Lumpy pudding

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. (Wimsatt & Beardsley)

Here we celebrate the excluded, lumpy parts of the pudding!

Aug 19, 2011 8:52pm
Robert Gibbons: Depths of Summer Shadows Depths of summer shadows, alive as their source. In the middle of the night glass shattered in pitchest black with the sound of light. Doorknobs flew off sockets. A dream? I wondered how an event could be wrenched out of eternity, held in tow by language? We knew moon would rise as if out of water, when she staked the plot of ground on hillside grass with a quilt, adding some modern dance move, legs outstretched toward sky, turning my world upside-down. The celestial event of full moonrise occurred out of a cloud, as opposed to the sea below. How the tune from my college years entered the picture, I can’t quite explain, but When a Man Loves a Woman, is such a Soulful tune, & I told her how once in Boston on Gainsborough Street right where Espresso Royale Caffe is now, there used to be a bar, an anonymous bar, where one could get a beer for a dime, so fifty cents for seven songs on the juke was affordable. There I was one night pressing letters & numbers according to sophomoric tastes at the time, when I saw a hand & heard a voice. The right hand was dark & mangled: two fingers & a thumb missing, & the voice deep, but gentle, saying, “Play C6,” which of course, was the Percy Sledge tune, thinking to myself, as I turned, looking up, eyes & smiles meeting, “Hell, I like that song, why not?” Photo - Claudia Paneca: Summer Shadows #15, 2011

Robert Gibbons: Depths of Summer Shadows

Depths of summer shadows, alive as their source. In the middle of the night glass shattered in pitchest black with the sound of light. Doorknobs flew off sockets. A dream? I wondered how an event could be wrenched out of eternity, held in tow by language? We knew moon would rise as if out of water, when she staked the plot of ground on hillside grass with a quilt, adding some modern dance move, legs outstretched toward sky, turning my world upside-down. The celestial event of full moonrise occurred out of a cloud, as opposed to the sea below. How the tune from my college years entered the picture, I can’t quite explain, but When a Man Loves a Woman, is such a Soulful tune, & I told her how once in Boston on Gainsborough Street right where Espresso Royale Caffe is now, there used to be a bar, an anonymous bar, where one could get a beer for a dime, so fifty cents for seven songs on the juke was affordable. There I was one night pressing letters & numbers according to sophomoric tastes at the time, when I saw a hand & heard a voice. The right hand was dark & mangled: two fingers & a thumb missing, & the voice deep, but gentle, saying, “Play C6,” which of course, was the Percy Sledge tune, thinking to myself, as I turned, looking up, eyes & smiles meeting, “Hell, I like that song, why not?”

Photo - Claudia Paneca: Summer Shadows #15, 2011
Page 1 of 1