In the discussions about occupations I started wondering how the spark was started. I went to one room schools for 8 years and a high school of only 8 in my last year and never took any English or lit classes in college beyond the minimal requirements for a BS degree. But my ill-trained(at that time with only a year or two at the most past high school) teachers read poetry through every grade and if you didn't understand at third grade it may have gotten clear by the 8th. This is where my preference for rhyme was started.
I really don't understand some of the classical references you folks make but it sends me to our little local library as I really don't "google' very well.
To follow up on occupations I have been retired for seventeen years but am still a student.
As many have said "This is a GREAT SITE".

Smokey, to quote an old saw about teachers, "once you're a teacher you're a student for life". That describes me perfectly.

How did I come to this site? I was researching a quotation, I don't recall what it was, but I read some of the posts here and got hooked. Now I spend about an hour or two a day here looking for quotes and reading some great poetry.

Les

Smokey,
I went to a three-room school, infants, juniors, and seniors. Every Monday we had a 'memory verse' on the board, and every Friday it was erased, and we were expected to write it down. Besides that, my mother loved poetry. We had no TV or radio, so for fun we had to spell words she picked from the dictionary or she would recite a line from a poem, we had to finish the verse, and poem if we could, and name the poem and author. I grew up loving the sound of words. I happened upon this site when I was looking for the rest of a poem I only half remembered. I spend way too much time here, but I have learned so much, and made some great friends.
JP

As I said earlier, I am a bookkepper by trade and that is not at all my peraonality, so as I work toward my degree, I daydream and secretly write poetry in my office to eascape! This site has given me inspiration and picked my brain. I visit everyday to escape.

Smokey-

I came here a couple of years ago looking for the rest of 'No keecka my Dog' by T.A. Daly, and never left. I have always liked poetry (Kipling, Service, Frost) but since stumbling on this site and 'meeting' people like JP and Les and MANY others, I have bumped into WORLDS of poerty I had never heard of. I will take my time to explore them.
Emule and it's people are the BEST.

There's no place like home.


Jack

I found this site by trying to find the source of a line for a friend. Now I am hooked. It has become like the morning news-have to have it everyday. As a retired English teacher, poetry has always been with me. Even in elementary school, I loved it and never stopped.

You all make me feel like we've contributed an asset to the Internet.

I was talking with Rudy the other day and we were recalling the first version of this web site. We started this site in high school as a project for a scholarship competition. The first version was written on a Amber Monochrome monitor. There was no database; it was all stored in text files and completely organized by directory, and the perl scripts were very nasty (mine anyway, Rudy's is always clean). This site is currently on it's 3rd version, and we soon hope to set some time aside to start on adding some new features.

I'm glad you enjoy the forums and content, and I appreciate all your praises.

Kevin,

You have created a terrific site, one that affords me many hours of pleasure.

Thankyou,

JP

I have had to give some serious thought to this question. (Thank you, Smokey) At first I decided that my love of poetry came from two of my favorite teachers. But , after some swing sitting time and wine drinking, I realized that my love of poetry comes from the realization at a fairly early age that some people could say, in beautiful ways, exactly what I was feeling and thinking. My second forehead slapper was that I could never in a million years be able to convey such emotions through my own writing. But here's the best thing. I was very young when I concluded that all that talent was out there for the taking.

First came across this site when I started seeing a guy who read poetry to me. He read me Kipling, Betjeman, Robert Browning etc.
No one had ever read poetry to me before and I thought it was so romantic. Scored him a lot of browny points!
I've always enjoyed poetry and being a Scot, love Rabbie Burns to bits.
I decided to find some of my favorite poems from my youth and, through this site, have not been disappointed yet.

How I came to Poetry:

I was over-exposed to it as a child, having a parent who was doing graduate work in English Literature and read to us everything from Beowulf to Shakespeare to Eliot to Nash ... and a parent who was a poet and hosted a poetry group in our living room. (Same parent, actually.)

So I fled from poetry for a few years, and was finally forced to make peace with it because there were so many Good Bits still floating around in my mind and I wanted to know what they were from.

How I came to eMule:

The Fugs did a song version of "Dover Beach" that I love, and I wanted to check the lyrics against the original text, and I found that here.

Why I keep coming to eMule.

Mostly to show off. Also to learn stuff.

I always enjoyed learning poetry in school. My parents let us read anything that we could pick up, so I was exposed to literature at an early age. (Also learned a lot about VD and birth control- my mom is a public health nurse)

I'm a science fiction reader, and many of my favorite authors have been poetry fans- I started looking for works that they quoted in their books and stories, and was hooked!

My college major was business and computers, but whenever I got bored, I'd sneak off to literature courses.

Like Marian-NYC, I came to eMule looking for Dover Beach, and never left.

pam

Pam-

As I recall, you were the one who tracked down T.A. Daly for me.
Never did find my dog.
Where's the beach?!



Jack

"Dover Bitch"

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormousd beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right.
We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as the come,
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.

--Anthony Hecht

Pam-

'... dependable as the come'

?

Really?



Jack

I came to it when i was in fouth grade now iam in 5th grade but i was the only one to enter a contest was published in a bookso I just started stuieding it and I was good at it so I became attache to it and i still am!

Should be '...dependable as THEY come'.'

pam

I'm not touching that one.

"WHERE'S THE BEACH?"

(for Jack, who asked the question after finding out that both Pam and Marian-NYC had found eMule while looking for “Dover Beach”)


... on the shore/ Of the wide world I stand alone,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre.
No map, there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand.

Now, land and life, finale, and farewell!
Now Voyager depart!
By indirection, find direction out.
“Where the place?” “Upon the heath!”

Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward,
I wandered lonely as a cloud.
One two! One two! And through and through!
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

We shall not cease from exploration.
Himselfe, the Primrose path of dalliance treads.
But I have that within, which passeth show—
I learn by going where I have to go.

Surf's up!

Let's get back to the naughty one that Hugh wouldn't touch (I'll bet!)


Jack

Point of trivia, Mr. Chairman - Marian's patchwork poem is called a 'cento'.

I didn't know that!

But I looked up more info about CENTOs, and found it at:
[www.delamar.org] />

They're also called MOSAICS. Being Jewish, I suppose I should insist on calling them that.

In that Moses reconstructed the Decalogue from scraps of the original he destroyed? I dunno. A separate etymology, I think:

"Middle English musycke, from Old French mosaique, from Old Italian mosaico, from Medieval Latin musaicum neuter of musaicus, of the Muses, from Latin Musa, Muse, from Greek Mousa."

Yes, Hugh -- totally separate etymologies -- hence the wee joke I was attempting. But thanks for the musings. (Another wee joke.)

I believe that I have come to appreciate poetry because of school. I was attracted to the romantic poets from the start. I have learned though, that not all poetry is sweet and beautiful. If the subject matter is dark and forboding then the poetry will reflect that. For instance, I have seen much poetry about war and some of it is really disturbing.
As it turns out my Mother is quite the poetess, unpublished but gifted with words. Maybe some of that rubbed off on me. I can only hope.

Hey, we are (mostly) all unpublished in here. Type us one of them up, if it's convenient.

Dave-

I am sorry, but I promise, you will NEVER be a successful poetess!


Jack

Was that a joke? Laughing is good for the soul.

Oh, I get it - Dave is short for Davina!

Actually, crying is good for the soul, laughing is good for the heart.