Blue Bird Revised Edit 1

[Brownlie]

What is the bluebird as a sign?
The beaky flag imparts
a hidden man in poetry’s lore,
and calls about men's, "hearts."


In ink it strikes a double stress,
And signs an animal.
It’s taken as a captured man
No longer seminal.

A bluebird sang inside of me.
It warbled when a worm
Was swallowed by my bloating corpse,
and ached with every burn

I Sped toward bone necrosis.
In bottle necked pastimes,
I lurched my birdlike collar high
And threw away my prime.

My smokeless song went riding pale
Unbridled on a swine.
I gamboled in a drunken dell,
And quaffed with rotten rinds.


What I could not load to “do it,”
I chased by rolling dice.
The rain was all that reigned, and I
Supposed I’d wetly strive.

I sought to whet my passion.
I Enflamed my liver,
And chased a circling Paradox,
dulling thought with liquor.

My curses reeked of father stuff,
And sought to murder signs,
Of trilling birds that fly to whirs
Of buzzing power lines.

And so I see my brother now
Who rolls across cement
Pretending he’s an invalid
To beg another cent.

Embracing with a distant word,
I coax a cracking voice.
From out a fragile door he begs,
and fades as vacant noise.

Away from him I see a duct,
A woman charged with life.
Unclipped and free the bluebird flies,
To feel itself deprived.

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup.

Because a word is prone to morph,
We can rename bluebirds.
reattribute what’s said as sweet,
to something that’s more blurred.

[tectak]

What is the bluebird as a sign? I don't know...but I don't understand the question,either.
The beaky flag imparts You cannot impart a man...especially a hidden one or what's the point anyway. Here's a man. Oh, you can't see him? That's because the beaky bluebird flag imparted him hidden. Huh?
a hidden man in poetry’s lore,
and calls about men's, "hearts." Call? You mean visits or by telephone. How about:
" and sings about men's hearts", whatever that means.


In ink it strikes a double stress,
And signs an animal.
It’s taken as a captured man
No longer seminal. Now brownlie, you know me and I know you and you know gobbledygook when you see it. Not only are you back to capitalising every line but the words are just dropped on the page with no attempt to group them with... what's it called? Ah, yes. Punctuation. It's is what?

A bluebird sang inside of me.
It warbled when a worm
Was swallowed by my bloating corpse,
and ached with every burn Burn? What's burning? Here I am, happily bloating along when somebody shoves a red-hot worm down my gangrenous gullet. And who let that bird in here? Oh, I know, I know...it is easy to pull this sort of well intentioned stuff apart and I do not do it cruelly. Thing is, you are making it too easy. There is nothing structurally connected and so the whole edifice shakes when I laugh...and that is not good.

I Sped toward bone necrosis. Bloody hell, brownlie...this is after an edit? Capital on Sped? Why? Metaphorically masticated. You are a dead corpse, you are speeding, you are developing a living necrosis(?). I am lost. Help.
In bottle necked pastimes,
I lurched my birdlike collar high
And threw away my prime. Quite right, too. I threw mine away way back just after I realised that a lurch of my collar meant I wasn't going to end up a dove. Look, all is opinion but this is just too obscure. Wonder why no one is commenting?

My smokeless song went riding pale Stop now. I have. If it wasn't so brillig in the slivey toves I would have quaffed a rind with you...but as it is, I'm going home to my glass encountered swollen rasberry for a quick round of cateract ridge. Goodnightall.
Unbridled on a swine.
I gamboled in a drunken dell,
And quaffed with rotten rinds.


What I could not load to “do it,”
I chased by rolling dice.
The rain was all that reigned, and I
Supposed I’d wetly strive.

I sought to whet my passion.
I Enflamed my liver,
And chased a circling Paradox,
dulling thought with liquor.

My curses reeked of father stuff,
And sought to murder signs,
Of trilling birds that fly to whirs
Of buzzing power lines.

And so I see my brother now
Who rolls across cement
Pretending he’s an invalid
To beg another cent.

Embracing with a distant word,
I coax a cracking voice.
From out a fragile door he begs,
and fades as vacant noise.

Away from him I see a duct,
A woman charged with life.
Unclipped and free the bluebird flies,
To feel itself deprived.

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup.

Because a word is prone to morph,
We can rename bluebirds.
reattribute what’s said as sweet,
to something that’s more blurred.

Very good. Now just lie still for a moment while the nurse sticks these milk-bottle tops to your temples.
Don't listen to me. Read what all the other crits make of it.
Best,
tectak

[expiring_touch]

What is the bluebird as a sign?
The beaky flag imparts
a hidden man in poetry’s lore,
and calls about men's, "hearts."


In ink it strikes a double stress,
And signs an animal.
It’s taken as a captured man
No longer seminal.

A bluebird sang inside of me.
It warbled when a worm
Was swallowed by my bloating corpse,
and ached with every burn

I Sped toward bone necrosis.
In bottle necked pastimes,
I lurched my birdlike collar high
And threw away my prime.

My smokeless song went riding pale
Unbridled on a swine.
I gamboled in a drunken dell,
And quaffed with rotten rinds.


What I could not load to “do it,”
I chased by rolling dice.
The rain was all that reigned, and I
Supposed I’d wetly strive.

I sought to whet my passion.
I Enflamed my liver,
And chased a circling Paradox,
dulling thought with liquor.

My curses reeked of father stuff,
And sought to murder signs,
Of trilling birds that fly to whirs
Of buzzing power lines.

And so I see my brother now
Who rolls across cement
Pretending he’s an invalid
To beg another cent.

Embracing with a distant word,
I coax a cracking voice.
From out a fragile door he begs,
and fades as vacant noise.

Away from him I see a duct,
A woman charged with life.
Unclipped and free the bluebird flies,
To feel itself deprived.

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup.

Because a word is prone to morph,
We can rename bluebirds.
reattribute what’s said as sweet,
to something that’s more blurred.

well, i was in a friendly mood, so I made myself read through all this assortment of cliches in hope to stumble across smth, which would catch my eye, lift my soul to some new level of purity of emotion, and thank God, I did:

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup.

the first two lines are the only ones I responded to in the whole poem.

[Brownlie]

Thanks for reading I'll make sure to return the favor when I get to a computer. I can definitely see where some of the problems arose. I attempted to argue with the blue bird poem by Bukowski, and then added Whitman Spenser and Milton references. I.e. the bird like collar refers to a long neck that was often compared as a fitting sign of gluttony. The hidden part refers to Bukowski and his hidden blue bird that seems to represent his gentler side, but I'm doing too much explaining here. The punctuation needs fixing and some other things need fixing. Thanks again. Still working through Spenser so I won't pretend to be an expert in that. Too old fashioned anyway.

[Isis]

I'm not looking at previous versions or comments since this has its own thread, so I assume you want people to approach it with fresh eyes. Let me know if I should look back. My comments below are in blue.

What is the bluebird as a sign?
The beaky flag imparts
a hidden man in poetry’s lore,
and calls about men's, "hearts." So this stanza seems to be pointing to the bluebird as a secret symbol in poetry, or a touchstone in the history of poetry. I'm confused by the comma at the end of the sentence. I'd remove it. It seems like a comma splice to me.

I wonder about the double lines between a few of the stanzas. I'm talking about stanza breaks like this one, between the first and second stanzas. Was this the pinky getting too comfy on the "return" key (something that happens to me often when I'm writing late at night), or are these extra spaces meant to mark out separate sections of the poem, like a more subtle version of numbering different parts or putting dashes/page breaks in? Should I pause extra here?



In ink it strikes a double stress,
And signs an animal.
It’s taken as a captured man
No longer seminal. I like the explorations of the word as it appears on the page, the discussion of ink and stress and signs. I gather that the rest of the stanza is about alternate meanings or interpretations of the word "bluebird" but it's not something I'm familiar with. I asked google and got nothing that seemed obviously connected to "captured man". Is there a reference to another work of art here that I'm missing? A pun? It's been a long day, help a sister out.

A bluebird sang inside of me.
It warbled when a worm
Was swallowed by my bloating corpse,
and ached with every burn I really liked this stanza because it twisted the expected image, and because it was something I could clearly imagine. And because the slant rhyme really serves the poem, like a Dickinson rhyme. I expected some pretty and bright image after "a bluebird sang inside of me", but the speaker is dead. This intrigued me and kept me reading.

I Sped toward bone necrosis. I'm reading "bone necrosis" as an image of death, not yet specific
In bottle necked pastimes, I assume "bottle necked pastimes" is drinking … is there a double meaning here?
I lurched my birdlike collar high
And threw away my prime. This sentence gets a little bit murkier. I'm torn between "birdlike collar" as a shirt collar or a collarbone. Either way I get the sense of the speaker regretting wasted youth, maybe, but because I feel like I have to stretch to get the image I get thrown out of the atmosphere of the poem.

My smokeless song went riding pale
Unbridled on a swine. Interesting images that end up feeling really surreal to me, and disconnected from the rest of the poem. Is this a further meditation on drunkenness and youthful folly? Is this a dream or something that's actually happening?
I gamboled in a drunken dell,
And quaffed with rotten rinds. Of all the images of drunkenness in the poem, I think this is the most wild and musical and descriptive. A large middle section of the poem focuses on how the speaker was drunk and wild, and some of this material ends up feeling redundant or extraneous to me, probably because it is laced with references or metaphor that I'm not getting. Basically, I think that a lot of the narrative/images about the speaker being drunk can be condensed, and these two lines are pretty great and worth keeping. Maybe this is all that needs to be said on the subject.


What I could not load to “do it,”
I chased by rolling dice.
The rain was all that reigned, and I
Supposed I’d wetly strive.

I sought to whet my passion.
I Enflamed my liver,
And chased a circling Paradox,
dulling thought with liquor. Why the capitalized words in the middle of the sentence here? I can see a reason for capitalizing Paradox, because that makes it like an abstraction embodied - an approach used by poets of previous centuries, I think. But why Enflamed? Why capitalize a verb?

My curses reeked of father stuff,
And sought to murder signs,
Of trilling birds that fly to whirs
Of buzzing power lines.

And so I see my brother now Is the speaker saying this from his drinking days, or from the grave? When is "now" in this poem?
Who rolls across cement
Pretending he’s an invalid
To beg another cent.

Embracing with a distant word,
I coax a cracking voice.
From out a fragile door he begs,
and fades as vacant noise. I'm interested in the shift to the brother's story, but I feel like it's touched upon and not fully explored. I'm curious about how this relates to the other stuff going on in the poem - the bluebird in the speaker, the memories and regrets he has about life.

Away from him I see a duct,
A woman charged with life.
Unclipped and free the bluebird flies,
To feel itself deprived. Lots of ideas in this stanza, and I had a hard time tying them together. On "A duct" - the woman is a duct? Or are these two separate sights, separate ideas? I'm glad that the poem has returned to its touchstone image and premise, but I'm not sure how we got back here or why, or what makes the bluebird deprived, and if this is connected to the stuff about the speaker's brother in any way.

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup. I also really liked this stanza: replacing drinks that dull a lonely ache with a symbol of life. I guess that could be read as sentimental, at least the way I wrote it, but not the way it's written in the poem. It's kind of strange and funny but still possible to interpret.

Because a word is prone to morph,
We can rename bluebirds.
reattribute what’s said as sweet,
to something that’s more blurred.

Overall, I see the bluebird as a symbol of something bigger that has helped the speaker figure out his life and death. There's narrative in there about drinking to excess and experiencing poverty, but I'm not sure how the bluebird turns this around at the end, which it seems to. I'm not familiar with the references mentioned in your explanation post, and nothing in the poem suggested that I should start looking things up. How hidden do you want the references to be? Sometimes it can work to have them there only for those "in the know", so that only people coming at the poem with certain knowledge will get everything you've put into the poem. This can risk alienating readers if the images or ideas don't also work well on their own when the reader doesn't understand the reference. I felt at a number of points in the poem like there was something, or many somethings, going on that I didn't understand. But it was hard for me to tell if it was a reference or just dense language that wasn't "clicking" for whatever reason.

[Brownlie]

I'm not looking at previous versions or comments since this has its own thread, so I assume you want people to approach it with fresh eyes. Let me know if I should look back. My comments below are in blue.

What is the bluebird as a sign?
The beaky flag imparts
a hidden man in poetry’s lore,
and calls about men's, "hearts." So this stanza seems to be pointing to the bluebird as a secret symbol in poetry, or a touchstone in the history of poetry. I'm confused by the comma at the end of the sentence. I'd remove it. It seems like a comma splice to me.

I wonder about the double lines between a few of the stanzas. I'm talking about stanza breaks like this one, between the first and second stanzas. Was this the pinky getting too comfy on the "return" key (something that happens to me often when I'm writing late at night), or are these extra spaces meant to mark out separate sections of the poem, like a more subtle version of numbering different parts or putting dashes/page breaks in? Should I pause extra here?



In ink it strikes a double stress,
And signs an animal.
It’s taken as a captured man
No longer seminal. I like the explorations of the word as it appears on the page, the discussion of ink and stress and signs. I gather that the rest of the stanza is about alternate meanings or interpretations of the word "bluebird" but it's not something I'm familiar with. I asked google and got nothing that seemed obviously connected to "captured man". Is there a reference to another work of art here that I'm missing? A pun? It's been a long day, help a sister out.

A bluebird sang inside of me.
It warbled when a worm
Was swallowed by my bloating corpse,
and ached with every burn I really liked this stanza because it twisted the expected image, and because it was something I could clearly imagine. And because the slant rhyme really serves the poem, like a Dickinson rhyme. I expected some pretty and bright image after "a bluebird sang inside of me", but the speaker is dead. This intrigued me and kept me reading.

I Sped toward bone necrosis. I'm reading "bone necrosis" as an image of death, not yet specific
In bottle necked pastimes, I assume "bottle necked pastimes" is drinking … is there a double meaning here?
I lurched my birdlike collar high
And threw away my prime. This sentence gets a little bit murkier. I'm torn between "birdlike collar" as a shirt collar or a collarbone. Either way I get the sense of the speaker regretting wasted youth, maybe, but because I feel like I have to stretch to get the image I get thrown out of the atmosphere of the poem.

My smokeless song went riding pale
Unbridled on a swine. Interesting images that end up feeling really surreal to me, and disconnected from the rest of the poem. Is this a further meditation on drunkenness and youthful folly? Is this a dream or something that's actually happening?
I gamboled in a drunken dell,
And quaffed with rotten rinds. Of all the images of drunkenness in the poem, I think this is the most wild and musical and descriptive. A large middle section of the poem focuses on how the speaker was drunk and wild, and some of this material ends up feeling redundant or extraneous to me, probably because it is laced with references or metaphor that I'm not getting. Basically, I think that a lot of the narrative/images about the speaker being drunk can be condensed, and these two lines are pretty great and worth keeping. Maybe this is all that needs to be said on the subject.


What I could not load to “do it,”
I chased by rolling dice.
The rain was all that reigned, and I
Supposed I’d wetly strive.

I sought to whet my passion.
I Enflamed my liver,
And chased a circling Paradox,
dulling thought with liquor. Why the capitalized words in the middle of the sentence here? I can see a reason for capitalizing Paradox, because that makes it like an abstraction embodied - an approach used by poets of previous centuries, I think. But why Enflamed? Why capitalize a verb?

My curses reeked of father stuff,
And sought to murder signs,
Of trilling birds that fly to whirs
Of buzzing power lines.

And so I see my brother now Is the speaker saying this from his drinking days, or from the grave? When is "now" in this poem?
Who rolls across cement
Pretending he’s an invalid
To beg another cent.

Embracing with a distant word,
I coax a cracking voice.
From out a fragile door he begs,
and fades as vacant noise. I'm interested in the shift to the brother's story, but I feel like it's touched upon and not fully explored. I'm curious about how this relates to the other stuff going on in the poem - the bluebird in the speaker, the memories and regrets he has about life.

Away from him I see a duct,
A woman charged with life.
Unclipped and free the bluebird flies,
To feel itself deprived. Lots of ideas in this stanza, and I had a hard time tying them together. On "A duct" - the woman is a duct? Or are these two separate sights, separate ideas? I'm glad that the poem has returned to its touchstone image and premise, but I'm not sure how we got back here or why, or what makes the bluebird deprived, and if this is connected to the stuff about the speaker's brother in any way.

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup. I also really liked this stanza: replacing drinks that dull a lonely ache with a symbol of life. I guess that could be read as sentimental, at least the way I wrote it, but not the way it's written in the poem. It's kind of strange and funny but still possible to interpret.

Because a word is prone to morph,
We can rename bluebirds.
reattribute what’s said as sweet,
to something that’s more blurred.

Overall, I see the bluebird as a symbol of something bigger that has helped the speaker figure out his life and death. There's narrative in there about drinking to excess and experiencing poverty, but I'm not sure how the bluebird turns this around at the end, which it seems to. I'm not familiar with the references mentioned in your explanation post, and nothing in the poem suggested that I should start looking things up. How hidden do you want the references to be? Sometimes it can work to have them there only for those "in the know", so that only people coming at the poem with certain knowledge will get everything you've put into the poem. This can risk alienating readers if the images or ideas don't also work well on their own when the reader doesn't understand the reference. I felt at a number of points in the poem like there was something, or many somethings, going on that I didn't understand. But it was hard for me to tell if it was a reference or just dense language that wasn't "clicking" for whatever reason.

That was a great critique, one of the best I've ever had someone do with something I've written. The Bluebird comes from the Poem by Charles Bukowski. I'll post it here, but that doesn't vindicate the valid criticism about the wanton use of recondite reference throughout the poem.

Here's Bukowski:

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

I'll list some of the other references to satiate my vanity, but they're really not worth your time: Fatherstuff, and electricity = Walt Whitman

Birdlike neck/collar = Symbol for gluttony as a longer neck allows you to quaff more deeply

Quaffing rotten rinds = Paradise Lost with alcoholic rinds I guess. I suppose the bower would be the dell though that is unclear.

Liver = In the Early Modern period the liver was thought of as the seat of passion.

The rain = A part of a song sung by Feste in Twelfth Night.

There, now I've gotten that out of my system. Let me say, You're way too smart to be reviewing my writing! Thanks, your efforts are very helpful.

[Isis]

Thank you - I'm glad my comments were helpful. And I'm glad I got a chance to read that Bukowski poem. I see why you're referencing it, I think. It's easy to connect to, even when I don't share the same kinds of life experiences. Is this a poem you want readers to be able to look up? Like if someone doesn't know the poem and is reading your poem, do you want them to be able to have enough info to type something into google and find the Bukowski? I think that there could be a few different strategies to pointing more clearly towards this poem, like a directly quoted line or an epigraph or a namedrop, but those all depend on your goals. If you want the poem to get readers looking things up and looking for connections, it might need a more clear nod to the source material. If you want the images to work on two levels, one level for those not in the know and another level for those who are, then the references probably don't need to be as clear or obvious.

I think that's happening with lines like "quaffing rotten rinds" - it's so descriptive that I 'get it' on just the level of image, even though I don't get the reference (I've never made it more than 3 pages into Paradise Lost). And I think that could happen with the "birdlike collar" and other similar mentions if they had a little more context or description around them. That way, a reader naive to the references would be able to see something on the level of description, and a more 'in the know' reader would both be able to see what you're describing and get the additional meaning behind it.

Again, not sure if that's what you want to do with the poem - or if I'm talking about stuff you've already thought through. Either way I appreciate getting to read a little more about your thought process with the poem. It's always fun and informative to see what goes into other people's work.