a review of the new Sun O))) album

[kleenexwoman]

after hearing the new Sun O))) album played at various volumes throughout the house for the past day or so i have concluded that

the new Sun O))) album is music which is designed to make you not feel good in any part of your body or brain or soul ever
the new Sun O))) album is the discordant, wordless wailing that emits continuously from the fires of a hell more horrible than we can ever imagine
the new Sun O))) album was made by lowering a microphone into the padded cell of a man who has seen the bottomless depths of eternity and whose mind has not survived and then you give him three electric guitars and tell him to just play whatever comes to mind
the new Sun O))) album is the three-dimensional echoes of the pleading of the angels who have been chained to the earth for all eternity. the kind of angels who have giant burning wheels for heads, i mean
the new Sun O))) album is the sound of the death of humanity as it is scooped into the maw of the apocalypse machine
the new Sun O))) album is the perfect representation of rage and frustration in musical form

it can make milk sour, make eggs explode, make bread crumble, and make rabbits die

the person or people who created this probably also enjoy electroshock therapy and derive sexual satisfaction from being stretched out on a rack

Comments

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

Ever heard of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" ?

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

That's what I listened to to concentrate when I had that algebra class. I love that album.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

There's just a moment on side 3 where it threatens to break into a tune, but Lou must have stopped himself. Do you know how it came to be made?

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing about three gallons of Robitussin.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

No - you will love this ---

Lou was under contract to produce two more albums for his record company at the time, and he wanted out. They didn't want to release him from the contract, and his response was to record a double album and drop it on them.

They then published it without checking the content. Lou became free from his contract, and went where he wanted to.

The album was recorded using various feedback loops to make the originally random playing as distorted and meaningless as possible, and I suspect that the record company did not make much in the way of sales, but it has become in its own small way a kind of classic; not that Lou did or tried to do anything special, it was a scam; but it just happens to suit the way people feel sometimes when they are in the mood! :)

:: is old ::

Now what about that poet's collective? I get days when I can see the point.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Now THAT is some A++ trolling right there.

Poet's College? I miss it :( The only writing group around here meets one day a month and I always end up missing it.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

Trolling? Looks like I have missed a new use of the word! Take pity on the old, let me know what you meant ---

I still think that most things called poetry have no business being called poetry at all, and finding any like minds who want to do it right is hard going. I would avoid most things called poetry like the plague. But didn't you speak of some place where people could live in a shack and do some fruit picking while they wrote laboriously?

Meanwhile, Who killed King Rhythm?

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Trolling: Doing things for the lulz! Or to mess around with a bad contract. Or something that sounds like a good idea when you're Lou Reed. Poetry.

The poetry farm (http://www.wavepoetry.com/special_section/8).

I've only just realized recently that it's okay to not like all poetry, because a lot of poetry is boring, and it's less about the fact that it's poetry than that it just happens to be boring. \o/ breakthrough.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link, I see they have not updated for 2009 ---

Vegetarian, yuck. A lot of the rest I can live with, but not that.

It is vital to be able to identify bad poetry, otherwise one is cursed to have to do nothing but write it oneself. The hard thing is to see when one is doing so. I can and do scrap considerable sections of work because they do not serve a purpose in the context of a story, and as I probably said before, 'Aurorielle' was revised right through four times. Without a concept of bad poetry, one cannot do so, and one cannot improve.

Yes, a lot of poetry is deadly dull. Of course not all will agree what is and is not, because that is a matter of taste, but along with my charges of technical incompetence and praising the Emperor's clothes, which I level against almost all modern poetry, I would add this; practically none of it has anything to say that is worth saying.

I do think that you have a way of expressing yourself that is worth working on, and that if you want to work on rhythm you will get there, and be very pleased with the results. But this readiness to call poetry bad or dull when it is bad or dull, is quite vital to the process of getting there.

Be passionate about something; almost anything; and then good poetry will become entirely practical, and the work of rhythm and rhyme will be worth the effort.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I go through phases in poetry. I can toss off verse about anything I like for months on end and know exactly how to fix weak pieces, and then for months I'll be completely blocked and unable to remember how poetry works. I think I'm coming into another knowing-poetry phase. I hope.

Modern poetry and classical poetry have different reasons for being and different ways of expressing things. I honestly like a lot of modern poetry's quirkiness and emphasis on small moments and images to subtly illustrate larger points--"no ideas but in things"--better than a lot of older poetry which seeks to sermonize or to express broad or universal ideas directly. (Not that this is true for all poems of either kind, but it's a trend.) The problem is figuring out which form will fit the idea or image--not everything works in traditional form, and not everything can support a more modern form. I'd like to be able to do both well.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

You are quite right that a lot of older poetry in strict forms is either not very good (form exists to achieve an effect, and is not an end in itself, which can be forgotten) and one should also remember that the things that mattered when it was written can be either misunderstood by, irrelevant to, or even anathema to the mind of the modern reader. So there is no guarantee of quality in what is ancient.

My point is mainly that I know of no way of defining poetry that means anything that can include the kinds of things that are being written today; and because of that lack of definition, it is also very hard to find objective ways of saying whether it has been written well or badly. From that it follows that mostly it will be written badly, because if no one can say if it has been written well for hard and fast reasons, that condition will include the author; and if the author cannot tell quality, they cannot improve what they have written.

So let the stuff that is today being touted as 'poetry' be called something else, and appreciated for its own merits in its own way, but whatever its merits are and are not, they are not the merits of poetry, and calling the two the same obscures reason and progress, rather than achieving anything. I also write prose, and I call it prose. I try to write it well. Doing so is an entirely different discipline to (rhythmical) poetry, and very much harder to define. As a result, I end up unsure myself whether I have done it well or badly, whereas with rhythmical poetry I can be sure of the merits and failings of whatever I have done.

Above all, line breaks do no turn prose into poetry, and to suppose that they do so is infantile. One could take a Shakespeare play and write it out without the line breaks and it would remain iambic. The purpose of the line breaks is to reflect rhythm; with them the underlying and deliberate intent to write in iambic pentameters becomes more apparent; the line breaks better reveal what is already inherent in what is there; they serve a purpose. In most modern poetry, line breaks appear to me to be there for no other reason than to allow the writer to claim that they are writing poetry when they are actually writing prose; take them away, and where would the reader put them to restore the original? No one would agree. Take them out of Shakespeare, and anyone with the least understanding of rhythm could put them back again correctly.

Absolutely no one has ever given me a contrary line of reasoning that begins to address this. By all means do ---

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Well, the definition of "poetry" has always been arbitrary, in the first place, and like all ideas of art it's continually in the process of being redefined. The Modern poets, after World War I, did a lot of that redefining--experimenting with form and thinking outside of traditional rhythm and rhyme in order to express new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new ideas of order and how the world worked. (Actually, that whole movement in all areas of art is pretty fascinating.) A very, very broad definition of poetry as it stands today might be that it's written work which depends heavily on form to express meaning, as opposed to prose, which depends on narrative to express meaning. But that's my definition, and it changes; ask another poet on another day, and you'll get a different answer. It doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to be called poetry any more than Shakespeare's sonnets don't deserve to be called poetry because they aren't the same as the Odyssey.

Arrangement on a page holds as much meaning as rhythm or form does--line breaks can denote tension, denote a whole thought, draw attention to a word, and create a visual structure that lends another layer of meaning to a work. Like punctuation, in a way. Greater freedom with form doesn't mean that there are no standards anymore; the truly successful poets are successful for a reason, and it is because they are able to manipulate words and form to evoke clear images and emotions in the reader. Shakespeare did this with a form whose meaning and implications were understood by his audience in his day (I'm thinking mainly of the sonnet here), and e.e. cummings likewise did by experimenting with form in a way that was understood by his audience to hold meaning (playing with spaces, spelling, capitalization, and syntax in a time in which such things are far more standardized). [I theorize that this may also be due to a higher expected literary rate among poetry readers--poetry can afford to look pretty on a page rather than pack meaning into audible rhythm if you expect that your reader will be personally looking at it. But that's just my theory.]

One of the wonderful things that Modern art has created is the idea that art of any sort is a dialogue between the artist, piece, and viewer. No two poets might agree on the right place to put every break or space, but that doesn't mean they're arbitrary; recalling my time in Poet's Collective, it was surprising how often we agreed upon the right place to break a line for the same reasons, and how strikingly different we could render a poem by simply arranging it in a slightly different way. I don't deny that rhythm and form is something a poet should learn in order to be able to experiment with it, in the same way that artists should learn anatomy, perspective, and classic technique in order to be able to create experimental or abstract art. However, poetry no longer requires that the poet fit their words into a grid in order to be meaningful; the poet must learn how to manipulate rhythm and form in their own way in order to convey precisely what they wish to convey, and what they wish to convey may very well be something that works best as a sonnet, or it may be something that works best by putting words into clusters removed from syntax and placing them in different corners of a page.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

I don't see that anyone is using rhythm at all today - rather, it appears that they don't have the faintest idea what it is. They speak of rhythm, and do not know it. The boundary lies with something like Coventry Patmore's "The Toys", where rhythm exists for a couple of lines or so in strict terms and more widely in general terms, but despite not having one pervasive rhythm, it is clear that rhythm is at the core. In modern poetry I don't find it anywhere at all.

Words do not become meaningful by being put in a grid; in rhythmical poems, the grid exists to define the rhythm, and all the skill is in making the words meaningful whilst still retaining the advantages of the grid. Not to maintain meaning and rhythm at the same time is, in that form of poetry, to fail. If the grid were arbitrary, and conveyed no particular benefits, then I would agree, but in my view that's exactly what modern poetry is - all grid, and neither rhythm nor meaning.

I remain convinced that modern poetry is a cult of self and mutual hypnosis, in which enough people gathering together to praise the Emperor's clothes can see them even when they are not there, but in this answer you have at least given me a better idea of how that arises ;)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Most professional poets do know what rhythm is, and many of them have either chosen to use forms that they find to be pleasing, or rejected it as not suiting their needs, much in the same way Picasso ended up using a form of perspective and anatomy that he found to be pleasing and that suited his needs, and thus risked people looking at his paintings and saying, "That dude does not know how to draw." Poetry doesn't always require rhythm, believe it or not.

in rhythmical poems, the grid exists to define the rhythm, and all the skill is in making the words meaningful whilst still retaining the advantages of the grid.
See, this just seems arbitrary to me. I mean, there's no doubt that the results can be pleasing, but it's just another gimmick or poetic parlor game that doesn't necessarily convey any layer of meaning. I know there's a tradition of oral poetry that relies on rhythm and rhyme in order to allow the illiterate population to memorize it, but we do have cheap paper and ink now, so...it's not strictly necessary, and we can find new ways to make words mean things.

I remain convinced that modern poetry is a cult of self and mutual hypnosis
That's pretty much how I feel about a lot of older poetry, although you haven't given me any idea of why you think rhythm is a necessary part of poetry. I guess it's another thing on which we shall have to agree to disagree ;)

[benprime.livejournal.com]

... at least it created a strong reaction in you, which is arguably one measure of what constitutes Art. I have to hear it at some stage in the future. That and Metal Machine Music. Great review :-) (hope you are well and happy, there. hugs. b.)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I don't doubt it's Art--they're certainly pushing the established boundaries of what constitutes music, as are other noise and/or drone bands--but it's not something I want to listen to for hours every day when I'm sick. :( It's certainly worth a listen, and I think you would find it interesting!

hugs back atcha. Things are a little tough here, but we get by. I hope your travels on all levels are going well!

[benprime.livejournal.com]

that probably constitutes torture, then :-/ Call Obama! (1-800-BIG-CHEESE)
I am sad to read that you are ill, I hope you get better soon. Well.. you are getting better all the time of course, but get well soon, I mean.