glenn dean, landscapes of the west / user @petrichara
This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8
I hate that my aesthetic sense agrees with this but everything you just said was correct
I went back to dig up this post because I was thinking about poetry.
This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.
As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.
Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:
Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.
There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.
And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”
The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.
This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.
From a technical standpoint (and ive taken 300- and 400-level poetry classes so I can say this) this is damn near flawless as a poem.
Kept thinking about this ever since I saw it and had to do something
there's art now
— Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)/ — Robert Frost, The Complete Poems; “My November Guest,”/ — Ellis Nightingale/ — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, chapter V. / — Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)/ — Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait Through Letters/ — Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex/ Albert Camus , “The Plague”/ — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights/ — William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
““Now the autumn shudders In the rose’s root. Far and wide the ladders Lean among the fruit. Now the autumn clambers Up the trellised frame, And the rose remembers The dust from which it came. Brighter than the blossom On the rose’s bough Sits the wizened orange, Bitter berry now; Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.””
— Edna St. Vincent Millay (2003). “Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems”, p.68, Library of America
(via light-and-salt)
On Rain
It was blacker than olives the night I left. As I ran past the palaces, oddly joyful, it began to rain. What a notion it is, after all—these small shapes! I would get lost counting them. Who first thought of it? How did he describe to the others? Out on the sea it is raining too. It beats on no one.
—Anne Carson, from “Part II: Short Talks,” Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (2000, Vintage)
Voyager Greetings in Things We Carried Into Space
The text of the second stanza in Things We Carried Into Space is taken from the spoken greetings recorded on the Voyager Golden Record, carried aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.
« Dawn comes later and later now,
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning
watching the light walk down the hill
to the edge of the pond and place
a doe there, shyly drinking,
then see the light step out upon
the water, sowing reflections
to either side—a garden
of trees that grew as if by magic—
now see no more than my face,
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,
startled by time. While I slept,
night in its thick winter jacket
bridled the doe with a twist
of wet leaves and led her away,
then brought its black horse with harness
that creaked like a cricket, and turned
the water garden under. I woke,
and at the waiting window found
the curtains open to my open face;
beyond me, darkness. And I,
who only wished to keep looking out,
must now keep looking in. »
— Ted Kooser, “A Letter in October”