The Tuesday Platform

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

by T.S Eliot 

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

(Read full poem here)

One of the first true modernist poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a shifting, repetitive monologue, the thoughts of a mature male as he searches for love and meaning in an uncertain, twilight world.

Eliot's poem caught the changes in consciousness perfectly. At the time of writing, class systems that had been in place for centuries were under pressure like never before. Society was changing, and a new order was forming. World War 1 was on the horizon and the struggles for power were beginning to alter the way people lived and thought and loved.

Greetings poets, wayfarers and friends. It's a beautiful day here and I am looking forward to reading some poetry with a lovely cup of mochaccino.

Before we begin there is an important announcement that I'd like to make, as of September 1, The Tuesday Open Link Platform will fall away. The Weekly prompts will shift to Monday and the Weekend prompts to Friday. See you on the poetry trail! 🍣

SHARE * READ * COMMENT * ENJOY

Just One Word: Hollow

Hello, friends!

With the new year, let’s try a new weekend challenge here in the Garden. Let’s try allowing just one word to provide a springboard for our poems and see what happens.

Our first word is one that I (and maybe you?) associate with T.S. Eliot:

hollow 

Please take this word anywhere it leads you and share with us what you create. Enjoy!

Tax Day

Hello Toads! I situated myself in the middle of "April...the cruellest month" (according to T. S. Eliot) to give my very first prompt. 

But don't worry. I shall show mercy and give a gentle prompt, which is just what the doctor ordered, especially if you live in America and are painfully aware that today is the annual deadline to file federal and state taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. 

For anyone living elsewhere, I’ll catch you up: April 15 is a delightful holiday in which we in the United States fill out legal forms at the last minute (or click, click, click on the web), and count our children's heads as glorious or inglorious exemptions and tax credits.

On past tax days in America, coinciding with National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets and the American Poetry & Literacy Project distributed thousands of free copies of The Waste Land at selected post offices across the country to taxpayers rushing to make the deadline. 

For today's prompt we will utilize Eliot's complex and very long poem "Wasteland" in a very simple way. Copy any good length of Eliot's poem and paste it into this Scripts page I originally saw on Found Poetry.  See how easy that was? No pesky numbers. You might even want to do this a few times..it's that easy.

Steady as we go here. Now, click on the first tab in the top left hand corner marked "Oulipean," and choose "Fibonnaci Seq" from the drop-down menu. Now click "Run" and let the machine run the fibonnaci sequence numbers for you in a jiffy, before it spits out your word list. This is so much easier, and more fun than itemizing deductions, I must say.

What the Fibonnaci sequence generator has just done was read through your pasted text and picked out words correlating to the procession of the Fibonacci sequence. In this sequence, each term is the sum of the two terms immediately preceding it; 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. But don't let all these gobbledy-gook numbers concern you. Your job is to pick as many or as few of the words you like from the generated word list, to use in any order you choose to for your poem.

Not disbarring Benjamin Franklin's quote, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes,” we'll be throwing it out, just for today.

Finally Toads, your prompt: Write a free verse poem using as many words from your generated word list as you like (numbers are of no consequence here). Be certain your poem has no reference to our taboo subjects, taxes (money & numbers) and Eliot's constant muse, death. Instead, offer us plenty allusions of renewal, rebirth or salvation, which are themes Eliot peppers the other half of Wasteland with. So, all you owe us today is one free-verse, up-beat poem. 

Post your new poem in the linky box provided, and don't forget to give some love to your fellow poets on this, the day smack in the middle of the cruelest month. Leave your messages or questions in the comment section. 

I shall return Sunday to make my rounds, after I take my "second tax deduction" prospective college hunting...running all those miserable numbers!

A Toad's Favo(u)rite Poem

Greetings to all my fellow toads and friends in poetry.
Today we are introducing a new feature in The Imaginary Garden:
A Toad's Favo(u)rite Poem. I have asked all our members to select a poem which is particularly meaningful or significant to them and to share it with us on Real Toads. Now, as you can imagine, this is no easy task. How does one sift through the accumulated poems of a lifetime and select just one which resonates?

I thought back to my earliest recollection of enjoying poetry, and remembered this book my father bought for me at a used book sale. It was a bit later than '72 since I was about 10 years old. I would read the poems aloud to myself in my bedroom, enthralled more by the sounds of the words on my tongue, than the actually meaning. The Brook by Lord Tennyson was my favourite then.

There came I time in my school years, when my relationship with literature underwent a remarkable metamorphosis - novels and poetry no longer represented study material; they were revealed to me as the secret formulae of humanity and I knew I would immerse myself in the written word for the rest of my life. I decided to become a teacher, not because I wanted to teach, but because I had no other excuse to study English Literature and answer my parents' question: "But what career will this open for you?" So I have decided to select one of those school day poems which made me fall in love with poets and the English language. T.S. Eliot wrote Preludes between 1910-1911, when he was 22 years old.

T.S. Eliot

Preludes by T.S. Eliot.

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

For the full text, please go to Poetry Foundation or listen to my reading below.

Wikipedia's brief explanation of the poem may be read HERE.