tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post3428691603332759727..comments2024-03-28T13:03:59.666-07:00Comments on Tillalala Chronicles: Parade SauvageJohn Olsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07873070309448793816noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-23127440872840531472010-03-26T00:23:18.353-07:002010-03-26T00:23:18.353-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-21604570814163085432010-03-25T15:11:41.617-07:002010-03-25T15:11:41.617-07:00No confusion, John, and your comment to Steve, lik...No confusion, John, and your comment to Steve, like the post, was a good read. Yeah, Macbeth on her bicep, my hand to God. and she'd sit at a table and smoke and read Graham Greene with black Dickensian fingerless gloves on her hands. And she'd pop these cool blues tapes into the box next to the hash-slinger. That was just about my favorite music in the world at the time.Delia Psychehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03020484032408233158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-38213467737067796152010-03-25T11:08:19.846-07:002010-03-25T11:08:19.846-07:00Hi David. Thank you for your vigorous and imaginat...Hi David. Thank you for your vigorous and imaginative response to the tattoo dilemma. Unfortunately, I posted my comment to Steve and the question about conversational aplomb before I caught your post, so my earlier post will probably seem a little confusing. I should have specified I was addressing Steve's remark. Oh well. Is that for real, Macbeth on the waitress's bicep? What a great place for Macbeth to be.John Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07873070309448793816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-52390591945959077082010-03-25T10:56:50.329-07:002010-03-25T10:56:50.329-07:00Yes, absolutely. When one hears, or sees, the pron...Yes, absolutely. When one hears, or sees, the pronoun 'I' in this poetry, we feel a pronoun swimming delightedly among nouns, propelled by flipper verbs and mercurial nerves. A poet delighting in language and its capacity for creating a sense of the marvelous. That's why it feels so natural. The focus isn't so much on the poet herself, who seems so fused with the spirit of poetry that her more personal identity is subsumed by it. I hope that makes sense. Frank O'Hara's little manifesto on Personalism describes this phenomenon best. "It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages."John Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07873070309448793816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-17233130120894787562010-03-25T10:39:38.170-07:002010-03-25T10:39:38.170-07:00Though my skin is totally unglyphed and will remai...Though my skin is totally unglyphed and will remain so, I do like a tattooed young woman--not a latter-day Lydia, but a girl with a few dignified Celtic knots or Chinese ideograms in none-too-conspicuous places. You guys remind me of a circus sideshow of a dog wagon I used to frequent. I was attracted to the waitress. She had long dark Mary-Tyler-Moore-in-'70 hair, a black leather studded punk belt, and a strange, Elizabethan-looking tattoo on her bicep. When I asked her about this last, she told me it was MacBeth and embarked on a demotically worded treatise of guilt in Shakespeare's darkest play. She was the kind of diffident, psychologically wobbly, slightly spaced feminine vortex who sucks me down to a bleak film-noir ending. But I resisted her charms. I kind of regret it now...Delia Psychehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03020484032408233158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-31723164467044234522010-03-24T22:38:04.908-07:002010-03-24T22:38:04.908-07:00{Hhere's the comment I deleted from above, w/o...{Hhere's the comment I deleted from above, w/o fewer typos!]<br /><br />All right, I got you, and anyways, I caught up to Fuhrman's Pagaent tonight after work (an advantage of working in Berkeley is that almost EVERY recent poetry book can be found within a couple hours.<br /><br />Holy ha-ha-hilarious -- how funny and packed tight with good writing is that poem, including the lines AFTER the bit on the piercings. Wow! Fuhrman describes a couple other subsets of cultural detritus that also out-number readers of contemporary poetry (or even poetry)!! It's really something<br /><br />John, your description of Fuhrman's poetry as (in part) "conversational aplomb" seems right to me. I also get from it (and okay, I've only read a few of the poems so far) an ability to upgrade the conversational approach enough to give it an edge, but one that doesn't seem forced. But maybe that's what you mean by "aplomb"?Steven Famahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13733977161680651117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-54231738967474713082010-03-24T20:36:21.914-07:002010-03-24T20:36:21.914-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Steven Famahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13733977161680651117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-20819887876831672682010-03-24T17:52:16.292-07:002010-03-24T17:52:16.292-07:00Glad you asked me that, Steve. It deserves a nuanc...Glad you asked me that, Steve. It deserves a nuanced answer. Tattoos have traditionally been the province of men, so that to see a tattoo or two on a woman (my wife Roberta has one on her shin, a Celtic symbol) is sexy and exotic. I have seen a lot of men who have gone hogwild with tattoos, tattooed every inch of their body, right down to the scrotum, maybe there, too, and while I can't say I find that particularly attractive, it is not especially freakish, either, because men do stupid shit all the time. That's why it's more fun being a male than a female. You have far greater license to be stupid and do stupid things. And men are hairy, knobby, and cloddish. Men need body-art. But a woman's arms and legs are so (I can see myself getting into trouble with Roberta here) are so luscious and smooth, so gracile, so nuanced and fine, it is disturbing to see that messed up with heavy tattooing. Older women, with a decidedly more seasoned appearance, might not look quite so freakish with a load of tattoos, snakes and flames and skulls and wild geometries, but they definitely come across as Motorcycle Mamas. There is, I confess, an attraction there. The lure of the carnival fortune-telling lady. I find that cool. So yes, it's young women with a load of tattoos that freaks me out.John Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07873070309448793816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1407034878188607881.post-48984823121906882010-03-24T16:03:20.378-07:002010-03-24T16:03:20.378-07:00First, welcome to Blog-Land, John!
Second, my con...First, welcome to Blog-Land, John!<br /><br />Second, my condolences, if only because now you'll have to put up with me in your comment box.<br /><br />Third, the paragraph in the post on amusement parks and poetry is amazing. I may clip and save that one, if I can figure out a way to pry apart the computer screen.<br /><br />Fourth, I LOVE that you post here about a poetry book -- and even better, write about particular poems. Yes! Fuhrman's book sounds charged, I'll have to go find it.<br /><br />Finally, let me raise something that made me uncomfortable, bothered me: your statement that you "find strangely disturbing [] young women who are not content with one or two tastefully positioned tattoos, but who tattoo their entire arm, and make of it something freakish and ugly."<br /><br />Okay, you don't like the overall or over-done tattoo look, I can understand that, even if it's not the way I roll on that one. <br /><br />But when you write that it's "young women" that you find disturbing, it suggests you're okay with young men who do it. And old women and men too, for that matter. In other words, is it only young women with lots of tatts you find freakish, and nobody else?Steven Famahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13733977161680651117noreply@blogger.com