Thursday, July 24, 2014

Groovinson


The Groove’s mission statement is clear. LOL—we don’t have a mission statement, but if we had one we’d want it to say that we will not waste our readers’ time with wordy explanations, gratuitous introductions, digressions, asides, redundancies, lists, etc. So . . . LET’S GROOVE!

What is The Groove? Duh! It’s a blog. There are other fine literary forms besides blogs—poetry, for example. Some feel that poetry is at least on a par with blogging.

We can now begin to address the day-to-day, meat-and-potatoes (take that, Dan Quayle), kitchen-table issues, like the fact that some people, Emily Dickinson for example, choose poetry over blogging. Here is an Emily Dickinson poem. The poem “The Brain Within Its Groove” was obviously inspired by The Groove. Groovsters-in-Chief Rachie and Tommy, as well as all regular readers of The Groove, are humbled. So, staying true to our would-be mission statement, we present the poem “The Brain Within Its Groove,” by Emily Dickinson. One more thing:  You’ll be excited to know that “The Brain Within Its Groove,” by Emily Dickinson, will be immediately followed by an in-depth analysis by Rachie and Tommy. So now, getting right to it, as promised, and in accordance with our nonexistent mission statement, we give you “The Brain Within Its Groove,” by the aforementioned Emily Dickinson:


The Brain Within Its Groove (by Emily Dickinson)

The Brain within its groove
Runs evenly and true;
But let a splinter swerve,
‘T were easier for you
To put the water back
When floods have slit the hills,
And scooped a turnpike for themselves,
And blotted out the mills!


The Groove’s analysis:

The first two lines mean that you’re totally in the groove.

The next five lines are saying that, if you get a splinter, soak it in water before scooping it out.

The last line is saying that, when you’re removing the splinter, keep grooving, and don’t get distracted by mills (nor the thought of mills).

By the way, you have just read a poem within a blog, which is kind of like a taco inside a taco, or like in Mad Men when Jessica Paré portrays Megan Draper, who portrays the maid, Corinne, in a soap opera.

The Groove—you love reading it!!

3 comments:

Rocky Fillifester said...

While the originality of your Dickinson analysis is to be commended, it nonetheless remains problematic. Put bluntly, it cries for rebuttal.

Your difficulties begin with your gross oversight of the poet's immediate avoidance of the personal possessive pronoun -- of course I am referring to Dickinson's startling choice of "the" over "my" in the poem's opening: what to make of this despairing self-abnegation?

Left in the Groovsters' hands, not much.

But a keener reading unfolds the immense tragic dimension of Dickinson's entire "cause juste." Need we cite more than "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" or "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" to bring this point home?

Not since Euschylaes have we had such a turn of ironic dispatch.

Sadly, the flawed critique you offer up only progresses from one misapprehension to the next.

I pity you both.

Unknown said...

I pity Rocky, whose flawed critique of the Groove does not progress past a single, fundamental misapprehension.

Unknown said...

I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but there's actually a typo in this poem. Emily and I were actually reminiscing about this funny thing that happened during college.
We were with our friend Brian Culbertson . Brian was trying to learn to play a guitar he carved out of an oak tree using only a recording of Frank Sinatra. We were listening to a Glenn Miller arrangement of Hit Me With Your Best Shot when Brian got a splinter from his guitar. He got impatient and cut out a little bit of the final fadeout, so the instrument wasn't quite crooned to perfection.
Brian started to cry, preventing us from hearing the rest of The Mills, as Emily affectionately refers to Glenn Miller. We told him to stop crying and mop the tears off his very prominent, very hilly cheeks, or else put his emotion to good use and go rebuild the run-down part of Baltimore Pike.
Anyway, this poem was actually meant to be a personal correspondence to me, which excuses the typo "Brain" (and copying and pasting it into the title). I guess she wasn't looking carefully at the autocomplete and accidentally sent the letter to penguin_manuscript_submission@legit_email.com instead of my personal email: YoLoSw4gpengWIN@hotmail.com. Sorry to render the argument moot, but I suppose it's the duty of a scientist to expose the cold, objective truth of things.

And, Miriam, I also pity Rocky. He really should have stopped after the fourth movie.