Chris Weimer

I'd like to ask the opinion of fellow BC&H'ers this poem. I want an honest evaluation of this poem.

sail the hall
shoot my ball
slip just once
damn the dunce

My question: what about those who analyze texts? That's what I see happening here in BC&H all the time. What is this poem really about?

You can browse through some of the answers I got in the Lounge.

Dean Anderson

To me (without having read the Lounge thread) this sounds like it is about basketball.

The first two lines seem to be talking about moving smoothly ('sailing') across the basketball court to take a shot.

In the third line, the protagonist makes a slip, contrasted to his previous smooth progress.

And then the last line would seem to be him berating himself for his incompetence after having missed the shot due to his slip - with "dunce" being used as a pun on "dunk".

Of course, that's just a surface reading. It could be trying to use a basketball metaphor to shed light on some other issue of something going wrong at the last moment - or may be nothing to do with basketball at all.

Without any context we're stuck with speculation.

gstafleu

The problem here is indeed lack of context, which may make the exercise meaningless. In general, if you try to gather meaning from cryptic texts or images:

you don't just go by one isolated example. You look at more, how they relate to each other, how they relate to what you (think you) know about the culture, how they relate to similar items in other cultures etc. Any meaning you then assign to the cryptic bit is thus substantiated by context and reasoning: just as with all science, you try to place the new item into what you already know.

The picture above comes from this page. If you just look at the picture in isolation, you won't get very far. Once you know a bit more you start to get some ideas. For example, if you know that the crescent moon, an aspect of the ever dying and resurrecting moon, represents life in general and agriculture in particular (food plants have to "die" (buried seeds) in order to live again in the form of the new plants growing from the seeds), and you then see something that looks like a plant right under the moon, being tended by the goddess, you start to get some idea of what this may be all about. But you can only validly produce such an interpretation if you can first demonstrate that these are general themes. Just the item in isolation doesn't do much, and just producing an ad hoc explanation that doesn't relate to anything else doesn't do much either.

The page BTW just mentions the goddess picking fruits from the sacred tree. Possible, but it doesn't explain the moon and plant under it, so it may be too narrow an interpretation. However, once you know that a tree in these circumstances is often a representation of the axis mundi you get a bit further. Again, context is the key.

Gerard Stafleu

Chris Weimer

Spare me, Gerard. You said nothing new. I'm curious on what people think of this poem out of context. It's the point.

So please, what do you all think? What does it bring to mind?

spin

You sit in the hall
with your crystal ball
in an effort to find
what's in Christopher's mind.

But you feel misled
when you find that the head
of the young pedagogue
is just filled with fog.


spin

Chris Weimer

I sit with a grin,
since I know spin,
has come with clever words.

But little he knows,
and the words that he shows
he flies away with birds.

Oh spin, my friend,
wait til the end,
and all will be made clear.

But if you depart,
you'll miss this new art,
and probably shed a tear. :Cheeky:

spin

The poet's curse
is to cope with verse
that is so perverse,
it's Skeltonic.

Writing lines so short
Any thoughts abort
And he's left with a sport
That's cacophonic.

Yet he's asked to judge
the worth of this kludge,
and's obliged to fudge
that it's Miltonic

Whatever the aim
the end seems the same:
not one plays this game.
Ain't that ironic?

Let me just suggest
that you give it a rest:
why not go and digest
a stiff gin tonic?


spin

jakejonesiv

There was a young poet named WEE muhr
Whose words were terse and unclear

To display a new art
That will set apart

The writer, the text and the reader.

:notworthy:

mountainman

A twelve-step monosyllabic random walk.

jakejonesiv

Click here .