Product Recall
Poem number two has been recalled to the factory. I had liked the poem, but seeing it on the screen while imagining actual readers gave me a new perspective--the thing was clearly too long and disjointed. This feeling was seconded by a posted comment by someone who seems to have made an honest effort to sit with the poem. So back to tinkertown with that one...
posted by pete. @ 12:51 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
ok. I am anonymous who tried to comment on the removed poem. I also had my friend read it. I asked my friend about the trouble I was having linking the beginning and the end. My friend told me that he thought I was simply looking at the poem incorrectly -- that it was just supposed to be a collage of events in the park and that my attempt to try to find more links between the beginning and the end was not really necessary. So it could possibly be that I was just approaching it in a way it was not meant to be approached.
Thanks for putting so much time and thought into this!
I would say that your friend is correct in that it is meant to be a collage of events and not a single narrative. But the end of the poem does go back to near the beginning with the return of the heart-shaped flowers on the ground. So there is some implied narrative connection even though I just meant for a symbolic connection between people and events taking place at the same location. It's not as clear as it should be.
If you were approaching the poem in a way it was not meant to be approached then I need the poem to be more clear in its telling you how to approach it. I don't want my poems to be a word puzzle, some "code" to be cracked. I'm not talking about dumbing it down either. You clearly gave the poem as much attention as any poet can hope for and if it doesn't give a little under the weight of such attention than it needs work! So off to work on it (after I pick up my pup from Bonnie the Groomer)
i heard you have a cool dog.
ok. It is me again. I will wait for the rewrite and let you know if I find it clearer. And I am glad to hear that you won't dumb it down! Just so you know, once when I was in elementary school the teacher gave us a poem and told us to write about it. I got my writing back from the teacher with a comment that I was "trying too hard" and looking for things that were not there, and that were not meant to be in the poem. So I have a history of this, apparently. So in all likelihood it IS me. I feel a bit guilty that you removed the poem.
When I read the poem, I instinctively want more information about the American television youth/detective moustaches/20,000 murders.
I am trying to figure out what that's all in reference to...or if I should know. This may be my own literal-mindedness getting the better of me, but I'm not sure the poem contains enough clues to tease me out of it.
Things pick up and carry me along with "So what could be brushed..."
---
There are some choice lines that go without saying throughout, in particular:
"What downward path the bloodhound’s madness?" (at which point the poem takes me in & swallows me whole)
&
"A billion people you can do what you want."
---
Nice spacing around
"all the way"
--leading to the greased slide through obvlivion that is the rest of this fine piece
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I question whether you need to include the last line:
"of diarrhea headache?
Open their door to such gruesomeness?"
I personally would like to see the poem to end here instead:
"Would you knowingly expose
their home to such manifestations[?]"
...which would echo back to the previous images of the manifest you have already offered, and reinforce them -- which I would really like to see, simply because those lines are, for me, the artichoke heart of this poem. I don't care about diarrehea headache after this sheer beauty:
"Spongy rot, even on
the blacker edges of the Void,
its faltering fertility
a venereal canker’s pucker.
The Unnamable’s
gummy breakdown to focused convulsions, plastic fruit,
that haughty aimlessness of privately schooled teenage Death.
The Beyond Form
stuck to your shoe."
---
The realization of the sacred/profane unity in these images is as striking as it is mundane. Wow.
-Anonymous
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