I'd like to do a new poetry contest. This one will be based on the Book of Revelation, and has to have imagery somehow derived from that book. Anything up to thirty lines will be ok. Contest will end on January 1, 2012 (if the universe doesn't disappear as per the Mayans) at 12:01 am. You can enter any number of times. The voting will be done on Jan. 1, and you only get one vote (all ordinary commenters here can vote as can participants).
This time there is an actual prize. It's a white 100% cotton t-shirt with the words Lutheran Surrealism printed on it. It's a double-large XX so should fit anyone. Some company approached me and I bought two of them. I will keep one for myself. Here's an example of the kind of poem I mean which will hopefully inspire others. I can win the contest but if I do I will choose one of the other contestants to get the tshirt so the tshirt will definitely be awarded:
AUNT
Her demure eyelids a magenta
My aunt touches an ash to the ashtray
The end of her cigarette sparkles
Between her frail hands
A glass of plum coffee rests
She takes the cigarette between her pale lips
And squints as she inhales smoke
(Pauses to read Book of Revelation)
Exhaling, small errant clergymen
Tumble like scorpions with women’s faces
Hands outstretched
They research the air for dark epiphanies.
35 comments:
Lost Revelation
Our tongues are swords
pointed inward
hilts left to those
whose snatching hands
scar our mouths split
between the ears
where no thoughts lie.
Revelation!
We are having
none of that stuff,
headpiece emptied
straw burnt, rocks strewn,
we have become
product zero.
Zeroed into
what we've become
we burn remains
of empty heads
and try to stuff
what we've got to
revelations
that will not lie.
Between our ears
our mouths are split
by jealous hands
who bear the hilts
of bladed words
forged by our tongues.
They said it was good to be sober -
Over and over and over.
That Christ liked you twice,
If you never rolled dice,
And kept far from whiskey and soder.
So I sat down to read my whole Bible,
The thing was so rich and delightful,
Holy men drinkin' wine,
But still I thought, fine,
I won't drink just so I won't be libeled.
Then finally I read Revelations,
Which told of the end of all nations:
Demons and locusts and a bleeding moon and a blackened sun and fires all over the place and fricking bigass hornets and like insane horses doing weird shit and the sky frikking falling to the earth and mountains moving man, MOUNTAINS MOVING, and blood raining from the sky and a bottomless pit, a pit with literally NO BOTTOM, and hell that ain't the half of it, and, anyways:
This pushed me all over the brink,
And it got me a-startin' to think,
That they've taught me all wrong,
With their Puritan songs,
An' I need to learn me how to drink.
this contest is over
brett wins
i'm not even entering this time
ok just a small poem
...
a brand new dance
do the apocalypso
I really liked GM's piece, and thought the contest was over right then. I loved Brett's, too. We're off to a good start. I liked JHs tiny piece. J's piece hit hard but I think was kosher.
Yeah. I had what I thought was a good start, and then I read GM's poem. Wow.
I think Brett has a strong entry, and J's is worthy of praise too.
This is going to be a great competition.
Brett wins. It's too awesome to try to even compete against.
withdrawn.
(No poet here--see Jefferson's bon mot on the Book of Rev.. tbh I find it interesting that many religious people (or apparently so) accept poetry (a few sections of St Augustine Ive read indicate...St. Aug. didn't, exactly)
Most Protestants have no interest in the contemporary arts. It seems like a shock from the avant-garde side to link surrealism to Lutheranism, but from the other side it's not even thinkable. At least the avant-garde side has a history of shocks, which means that this is just one more.
Plato denounced the arts, and Auggie Doggie took his cue from Plato.
But I like the arts. I like Aristotle's view of it in the Poetics. There are a few contemporary theologians who like the arts. Paul Tillich was friends with Saul Steinberg, for example.
Luther didn't denounce the arts but thought they shouldn't be funded by the church. This creates a funding problem, but on the other hand he gave total freedom of inquiry to the arts, which has meant poverty for the artists and writers, but richness in terms of originality and quality.
Innovations abound in Lutheran writing from Kierkegaard on up. There isn't a lot of Lutheran poetry. There was an anthology called Simul a few years ago. You can find it at Amazon.com. I had a poem in it, and I found a few Lutheran poets that way and exchanged a few letters with some.
I think Revelation is where Lutheran Surrealism should go. I love the richness of the imagination in it, and the sheer hatred of the communists that can be found in it! People talk a lot about love in the Bible. But hatred is there too. Hate for the Pharoah, hate for the Canaanites, hate for Satan, hatred for his minions. Hatred is a very good thing.
I love it when God strikes Miriam down for daring to ask why she didn't get the command over Moses? He turns her into snowflakes!
I love it when Sodom burns to the ground.
I love it when Samson goes to town and wipes out the Philistines and turns them into Samsonite luggage! I like it when Jesus gets mad and throws the money changers out of the temple. His final acts at Gethsemane show a wonderful hatred of the Romans. When you are going to completely destroy someone, make them so wrong they can never back out. He doesn't cite Socrates as a reference but he might have!
Hatred is a great and unsung virtue of the Christian tradition, and it finds its most extensive flowering in Revelation. The lake of fire is a symbol of the bubbling hatred that always lies simmering just below the surface!
I love hate! It's so voluptuous! There's nothing better!
I was shocked by Brett's poem's support of drinking. I thought we were all in sympathy with the Women's Christian Temperance Union and marched in solidarity with Carrie Nations!
Come to find out, there's a faction WITHIN LS that supports demon rum. And that faction might even win the poetry contest! OMG.
To SOME extent I support the egalitarianism of the enlightenment and see Luther as instigating that egalitarianism by consigning the Pope himself and all ecclesiastical hierarchy to the flames as instances of devilishness.
And along with equality would come LIBERTY! That liberty that shows up in the Statue by that name, in the New York Harbor! I see drinking as leading to licentiousness, but not to true liberty, which is always liberty of INQUIRY.
How can you have liberty of inquiry if you are drunk?
Marxists support equality, but it's at the cost of liberty, which is why I don't support them, and will never support them, or any slight alliance with them (I am willing to befriend Marxists because they can be fun, plus I have to hone my wits against opposing factions, and Marxists will suffice!), but to actually sign on with the drinking faction! I'm NOT saying they should be liquidated.
I don't know who should be liquidated. Fortunately, it's not up to me. I do hope that I am among the raptured while the himly bimping occurs. I also hope my immediate family and friends are among the raptured while the himly bimping occurs.
I should have written "hymnly" bimping. It's of course "hymnly" bimping.
Augustine was not opposing belle-lettres (and the theatre) merely for moralistic reasons (tho, that was part of it--the roman circus was a 24 hr porn show--), but, IMO, because of his interest in veracity. Perhaps that has some connection to the greek klassix, but he understood the tendency of poets (playwrights/novelists, etc) to ...fib, if not prevaricate in a grand manner. Homer was not Thucydides ( nor was he Euclid, Pythagoras, Plato, Ari, et al). And that process still occurs--students know all about The Waste Land, or victorian novels, and little or nothing about the battles of WWI, or great depression, the causes of WWII, etc. And often the literary imagination takes precedence over any scientific/logical knowledge as well (as Bertrand Russell was aware). The greatest poet could not begin to capture the battle of Verdun anyway.
Moreover, who really cares about a few unorganized yaps from beatniks in madhouse, KO? Heart of Darkness is worth a few boxcars of 'em. And the "old-school" realists-- Steinbeck, Dreiser, Hemingway, etc---tried to depict life as it was, with no narcissism or hipster drama (or space opera).
Kirby:
I strongly stand with Brett on the side of demon rum. So did Jesus.
I, too, like Brett's poem and shall be voting for it because it is awesome (and I can't vote for my own).
but i had it on my lips, then something happened
I like zoreastirans more than pepsi
I like ahura-mazda more than cola
I like satanisms as the best club soda
I wish mayans had a system for dr pepper
I think there's no sword-mouthed bastard with a big family
without a mountain dew.
There might be a disturbance or a few
Suddenly something shook or took
my tv dinner
--
/Kristian Lahdensuo
With your anti-booze perspective KO
I don't completely disagree . Wesley was not completely off the mark there--if ever there was a Christian, that man was John Wesley as ST Coleridge allegedly said (though that's had little effect on irishmen/papists--nothin' like being nearly killed on the freeway by drunken mex. migros--) . The good book has few proverbs contra-drinking as well. We swore off hard liquor over 10 years ago--no Kerouacian cirrhosis-blast needed, (and also avoid the 'Merican beerswill--got a bit of strychnine in it IMO)
Holidays are of course a great time for BoozeCo (+ baccy, sweets, pork, etc)--really one might say the raison d'etre of H-days to a large extent (certainly new years). No wonder libertarians such as Ann Althouse & Co love the h-days. Drink up all youse peoples
John's reply to John
Neither the horses,
nor the whore,
nor the beast,
are the Lord.
They are mortal.
Their doom was ordained
at the beginning
to testify to the Word.
Violence will fail,
The lamb will prevail.
All will be light,
and dark become white.
Neither the horses,
nor the whore,
nor the beast,
will be, at the end.
At the end, the Word will be,
and the Word will be with God,
and the Word which is,
and was,
will be
God.
Amen.
Very impressive poem from Stu.
One should not overlook the early esoterica, the freaks who were purged--such as theHypostasis of the Archons.
The quantitative Beings of Light, battled (IMO) against the corporeal..substances, the qualitative. Asuras vs Devas...and Plato vs Aristotle on a grand scale.
Yet the..Archons prevail
There was once a time when I hugely enjoyed reading Irenaeus on the Gnostic libertines such as the Carpocrations, and other somewhat orphic cults around Valentinus. Quite obscure and charmed, but obviously desperately outgunned and ultimately run down, run out, and run off.
It would be a different church had they prevailed. More like Manson, I think, than what has come to the surface in mainstream Protestantism and in Catholicism.
The apocalyptic aspect of Christianity and the end days loomed far larger in the church of my youth. How I loved to hear of the worms eating bad children, and the hairy men who would stab you with a pitchfork every time you reached for a grape.
The days of wrath subsided, and we now rarely hear of hell, with its lakes of fire, and its preposterous pleonasms. Did I mean pleonasms?
Camus wrote his thesis on Plotinus. Most people now think Camus is just an expensive brand of cognac.
sin city
this old town steeped in sin
it will swallow you in
if you've got some money to burn-
take it home right away
you've got three years to pay
but satan is waiting his turn
this earthquake's going to leave me in the poor house
it seems like this whole town's insane
on the thirtyfirst floor
your gold plated door
won't keep out the lord's burning rain
all the scinetists say
this will all wash away
and we don't believe thme anymore
for we've got our recruits
and our green mohair suits
just show them your ID at the door
this earthquake...
an old friend came around
tried to clean up this town
but ideas made some people mad
well he went with his crowd
and he spoke right out loud
now they've lost the best friend
.... they've ever had
this earthqauke...
-Gram Parsons
I'm voting for Stu's poem. I liked Brett's poem because it was excellent in terms of its flow and imagery, but I can't support drinking. I loved GM's poem, but have decided I didn't understand it quite.
Kristian Lahdensuo's poem is the most surreal and striking in its imagery but it doesn't seem to be subordinated to a strong clear thesis.
Stu's poem has a strong clear thesis which holds the poem together, and his images and music all seem to move together as one. So I'm voting for Stu's poem. Thanks to all for attempting to win this contest! Don't forget to vote by midnight tonight or my vote will prevail over all others.
I'm for Gram's take on Rev.. Er jh's quote of GramParsons--plus has a copacetic opium-in-the mojave vibe to go along with it.
I'll stick with my vote for GM, although I though Brett's poem was worthy too.
Kirby: Matt 11:18-19
I am voting for gm... Stu's has a certain strength and power, but is clunky in spots - with some editing could be a winner, but it's not there yet....
NB:
Already voted for Brett. Reiterating that.
It's after midnight on the east coast and it looks like GM Palmer won the Revelation contest and the t-shirt. If JH or some other west coaster, or Craig cares to vote before it's midnight at their place, I'll tally their votes in the morning.
Adios, all!
w00t.
I'd like to thank the Surrealist Academy & baby Jesus. Not full-grown Jesus, though. That wouldn't be hip--I'd just give that bro a tip of the hat.
Buy my book when it becomes available! You really like me!
GM, could you send me your best surface address at kirbyolson2@gmail.com so I can send you the t-shirt? Congratulations! Also, give us the specs on your forthcoming book!
GM, Imma, Imma let you finish...
but JH and W let me down!
Not that I care about the glory, at all, but this time there was a T-SHIRT involved!
A T-Shirt!!!
I guess that's what you get when you're relying on the drinkin' demographic on the day after New Year's Eve...
Congrats to you, GM, and a happy 2012 to all.
Maybe I'll take a picture of me in it then mail it to you.
I do rather fancy the "royal We" when poeticals make use it--allows for all sorts of grand generalizations (eloquent of course).
GM Claudius!
what a delinguent i was
i was having too much end of the year start of the new fun
sorry brett
i would've voted for your poem i think i did actually
i mean i sort of said that was the one for me
anyway
i didn't actually vote
i was negligent in my literary duties
as is so often the case
woe is me
hey
if kirby will print two t-shirts
i'll send him a check and have him send you one
great poem gm
a really superb apocalyptic expression
in a quiet sort of selfreflective way
with a punch
long live poetry contests
i'm ramblin in montana
using other people's computers
that's th e way to go
yowzaa
maybe the mayans are right
jh
G.M. - you should probably travel around the world with it, taking pictures of yourself in front of various well-known and not-so-well-known monuments and the like.
I can take it on my book tour ;)
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