Re: NastyGoon lifts a line

On Sat, 8 Feb 2025 12:41:26 +0000, W.Dockery wrote:

On Fri, 7 Feb 2025 0:04:15 +0000, George J. Dance wrote:
>

https://www.novabbs.com/arts/article.php?id=255731&group=alt.arts.poetry.comments
On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 16:15:27 +0000, Michael Monkey Peabrain (MPP) aka
"HarryLime" wrote:
>

I realized from the content of NancyGene's posts that they were
intelligent, well-educated, and better written than anyone here.
Naturally, I asked them to start contributing to the "Sampler."  And I
was right in doing so.
>
Here are the opening lines of NancyGene's latest poem:
>
"Yesterdays stack up like piles of read newspapers,
Cluttering my mind and obstructing my day."
>
That's poetry of the highest quality.

>
The opening line is very good. It's almost as good as the opening line
of Robert Creeleys poem, "The Days Pile Up":
>
"The days pile up like unread newspapers,"
>
I do hope "Dr." NastyGoon credited Mr. Creeley; otherwise that would be
something they would call, you know -- "plagiarism".

>
This also reminds me of a poem I wrote back around 1976, "Shattered,"
which starts with:
>
"The seconds have piled up on the floor,
Lost here in some other guy's past."
>
I posted this on the newsgroup a few years ago. JLA Forums does have a
search function so I might be able to locate it there.

The idea of time piling up is a common literary conceit.  It stems from
the image of sand piling up at the bottom of an hourglass (which is why
Death is often depicted as carrying one).
One of my favorite examples is from Melville's "Moby Dick":
"But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly
faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the
piled centuries since Paradise."
I like it so much, that I've used variations of it in several of my
poems.
Your above variation is certainly a cut above the usual swill that you
post here -- but your older posts show that your mind was a look sharper
when you were younger.  But it isn't original: the hourglass has simply
sprung a leak.
But as I pointed out to George, NancyGene isn't talking about Time. She's comparing memories (images/events or... stories) of each passing
day to daily newspapers.  Since the memories pile up on her speaker,
weighing them down, they compare them to old, *read* newspapers.
That's an original idea -- and a *Great* line of poetry.
It reminds me of my Great Aunt Dorothy.  She'd been jilted by her fiance
back in the day, and had consequently withdrawn from life.  She lived
with her parents until their deaths, then became a total recluse and
shut in -- eventually dying of malnutrition.  I helped my Grandmother
(her sister) clean up the house and pack up her belongings, etc.  Her
enclosed front porched was packed from floor to ceiling with piles of
yellowing newspapers.
I'm sure that someone, someplace, sometime, must have compared memories
to yellowing newspapers that can pile up on one and bury them alive.  I
can't recall ever having read it before -- but pretty much every thought
has been expressed by someone -- but I can't think of any examples.
--