deepundergroundpoetry.com
I YEARN TO SIT WITH HIM.
I YEARN TO SIT WITH HIM.
Let me sit on my chair with calm mind to write verse.
I refuge to my heart where Christ sits on His throne.
I go there, where He sits; He makes me feel secure,
but He leaves when my heart is upset with the world.
He has changed my dull heart into His paradise.
I love that cosy room where my Lord gives His warmth
though outside it's so cold and the ice paves the ground,
while the wind blows and roars to uproot trees and roofs.
When some men drive me mad and force me to be cruel,
I think of my dear Lord, and He gives me great force.
I endure all their words as l hope to get there,
and forget all the world to sit with Him and verse.
BY JOSEPH ZENIEH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
____________________________________
Let me sit on my chair with calm mind to write verse.
I refuge to my heart where Christ sits on His throne.
I go there, where He sits; He makes me feel secure,
but He leaves when my heart is upset with the world.
He has changed my dull heart into His paradise.
I love that cosy room where my Lord gives His warmth
though outside it's so cold and the ice paves the ground,
while the wind blows and roars to uproot trees and roofs.
When some men drive me mad and force me to be cruel,
I think of my dear Lord, and He gives me great force.
I endure all their words as l hope to get there,
and forget all the world to sit with Him and verse.
BY JOSEPH ZENIEH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
____________________________________
Published 6th Feb 2020
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
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The author encourages honest critique.
6th Feb 2020 10:43pm
6th Feb 2020 11:57pm
7th Feb 2020 3:15am
And here I thought that Jesus was intent
to bring bright comfort to a heart distressed
by having suffered all the cruel world’s harryings.
But now you tell me this: that when you find
yourself upset at fortune’s arrows and its slings
your Lord is quite content and aimed to leave you on your own,
alone and unconsoled, to know the coil of pain
that comes with black abandonment.
Ah, contradiction is, I see,
a vital element within,
if not the very essence of,
these always Gnosticism tinged attempts
you make to speak some theological profundities.
to bring bright comfort to a heart distressed
by having suffered all the cruel world’s harryings.
But now you tell me this: that when you find
yourself upset at fortune’s arrows and its slings
your Lord is quite content and aimed to leave you on your own,
alone and unconsoled, to know the coil of pain
that comes with black abandonment.
Ah, contradiction is, I see,
a vital element within,
if not the very essence of,
these always Gnosticism tinged attempts
you make to speak some theological profundities.
7th Feb 2020 7:01am
Dear LilDragonFly,
Thank you very much for your very nice and encouraging comment.
Thank you very much for your very nice and encouraging comment.
7th Feb 2020 7:05am
Very dear Tig,
You are a very dear, old friend. Thank you very much for your continual encouragement.
You are a very dear, old friend. Thank you very much for your continual encouragement.
7th Feb 2020 7:12am
Very dear Baldwin,
Thank you very much for your very useful observations. To tell you the truth you have helped me a lot although, l have sometimes been ungrateful to you. I am very sorry.
Thank you very much for your very useful observations. To tell you the truth you have helped me a lot although, l have sometimes been ungrateful to you. I am very sorry.
Thank you for your note. But I have to say that if you want me to see that you are indeed sorry for the ways you have responded to my remarks about your submissions, stop dodging them, and instead demonstrate that they are off the mark if you think they are.
Moreover, show me that your remark that my observations are useful is true and sincere by doing what you have yet to do -- i.e., to take account of them when you write.
Let's see you do this by writing a poem about your desire for a woman that avoids the mistakes that I have claimed pepper what you write and that uses the kinds of poetic devices I have suggested you need to use to write well, the devices that will serve to cause a reader to experience the depth of your desire for her.
After all, you challenged me to write some verses in trochaic tetrameter -- and I met your challenge successfully (though you have yet to admit this, presumably because you'd then have to say that your were wrong to claim that I couldn't meet it). Let's see you meet mine. Given that you have claimed in a variety of ways that you are a master of poetry, this shouldn't be very had to do. And I think it's fair to say that if you don't take this up, you will be admitting that your claim to mastery is a false one.
Moreover, show me that your remark that my observations are useful is true and sincere by doing what you have yet to do -- i.e., to take account of them when you write.
Let's see you do this by writing a poem about your desire for a woman that avoids the mistakes that I have claimed pepper what you write and that uses the kinds of poetic devices I have suggested you need to use to write well, the devices that will serve to cause a reader to experience the depth of your desire for her.
After all, you challenged me to write some verses in trochaic tetrameter -- and I met your challenge successfully (though you have yet to admit this, presumably because you'd then have to say that your were wrong to claim that I couldn't meet it). Let's see you meet mine. Given that you have claimed in a variety of ways that you are a master of poetry, this shouldn't be very had to do. And I think it's fair to say that if you don't take this up, you will be admitting that your claim to mastery is a false one.
7th Feb 2020 2:59pm
7th Feb 2020 7:18pm
Dear Baldwin,
I like you and your remarks as a critic, but l still believe that my poetry is excellent, and l still find it much better than your poetry. Baldwin, l have no time to answer your long criticism, or to write poetry according to the advice of any person. I love poetry, and l express it in the way my soul imposes it on me. It is the expression of my soul, and following the traditions of the best English poets. It is useless for you to advise me to change it. However, l like your observations and l find them useful. Poetry is my life, and true poetry can't be but free. I find your poetry void of spirit, and l haven't seen any of your poems written in trochee, hexameter, but this doesn't mean that you are not my friend, and l like you although we differ in our tastes. Please don't be surprised. We are friends, but l don't impose on you my taste or style. Keep to your poetry and l keep to mine, but we remain good friends.
I like you and your remarks as a critic, but l still believe that my poetry is excellent, and l still find it much better than your poetry. Baldwin, l have no time to answer your long criticism, or to write poetry according to the advice of any person. I love poetry, and l express it in the way my soul imposes it on me. It is the expression of my soul, and following the traditions of the best English poets. It is useless for you to advise me to change it. However, l like your observations and l find them useful. Poetry is my life, and true poetry can't be but free. I find your poetry void of spirit, and l haven't seen any of your poems written in trochee, hexameter, but this doesn't mean that you are not my friend, and l like you although we differ in our tastes. Please don't be surprised. We are friends, but l don't impose on you my taste or style. Keep to your poetry and l keep to mine, but we remain good friends.
7th Feb 2020 9:33pm
I wonder if what you do claim is true:
that all the versifiers of the golden age of poetry,
when reigned Will Shakespeare and his ilk
(Rossetti, Marlowe, Milton, Donne, Traherne, Carew)
and those who wrote before free verse became the rage,
like Browning, Byron, Shelly, Keats and Pope,
Thoreau, and Hardy, too,
felt free, if not obliged, to give
all leave unto themselves
to think it so that they, to get a cunning verse
or two,
had liberty, indeed a mandate then,
to throw good grammar to the wind,
and felt that it was never sin to leave out articles
and other parts of goodly speech
in order not to breech the all important sacrosanctity
of well maintained precisioning within
the measured rhythm and the length of line
they knew (or so it’s claimed)
they had,
upon the pain of being thought
poetically incompetent, untalented,
and lacking inspiration and the gift
of literary grace,
to cast their verses in
if they were ever to achieve,
to win, the knowledged critics’
and the educated reading public’s accolades?
Is there any concrete evidence for anyone
assuming so?
I’ve never seen a whit, seen neither hide nor hair, of it.
But if you think you’ve found such
in their work,
I beg you this with me, as soon as possible,
to share.
that all the versifiers of the golden age of poetry,
when reigned Will Shakespeare and his ilk
(Rossetti, Marlowe, Milton, Donne, Traherne, Carew)
and those who wrote before free verse became the rage,
like Browning, Byron, Shelly, Keats and Pope,
Thoreau, and Hardy, too,
felt free, if not obliged, to give
all leave unto themselves
to think it so that they, to get a cunning verse
or two,
had liberty, indeed a mandate then,
to throw good grammar to the wind,
and felt that it was never sin to leave out articles
and other parts of goodly speech
in order not to breech the all important sacrosanctity
of well maintained precisioning within
the measured rhythm and the length of line
they knew (or so it’s claimed)
they had,
upon the pain of being thought
poetically incompetent, untalented,
and lacking inspiration and the gift
of literary grace,
to cast their verses in
if they were ever to achieve,
to win, the knowledged critics’
and the educated reading public’s accolades?
Is there any concrete evidence for anyone
assuming so?
I’ve never seen a whit, seen neither hide nor hair, of it.
But if you think you’ve found such
in their work,
I beg you this with me, as soon as possible,
to share.
"but l don't impose on you my taste or style".
Ah but you do every time you tell me that because my submissions are not like yours in form and theme and "language", they are not poetry.
And you hardly follow the traditions of the best English poets when you force your lines, through omissions of articles, use of awkward syntax, grammar gaffes, bad rhymes, solecisms, and the absence of metaphor and simile, and concrete appeals to the senses, into the linear and stanzaic forms some (but not all) of them employed.
In any case, this is a dodge of my challenge to you. If you are the great poet you say you are, then show me just how much this is so by writing a truly evocative love poem about your desire for a woman. Surely, your "soul" has experienced this. And surely, if you are who you say you are, writing such a poem should be very easy for you to do.
And as to your note that you "...l haven't seen any of your poems written in trochee, hexameter
,
you must have missed what I sent to you here some time ago, namely
Can I not produce some fulsome lines that measure
up to six foot falls felicitous in rhythm
and in rhyme that use some sharp, concrete appeals to
striking imagery and does not make a reader
angered at my inability to write like
one who knows his stuff regarding what it is that
causes one to see some wondrous things with closed eyes?
Doubtless you'll find a way to say that this is not poetry. I look forward to seeing how you will do so.
Ah but you do every time you tell me that because my submissions are not like yours in form and theme and "language", they are not poetry.
And you hardly follow the traditions of the best English poets when you force your lines, through omissions of articles, use of awkward syntax, grammar gaffes, bad rhymes, solecisms, and the absence of metaphor and simile, and concrete appeals to the senses, into the linear and stanzaic forms some (but not all) of them employed.
In any case, this is a dodge of my challenge to you. If you are the great poet you say you are, then show me just how much this is so by writing a truly evocative love poem about your desire for a woman. Surely, your "soul" has experienced this. And surely, if you are who you say you are, writing such a poem should be very easy for you to do.
And as to your note that you "...l haven't seen any of your poems written in trochee, hexameter
,
you must have missed what I sent to you here some time ago, namely
Can I not produce some fulsome lines that measure
up to six foot falls felicitous in rhythm
and in rhyme that use some sharp, concrete appeals to
striking imagery and does not make a reader
angered at my inability to write like
one who knows his stuff regarding what it is that
causes one to see some wondrous things with closed eyes?
Doubtless you'll find a way to say that this is not poetry. I look forward to seeing how you will do so.
Iambic hexameter, too.
I challenge you, J-Z, to write some verse that has
a filled capacity to make a woman swoon
and fires desire in her to run headlong into
your arms, all breathless, sighing with her love for you .
Now this would mean you’d have to fill your measured lines
for once with true erotic charm, avoid cliches,
and also then eschew the awkward phrasings and
the rhymes predictable and dull you’re wont to place
inside the dreary lines you set upon the page.
Now given that you’ve claimed to be a writer who
has mastered every grace that gilded poets from
a former time exhibited, you surely should
be able to produce a thing or two that shows
you know just how to scribe a piece that rivals or
fits hand in glove with what they penned when they composed
the vivid, living poetry on love they did.
I challenge you, J-Z, to write some verse that has
a filled capacity to make a woman swoon
and fires desire in her to run headlong into
your arms, all breathless, sighing with her love for you .
Now this would mean you’d have to fill your measured lines
for once with true erotic charm, avoid cliches,
and also then eschew the awkward phrasings and
the rhymes predictable and dull you’re wont to place
inside the dreary lines you set upon the page.
Now given that you’ve claimed to be a writer who
has mastered every grace that gilded poets from
a former time exhibited, you surely should
be able to produce a thing or two that shows
you know just how to scribe a piece that rivals or
fits hand in glove with what they penned when they composed
the vivid, living poetry on love they did.
