steph1030 Posted October 5, 2006 Share Posted October 5, 2006 this was forwarded to me and i thought it an appropriate piece of writing to place here. hope no one minds The tones go out In the middle of the night. The firefighter responds There's a fire to fight. The apparatus rolls As the crew gets ready The Officer's on the radio. The driver holds it steady. As the truck draws near Black smoke rolls into sight, The firefighters are ready To battle the orange light. The flames are growing. They find the occupants are out. The hose lines are charged. This is what it's all about. Two firefighters go in To battle the flame. Something doesn't feel right, They both feel the same. The creaking is now loud, They turn to retreat. The roof crashes in The sound is deafening in the street. Other firefighters are trying To clear through the rubble. They know two of their own Are in grave trouble. At last one calls out, "One firefighter found!" The digging begins To get him unbound. He asks for his partner As they pull him free. They tell him they're looking, And then they finally see. His partner has been found, His injuries are grave. As hard as they try, His life they could not save. Thousands of grieving firefighters Gathered to hear The chaplain say, "Firefighter Down," And from each falls a tear. *If you know a firefighter, and don't want this to happen, please show our firefighters the respect they deserve and re-post this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asysin2leads Posted October 5, 2006 Share Posted October 5, 2006 Yeah, actually, we do mind. Really bad, cliched, self glorifying pity me fireman poetry isn't what this site is about. At least it wasn't as bad as "I wish you could" or "The littlest firefighter." Those were awful. Everytime I read them I want to do my job just a little bit less. Randall Jarrell, author of the famous poem "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", about the realities of the glorified deaths of air crews, wrote a piece about bad poetry. Here it is. "Bad Poets" by Randall Jarrell Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry." It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem. A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing. Okay, there lesson over. Bad poetry is bad, and death is bad, and such. Class dismissed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Posted October 5, 2006 Share Posted October 5, 2006 would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe Anchovies on that side of sacred awe you ordered, Assassin? (That wasn't me, that was the spell-check.) :wink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asysin2leads Posted October 6, 2006 Share Posted October 6, 2006 Ummmm.... yes... I'll have the anchovies? I don't follow ya, Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akflightmedic Posted October 6, 2006 Share Posted October 6, 2006 Although the piece is not funny, I moved it to this forum as this is the catch all for most things including poetry. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Posted October 6, 2006 Share Posted October 6, 2006 would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe Jarrell says only a hard-hearted and dull-headed critic could, without a sort of sacred awe, condemn what you condemned. But no sacred awe was evident in your condemnation. And yet, you are neither hard-hearted nor dull-headed (or at least not both :wink:) Ergo, you must own but not yet possess that sacred awe, as in it's en route, you're simply waiting to take delivery, like a pizza or other order-in dish. I was affirming the nobility of your character, according to Jarrell's litmus test, against any fleeting superficial appearance to the contrary. Let it pass, let it pass. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weasel 108 Posted October 6, 2006 Share Posted October 6, 2006 this was forwarded to me and i thought it an appropriate piece of writing to place here. hope no one minds The tones go out In the middle of the night. The firefighter responds There's a fire to fight. The apparatus rolls As the crew gets ready The Officer's on the radio. The driver holds it steady. As the truck draws near Black smoke rolls into sight, The firefighters are ready To battle the orange light. The flames are growing. They find the occupants are out. The hose lines are charged. This is what it's all about. Two firefighters go in To battle the flame. Something doesn't feel right, They both feel the same. The creaking is now loud, They turn to retreat. The roof crashes in The sound is deafening in the street. Other firefighters are trying To clear through the rubble. They know two of their own Are in grave trouble. At last one calls out, "One firefighter found!" The digging begins To get him unbound. He asks for his partner As they pull him free. They tell him they're looking, And then they finally see. His partner has been found, His injuries are grave. As hard as they try, His life they could not save. Thousands of grieving firefighters Gathered to hear The chaplain say, "Firefighter Down," And from each falls a tear. *If you know a firefighter, and don't want this to happen, please show our firefighters the respect they deserve and re-post this :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hfdff422 Posted October 6, 2006 Share Posted October 6, 2006 I am a firefighter, and I find most of these unreadable. This forum is certainly not the place for them. There are plenty of sites for the tear jerk- hero stuff, but this site should either make you think or laugh (or mad), that is why we enjoy it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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