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First poem in quite a while. Untitled (A cough) A cough fell out of his right side, where on the left it got caught in a sleeve of steel. Meaning, of course, a Poetic Idea, a division in something, but where, or what, he wasn't sure. "Oh come on now!" she cried (having changed her pronouns.) "I've been working on that left side for weeks. It's like this: it's so much easier, the release, on the clear side -- the distinct confusion, all a muddle, on that other side, like a profound well, perhaps, or perhaps a little puddle, a filthy subsistence of turbid moisture -- oh you know what I mean!" Asking yourself then: did I but skim the surface, or, is there even any difference there from plumbing the depths? Is there pain there? Or my sense of humor gone to die -- the left side, rigid in the arm and in the shoulder, interlocked as if with empty contradiction, as if enervated by a secret source or battery embedded below the scapula.
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Feb 2, 2013 20:32
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 22:21 |
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quote:Here's a question: Do you think that the meter/rhyme oddness could work if I broke the stanzas around the different schemes? For example (without rewriting): I like this better than what you had before. Here the rhymes are able to carve out their own time and meter against (or amidst?) the prevailing metric cadence... a kind of inner life against the inevitable tick-tocking of the world.
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Feb 9, 2013 20:37
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Budgieinspector covered pretty much everything I was going to say. There isn't a single joke in there, which with a topic like that gets pretty exhausting. It's pedantic/didactic to the nth degree, and it takes itself very seriously, which means no one else will. My impression of mystics is that they tend to have a pretty great sense of humor. A lot of the phrasing is awkward and I have a very hard time imagining you saying it. The ideas seem to live in a world of generality instead of assuming an atomic singularity which would allow them universality -- imagery can help with this, giving it an immediacy which will then allow us to see beyond, to the vistas of spirit. Plus it gives us something to follow. Here's something I wrote yesterday, first go around in a few months. Untitled (A bubble) A bubble overcame me. With what precision its surface tension the magnitude of my self. As though stretched on its skin. An awkward situation. Abyssal belch. Now, absent, I had to resume. Gradually. Was the following laughter sufficient, when at last I followed from it? Laughing of the rasping class, constriction in the throat perhaps, not entirely unpleasant but something to grow out of. I have these times when I want to cry, of a sudden, or gasp, the diaphragm a criminal in the loud shunt of the light. My sorrow then is for the fact of existence. My joy occasionally an eggplant. Drag the velvet on the couch. Drape; drape the velvet on the couch. Am I some fat toe of God’s fallen asleep? The swollen seaslug pincushion of numbness and tingling, the slow arousal to an immemorial exotics? Every moment belongs only to being itself alone. Listen carefully: this ache, this casual kind of pleasure, like a belly overfull, which points beyond itself, as wakefulness to slumber or slumber to wakefulness, & otherwise -- the bubble burst. The crater subsided to a curious dormance.
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Apr 19, 2013 15:39
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I like the idea very much, minus the endnote; at first it feels like a starter kit for your very own poem, but then it veers into social commentary. When it felt more like the former, I enjoyed it more. In that case, angling toward effective juxtaposition in each section, to create a variety of effects ("humor and pathos"), would be my recommendation. I have seen microprose of that kind: there is something (less?) of a "story" to a given series of juxtapositions, but even moreso, each juxtaposed moment or vector has its own story, of which we're only given the most fleeting glimpse; we get the definite sensation it came from somewhere and it headed elsewhere, but we know only the tiniest bit of its life. That's the feeling I'd like to get from each listed option, that they open out onto hundreds of thousands of vistas, branching and ramifying, like Borges' Garden of Forking Paths. Then the way they bump up against each other can have tremendous unspoken energy. Because it is very cinematic, in terms of its basic enforcement of a sequence of images, you must be very careful about which you choose to show. One misplaced or inappropriate selection will ruin a whole chunk. On the other hand, the right selections could create bizarre and intense resonations. On a more specific note, a lot of the jokes feel forced and don't hit the right note. I'm not sure if they're too bitter or they just ring hollow or clunky. Perhaps removing the social commentary aspect, to some degree, could help with this -- it comes off feeling somehow grumpy or judgmental? I dunno. Instead of humor that has a twinkle in its eye, with the sad knowledge of human feebleness, or whatever it is. Also, I understand you've chosen the repetitious list format purposefully, but I actually think the utter lack of list-iness in the first section (Pre-Dawn) is stronger. The fragmented and embedded list of dreams (not immediately following one another; not occupying entire entries in the list) is a fun variation, and kind of haunting. Perhaps limiting the repetition to only one or two sections would be more effective. Finally, the slashes are very difficult to pull off! It seems like you would need a higher density of them to make it play, and in a poem this long, I don't think it'll work. I'd suggest cutting them. In a shorter poem, that could be more clearly a kind of business or marketing concept piece, they might find more life. nomadologique fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 07:35
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Ah, I've thought of a more acute critique of the "main point." It feels as if each "choice" is little more than a meaningless alternative in a life doomed to smallness and inadequacy. I'd love if it was the opposite: every choice, even the smallest, has revolutionary, world-altering consequences. I don't think this sense could be achieved directly, by telling us that's the case in some sort of endnote, which is what's happening here to tell us the choices don't matter; instead, some kind of magnificence must be built up in the description of the choices themselves, and the way they interact, but I'm not sure how. Perhaps exquisite detailing, or a feeling of independent life as I've described above, or something else entirely.
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Apr 30, 2013 15:04
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To be fair, it's possible that it is interesting or engaging, just not to me. My own "spiritual" development or whatever has been away from that attitude and viewpoint, so it might be that it just doesn't appeal to me personally.
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Apr 30, 2013 16:59
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I've also just thought: the poem starts out quite innocently, and maybe that's a way to do what you want to do. Perhaps you could lead us on a journey which begins hopefully, sort of wide-eyed, and is slowly and progressively shut down throughout the selections. Maybe that was what you tried to do, but it seems to happen rather too quickly and heavily, instead of taking us by surprise, like we're not quite sure when it all went wrong...
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Apr 30, 2013 19:51
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I critiqued several before my last poem and no one responded to it. ;( Ah well, the way of all flesh.
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May 31, 2013 03:09
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quote:I could've sworn you quoted Keats (?) in this thread about roadside flowers and how the goal is to show them as they are in all of their beautiful humility, but that appears to have been a hallucination or something because now I can't find it. Here you go. I love Ikkyu, my favorite is: men are cows horses gently caress poetry look at your hand read it
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Aug 15, 2013 17:17
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quote:Cold weather? said the body The hell is this? I actually quite like this, except for the penultimate line. There's something nice about the lackadaiscal tone and the punctuation (lack of) excites me. Plus I like the scenario, which seems to be hypothermia... a nifty exploration of the drifting off and loss of decision-making power. "The hell is this" is a little awkward, I like the idea of colloquialism but it doesn't come across quite right here. quote:Higgledy-Piggledy According to the Wiki page you linked, it's a very good example of the form: it meets all the criteria, and it's cute and funny. Untitled (The space between) The space between the eyeballs and the glasses' lenses a muscular distance, twisted and tense. This gives the head a strange new sensation, overfull-dimensional. She, with her hair falling out. It will grow back, do not doubt. Yes God is in the bandstand, a dog is on the field; we'll try our best, give it a go, give it a whirl, we'll laugh and run around and have our fun, play the game pretend the way we saw it on TV, it's true that was a live feed, nothing fictional. In the room the motors whir, giving the air a sonic thickness. She can see the fibrillation; outside the glasses' lenses the soupy light of the fluorescents takes on a different timbre. The gown is like a cornflower bib. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong. Her diaphragm is paper, folded seven times. There was that day on the beach she laughed and cried Nothing is hidden, Nothing is hidden from me. She tasted the tears of everyday triumph, how she would go in and out with the sun and the moon and the stars. Each day its little differences, and the dumb-wise birds, and the flower-fields without any answers, and the silent sky cascading down invisibly. Here is how she prepares an ice cream cone: with a spoon, not a scoop; delicately. A little at first, pressed and finessed and tamped down and poked at to fill the depths. A little more, the middle and the top now, shaped and smoothed. If more than one flavor, the second scoop unlike the first, and the order carefully considered. Finally, a plop or two on top, shaped as well for integrity and edibility. Licking and biting, she reduces it, curating with diligence, attending first this side, then that; the cone she leaves untouched until the ice cream is level, then biting to reduce it, another new mound exposed, this reduced, then the cone further removed; at last, at long last, the end-melt, in one long-awaited, sharp and mushy mouth- ful. The stupid sea into which sinks the 'snow,' so called 'sea snow,' the grey-white descent of death into the deep, the dark where colors bioluminesce; skin cells, deceased biota, birdshit and fishshit, turtleshit and squidshit, expired jellies; these and others, cycling slowly, ever-downward, a thousand feet down and nine hundred feet up, churned and churned for a hundred years, two hundred, three; an exchange of energy and ecosystem, this vertical transmission. The hairband on her wrist is a long-forgotten constriction. Today will not be the day.
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Oct 11, 2013 07:24
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Rewrite it. What I don't particularly like is the repetition of blah blah blah... and the responsibility/responsibility doesn't really make sense to me (I don't actually know what it means). There's something a little too loose, overall, about the tone, despite the fact that I said I liked the lackadaisical tone of the rest of the poem.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:38
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This since time i. "If there's another go-around perhaps I'll be closer to Buddhahood." She chews the beef jerky with an insolent contemplation. Smoke squeezes through her teeth. She's not self-ignorant. "I wasn't a bad person, exactly, but --" this lingering, with an almost- ideal roundness. "No no no, enough of that. Enough moralizing." She has swallowed. ii. Then the bird flies south for the winter. This since time immemorial. iii. "Okay I was a painter. Not a very good one. If I had studied physics, I would have ended up the same." Page 99: a diagram of a dog, its musculature. "I read a lot, I read a lot. The westerns were my favorite. They come in, they mess something up, they fix it maybe, then they're gone." Another and another and another burning down and filling up the ashtray. The books loom. Plastic goes in the receptacle. "Your last will and testament he says. I told him go gently caress yourself. "You can imagine how he took that. "Deals with all kinds in his line, I guess." iv. In ten or twenty years, the grain of sand becomes a pearl. A knife then is enough. v. "Behold the masterwork. A real shitkicker. I call it Gone With the Wind. See how the pine tree bends."
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Mar 9, 2014 17:17
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lolling all the way to the internet bank
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May 2, 2014 21:20
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This poem comes very near the end of a play I am writing, and is therefore not intended to stand on its own but more as a summary capstone (like a couplet might end a soliloquy); nevertheless I'm curious what the response might be. Also only some of the play is in verse, and almost none of it in rhyming verse, so this section will stand out in that sense. She had when we first met that white lace hat upon her head, its brim blown down before her face and shadow gently shed: so in my mind she stands upon the strand beyond the sea, where the wind forever tickles her behind her chubby knee where, whenever I would tickle her, she always laughed at me; there – just there – the flesh behind her coffee-colored, chubby-child knee. Thus – though nomad time has come and gone and ev’ry bird has fled, and time its yurts once built upon the plains where cattle fed, and time refused the comforts of a sedentary bed; and though of passersby my mind could not detect a trace; and though my mind became in time a native of this place –- still: squat upon some distant mantle stands a granite vase, and through the air about that urn my desperate hands will trace and by this movement wish to weave white lace of ghostly thread –- my feeble-fingered soul cannot encompass this last dread: my friend – my friend – my dear, sweet, twelve-year-old friend – is dead.
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Aug 23, 2014 20:16
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Thanks for the responses.  I think your alteration of the first line makes sense, although the image comes up earlier in the play and for that reason may still prefer the inverted structure. But I was playing with that line and your straightforward version feels very nice. The "so" comes from just that, although you're misunderstanding it slightly: instead it's "so (with the hat, and with the shadow) she appears in my mind." Sedentary bed as opposed to nomadic bed. The nomad's bed moves. Can you tell me how the meter stumbles in the last line of the first "stanza"? "There -- just there --" is deliberately separated because it breaks the meter, and I'm fine with that, but it seems to me the line after follows the meter (child, with a dipthong, having effectively two syllables). Infantilizing is fine, thank you for pointing that out though. I see what you mean about padding. I also agree the logic stands out as odd, and have to again magically appeal to the absent play. I'm most interested in the report of affected sentimentalism, and will have to keep that in mind. Thanks again.
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Aug 24, 2014 19:31
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Well, you're asking the right questions. Nobody here can answer them for you, but if you attempt to answer them through the writing itself, who knows what will happen. There isn't any art that isn't experimental; these considerations of living affect, communication, meaning, value... you will have to investigate them through practice. Every new work will offer new solutions, and you will keep going from there, learning and changing as you go, along with your work.
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Apr 12, 2015 16:31
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 22:21 |
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I had posted a version of this some time ago and got a few helpful comments. Here is another, slightly altered version; it's not much different but I think, for that, quite a bit stronger. For those not interested in reading upthread, it's intended as a poetic coda for a play I'm writing, where the protagonist reflects on her dead childhood friend, who features prominently in the play. Now in sonnet form! Lemme know what you think. She had when we first met that white lace hat upon her head, its brim blown down across her face and shadow gently shed, as in my mind she stands upon the strand beyond the sea, where the wind forever tickles her as gently as can be where, whenever I would tickle her, she always laughed at me: the flesh behind her coffee-colored chubby-child knee. Though nomad time has come and gone and ev'ry bird has fled, and time refused the comforts of a sedentary bed to travel over th' vast and empty plains where cattle fed, upon some spectral mantle yet remains a mason vase, and through the air about that urn my desp'rate hands make trace, as if by anxious motion weaving lace of ghostly thread; my feeble-fingered soul cannot encompass this last dread: my friend -- my friend -- my dear, sweet, twelve-year old friend is dead.
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Jun 7, 2015 20:40
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