utexas.edu (Sankrant Sanu)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: pain
Date: 16 Apr 1992 20:04:48 -0500
Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
NNTP-Posting-Host: tokio.cs.utexas.edu



"Let's stop. It hurts too much to go on."
Of course.
Did you think the road to truth would be fucking easy?
As easy as fucking?

sanu.



From: Ralph.Cherubini@f10.n382.z1.FidoNet.Org (Ralph Cherubini)
Sender: uucp@p0.f39.n382.z1.FidoNet.Org
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Poem--Movie (Message 2 of 2)
Date: 13 Apr 92 13:33:22 EST

 

He is happy for what he is giving her,

happy the word-mind has taken a safari,

let it enjoy itself,

he is in the real Africa,

with her,

Tarzan and Jane,

innocent and mindless,

knowing neither sin nor perversity,

only pleasure and the beauty of the blood.

 

Sudden thirst,

it must be the drought,

they said it has lasted ten years--

is it Transvaal?--

he must get a drink,

then the fatal error:

"WOULD YOU LIKE A DRINK?"

Her ears hear as if for the first time,

the whisper cutting through the African night,

and she says "No thank you" in a flattish tone,

and he gets up and leaves,

and gets a drink,

and is happy and grateful,

his offer was his gratitude speaking,

as she is dragged screaming from the veldt

brought face-to-face with her world which

is neither Africa nor his.

He returns to his seat to face a woman's back

sitting on the edge of her chair

leaning into the illusion on the screen

which she can no longer enter,

upright,

away from him

and towards the tinsel Africa now so false,

and he waits awhile,

long enough to see her pushing her hair

away from her eyes,

or is it tears which threaten to dissolve

the Africa of her dreams,

as he walks out into the bright Texas afternoon...


 * Origin: Connect America #2, Austin, Tx, 512-459-3351 (1:382/10.0)
From: gilligan6855@iscsvax.uni.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: library of wishes
Date: 6 Apr 92 21:44:54 -0500
Organization: University of Northern Iowa

***
this was just something that leaped off the top of my head in the mood of
spring today, thinking about all of the pennies i've thrown in vain...

************************************************************************

i used to wish for an
angel
begged the sky and its stars
for 
salvation
until i wept,
slept,
exhausted with the effort
of wanting

i used to ask for
love
pitching pennies
crossing fingers
blowing out all the dripping candles,
but only succeeded
in melting wax
into the cake

later, i tried finding what i sought
under a different name
or face
--like the card catalogs 
in the library.
subject?
title?
author?
--all unknown to me
--who is the fabricator of happiness?
who is to say under what guise 
it lies?
the subject--
well, there were just too many possible combinations,
too few words
in my vocabulary 
to understand

--i couldn't find any librarians that could help me

***************************care****************************************
comments welcome
gilligan6855@iscsvax.uni.edu
From: dbeacham@willamette.edu (Daniel Beacham)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: daniel who is your host?
Date: 16 Apr 92 01:17:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: willamet.1992Apr16.011759.27104
Organization: Willamette University, Salem, OR


		Roadkill

The knob turns, a lever is pulled, and
the contraption goes into motion, pulling with itself
	a ton of steel, its fused glass eyes, and a body.  The body is
attatched to the steel, and it controls the careening hunk of metal,
   peeling off the layers of earth beneath itself,
lopping the corners off of the road as they speed nightward.

  Near the metal waits a still being in the darkness.  It
crouches in the weeds, intently watching as its prey
approaches without stealth.  Its voluminous, luminous eyes
   and droning call
	seem foolish and obvious targets for attack.
The creature readies sinews and claws and drops breath to silence, as
	pupils dilate and closer speeds the hum of circuitry,
the roar of cylinder might and muscle with the xenon arc eyes.

This night is for hunting.
 One of them
	is fearless when it should fear;
  something should know better than to cross here.

The body in the steel, the creature in the metal
  knows
that without it,
	the steel is but a shell, a
lifeless and still piece of obeying machinery.  
The body knows that the machine does not have eyes.

   The steel growls and accelerates toward the creature in the weeds.
	The body whistles a tune to the hum of the machine.
For one moment,
  the body bristles at the leap of roadside eyeshine, and
fearless
meets fearless, as both speed into the earth.



				Daniel Beacham.


	(This is a metaphor for something- everything is, I guess, but 
	can you tell what?)  hijanicetogetyourletterwherehaveyabeen?
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems