Can I join? Or is it too late?

Please join! Let us know what poetry book or website you've been reading from, and what you've been writing lately.

Joined, then. I'll go to the book store today.

I again don't have so much to say, I'm just spamming this up. I might feel bad, if it were more active here.
I'm hardly in one anthology anymore, just skipping around with whatever poetry I get my hands on. So now it's two thin books I can mark in.
First I note that Emily Dickinson has no dashes. I couldn't find a copy with her punctuation in any of my books (in one library book). It's now normally taboo to mess with punctuation, but there's an exception to Emily. Because her dashes seem unfinished, because she had few finalized poems, because this alteration is traditional. It rather bothers me. Emily's dashes are important. They change the flow of the poem. (As for ease of reading, Rimbaud's exclamation points drive me nutty, but remain.)

Well to keep this thread running, and to talk about Craig Raine, here I am.

So, even though he's not part of my anthologies, we read a Craig Raine poem in my English class on Thursday. He'd never really been a poet I'd thought about before, but I kind of enjoyed the poem we read. I can't say I know much about Raine's style considering I've only read one of his poems, but from what I read, he has a very... futuristic style. (Not really the right word, but I can't think of another).

In the poem I read, very little did he tell us what he was describing, but he gave hints and clues to tell us what he wanted us to know. I was really mesmerized by the poems style on a whole, the way he used form to create ideas in our heads and the way he used advances in human life that reflect what he was describing to tell us the object or thing.

Enough of my rambling, here's the poem.

Spoiler:

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings--

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on the ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the properites of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

And here's a first draft of a poem that I've been working on in a reflection/mimic of his style and idea of the poem.

Spoiler:

When plastic meets metal and melds together
into stacked fours of stilted legs

and stiff backs of cracked bones. Curved
to accommodate the warmth of coursed blood.

And they let talons tickle their tastebuds
when the water runs and soaks

the bristles that steal their seashells
that are eroded from the waves.

To stretch out the eye, they cling to the retina
and steal the blues and greys and greens

which the rays take and smother
the world in.

And when the tears fall and saturate colours,
they run wild into crevices

or trailed laces of the disguarded
and polyester thoughts.

Tuning voices with the time
that cling to tiny holes that create

the rhythm for eardrums
and airwaves alike.

And songs cling to them at night
when lamps shine on streets

and pump caffeine through circles
so soft in the moonlight.

Because they enjoy the softness of geese
and the crispness of linen

when shoulder marks engrave themselves
into dreamless sleeps.