He said
Socially agressive--
Bully
Dude you should've seen
what I went through
Socially agressive--
Bully
Dude you should've seen
what I went through
posted by Philip at 10:41 PM
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
About Me
- Name: Philip
I discovered haiku in the summer of 2004 while browsing poetry forums. Since then I kept a little journal of my haiku and in winter of 2005/6 I started other writings i.e.- short story, prose, and poetry. All my writing essentially centers around haiku. All my haiku are 5-7-5 syllables.
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9 Comments:
Or, perhaps, another besides you might know it also.
I think I like this, reminds me of a poem I wrote once, with a similar theme.
tenebris, to be frank with you I didn't understand your comment.
Stylistically, the poem has the terseness and line-sideways slips\shifts of thought necessary for this format. It also has something of substance at its core. (You would be surprised how rare that is.)
Yet that substance is explicitly designed to give the writer the moral high ground, while at the same time defending from a perceived social aggression (equated with bullying, but otherwise undefined) by assuming the subject's (and, implicitly, to some extent the reader's) ignorance and, in fact, irrelevance -- which, interestingly, tells me far more about you than about your subject. (Was that the intent?)
Not only does the poem assume the subject's ignorance of the writer's specific experience (which, after all, is to be expected! how can the subject know what the writer has been through unless the writer tells them?); but also the subject's irrelevance in the most general sense: your experience inherently trumps their experience ... whatever it might be.
Very short form: the words of your poem tell me, the reader, that you find nothing of value in your subject whatsoever. Yet, at the same time, you seemed to find enough there that you needed to defend yourself from it; that, in fact, it needed writing against?
Interesting comment. Although I think a tad overthought.
tenebris, to be frank with you I didn't understand your comment...
...Kidding, but in all seriousness I am having a rather difficult time understanding how you interpreted this poem. But thank you very much for giving the poem some careful thought and consideration:
"Stylistically, the poem has the terseness and line-sideways slips\shifts of thought necessary for this format. It also has something of substance at its core. (You would be surprised how rare that is.)"
--That was a very big complement thank you.
"Yet that substance is explicitly designed to give the writer the moral high ground, while at the same time defending from a perceived social aggression (equated with bullying, but otherwise undefined) by assuming the subject's (and, implicitly, to some extent the reader's) ignorance and, in fact, irrelevance -- which, interestingly, tells me far more about you than about your subject. (Was that the intent?)"
-- Here is where I run into difficulty understanding you. There are two possible ways to understand the speaker: 1) as the victim, or 2), as the bully.
1) If, "dude you should've seen..." is said by the bully--which is the intended meaning-- then the only way I would very implicitly be suggesting the subject or victim's ignorance, is by presuming that the victim is too stupid or ignorant to understand that the bullying stemmed from the bully's past experience. But even so the confession is intended to purge the bully of his guilt by revealing to the victim the circumstances which lead him to bully. There is also the factor of the bully presuming how much worse he had it than his victim. Which then assumes him, the bully, to be utterly ignorant.
2) alternatively, if, "dude you should've seen..." is spoken from the mouth of the victim to an intended audience or possibly to the bully, then I could understand why I would be inherently presuming the ignorance of the audience.
It was entirely possible that I misinterpreted who was to "say" what -- and, as you point out, that changes everything. I was working from the convention of italics being used to frame the ("I" of the writer)'s hidden thoughts: thus [external] observation, [external] observation, italicised "I" thoughts (bully as external to "I").
By your words, it sounds instead as though your intent was to give the bully a voice? in which case the pattern becomes [external] observation, [external] observation, italicised [projected] "I" thoughts (the internal "I" of the bully).
In which case (unless you intend this potential ambiguity to remain as a deliberate thing), you need something to make clear who the "I" of the thoughts is to be -- maybe even just a single word or two, or maybe a fifth terse line between the "bully" and the italicised thoughts -- to focus the reader's perspective in the way you intend.
As to overthought :D
I take you back, for a moment, to my first ever literature (poetry) university course; and to my first ever assigment of that nature: to write a 1000-word paper on a 50 word poem. (Even more interesting, in that I came at it from a physics major perspective: and at the university level had written only science papers previously.) Several of us in the class agreed that if we were to photocopy the poem ten times, we still would not have the required number of words. Somehow, to this day, I remember the poem word-for-word ... but the paper was forgettable, and ultimately forgotten and lost.
Greets to the webmaster of this wonderful site. Keep working. Thank you.
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Hallo I absolutely adore your site. You have beautiful graphics I have ever seen.
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