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Poertree
Senior Member
since 1999-11-05
Posts 1359
UK

0 posted 1999-11-23 05:46 PM


Poet's journey

Other-worldly I dress to leave.

The rhythm, rhyme and flow
The rhythm, rhyme and flow.
Time to go
Time to go.
We shared our love, our lust, our time,
but never shared our minds,
We shared our adulthood and teens,
but never shared our dreams.

Luggage, tension and male precision,

Smash up

the rhythm, rhyme and flow
the rhythm, rhyme and flow.

En-tranced I take the wheel.

The rhythm, rhyme and flow
The rhythm, rhyme and flow.
He'll never know
He'll never know
the rhythm saturated sea
in which I bathe the real me,
Where wave tops wave in curling sound
so far from his unyielding ground.

Road-maps, tension and male derision,

Disrupt

the rhythm, rhyme and flow
the rhythm, rhyme and flow.

Mesmerically I feed the gas.

The rhythm, rhyme and flow
The rhythm, rhyme and flow.
Too fast too slow
Too fast too slow.
The rubber beat of tyres on seams
metronomically feeds my dreams,
The shush and shush and shush and shush
of air squeezed as we rush and rush.

Male screams, metal screams and momentary pain,

Break

the rhythm, rhyme and flow
the rhythm, rhyme and flow.

More clearly now I feel the beat,
Red pumping life, red staining seat,
And rivers flow and merge and meet
my thigh the spring, the sea my feet,
As day collapses other light
invades my mind but blinds my sight,
And feeling goes and feelings come
and once so old and now so young,
Time passes; slows, so long, and long
I drown in my arterial song,
And whisper out an age held breath
and smile to know the life of death,
Then loose my hold and slide below
become the rhythm, rhyme and flow

the rhythm, rhyme and flow
the rhythm, rhyme and flow

time to go
time to go.

© Copyright 1999 Poertree - All Rights Reserved
roxane
Senior Member
since 1999-09-02
Posts 505
us
1 posted 1999-11-23 07:18 PM


i absolutely loved it!!! this is your best i would have to say. i'd love it if i could get some background on this, although i think it's great without any explanation. feel free to email me at any time.
Poertree
Senior Member
since 1999-11-05
Posts 1359
UK
2 posted 1999-11-24 06:38 PM


The background .. the background is that I woke up one morning a few weeks ago with poems going round in my head. I knew I had a good set of lines to string together but kept getting interrupted. Got into the car to drive to work with ideas still running thro my mind (in another world) - drove the car into a ditch (lol).

Got me thinking about the idea of a poet(ess) in an unhappy marriage, poles apart from her husband intellectually, seeking refuge in her poetry to the extent that she swithches off from the real world with disasterous consequences when she is driving.

Then she finds out maybe it's not so bad in heaven after all .

Philip

jenni
Member
since 1999-09-11
Posts 478
Washington D.C.
3 posted 1999-11-25 05:50 AM


Hi Philip...

overall, I thought this was a really good piece. I liked the coming in and out of “reality,” that was
really effective, I thought, as well as the use of repetition, the use of repetition. From a
“dramatic” angle, though, I have a question: what are the “male screams”? This bothered me the
first few times I read this, before your posting with the background, and now I’m even more
confused. I thought the driver left the man. Who is screaming then? Is he in the car too? Is this
someone else screaming? Did I miss something?

Anyway... when you write a poem with the line “the rhythm, rhyme and flow” repeated 15 times,
you’re practically begging the reader to look at your poem’s rhythm, rhyme and flow very closely.
So... You start off with a line of fine iambic tetrameter (“we shared our love, our lust, our time”),
followed by a line of iambic trimeter (“but never shared our minds”). This 4-3 beat sequence is
fine, but it’s a meter known as “ballad stanza”, and it has a slightly sing-song sound to it that
doesn’t quite fit here (in my opinion). I don’t think you want the 4-3 sequence, because the rest
of the metered parts of the poem are iambic tetrameter. At all events, your next line is a problem:
“we shared our adulthood and teens”. This should be another line of iambic tetrameter, whether
you’re doing ballad stanza, or if the three-beat line just previous was a mistake. It is, as I read it,
though, not 4 beats but 3, and not iambic:

we /SHARED/ our / a /DULT/ hood / and /TEENS

it occurs to me as I’m writing this that maybe you’re pronouncing it AD/ult/HOOD, though? you
Brits can be funny that way.

anyway, the rest of the metered sections are fine, with just a few lines that sound slightly
awkward:

“metronomically feeds my dreams” starts with an accented syllable, and it feels like it has two
unstressed syllables after the second beat, i.e. -NOM-i-c’ly;

“Time passes, slows, so long and long” feels like it starts with 2 accented syllables back to back,
but it’s a close call;

“I drown in my arterial song” definitely has an extra unstressed syllable at the end of ar/TER/i/al.
(Cool line, though!)

Maybe you intended the first metered section to be sort of off-rhythm? At that point in the poem,
the driver, after all, hasn’t entered that world of perfect rhythm, rhyme and flow yet. I think it’d
work better if you made that one line in the first section a line of iambic tetrameter like the rest,
though, and reworked the other lines, too, especially “I drown in my arterial song”. I think you’d
want to have all the metered sections have nearly perfect “rhythm, rhyme and flow.”

and one more thing... you used the word “and” a lot in the final section, and it seemed like it was
a way to keep your meter tripping along, and it was a little distracting, and made things maybe too
bouncy, and somewhat repetitious, and you already have a lot of repetition going on, and so I
might think about reworking those lines, too.

like I said, though, I thought this piece was very good! Keep ‘em coming ...but please, drive
carefully, ok?

[This message has been edited by jenni (edited 11-25-1999).]

[This message has been edited by jenni (edited 11-25-1999).]

Willem
Member
since 1999-11-18
Posts 139
Inverness, FL, USA
4 posted 1999-11-25 10:22 PM


Whoa, Poertree! This was another of your
looong ones.Cleverly constructed around an
interesting, contemporary subject. I must
say that I - in general - agree with what
Jenni said in her long list of remarks and
suggestions, although maybe in less detail.
I'm one of those poets that write by ear
and sight without much attention to "the" rules of meter, rhyme, etc. I learned from reading an enormous lot of poetry by others. And I
believe, like I know you do, that the poem
should be only the envelope for the story.
And that is why I have some reserve about
your choice of a female persona to carry
the story. It makes it a little difficult for me to make that jump, male-to-female, from the happy first part to the tragic
last part. But then, I may be a little bit to macho in my thinking to do that kind of flip in my imagination. Anyway, nice work, Poertree!

Willem


[This message has been edited by Willem (edited 11-25-1999).]

jamaicabradley
Junior Member
since 1999-11-04
Posts 39

5 posted 1999-11-25 11:28 PM


Hello Poetree.
Once again
I must say
I really liked this poem...it mirrors my life at the moment exactly, what I mean to say is that after I read the poem a few times through I thought that I could really relate to it, and not really knowing how your interpretation or should I say intention was while writing the poem it really hit me when I started reading the critiques...wow. I only wow because sometimes in your life you look to things as pointers or justifications, even if they are not related directly to you, you can use them to access your feelings and that is what this poem did for me, I am not to into the rules of poetry, and I thought the poem flowed rather well, and just one question directed to Willem...what do you mean when you say you had a difficult time switching from the male to female roles...I thought this poem was written from a female perspective entirely, when you say you have a hard time with the concept of a female persona carrying the storey, am I correct to interperate that you have a hard time seeing a woman so driven by her passions ie: writing and that perhaps due to your "macho" side a woman would not or could not possess such inherent passion? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Jamaica

Poertree
Senior Member
since 1999-11-05
Posts 1359
UK
6 posted 1999-11-28 07:25 AM


Thank you Roxane, Jamaica, Jenni and Willem sorry its taken so long to come back on this, some sadist (lol) set me an "impossible" poetic challenge which together with being asphyxiated by paint fumes has kinda finished me off.

Anyway you were right Jamaica the whole poem is of course written from the wife's perspective (even tho she is now dead of course lol ... I worried about that anomaly for a while). I too wasn't sure where you were coming from Willem? I rather came to the conclusion that you had a bit of a problem with me as a man writing from a female perspective? Is that it? Maybe future contributions like this should be under my female pen name (would that make you happier?) ... And, no I'm not telling you what it is (lol).

Now then Jenni - first, thanks again for the trouble you took over this and your kind comments.

The husband was indeed in the car from the start. Admittedly this isn't entirely clear at first but surely by the line "Road-maps, tension and male derision" it ought to be. I can't believe you haven't been driven crazy be some over bearing male in the passenger seat trying to tell you how to drive and navigate, or is it that even you can't conceive of a situation where you would have a man and a woman in a car together and the man wouldn't be driving (LOL - just teasing).

I see exactly what you mean about the iambic trimeter, and above all I completely agree that the rhythm and flow in this piece must be perfect, as you rightly point out the whole point of the piece is to try and lull the reader in and out of a day dream by engendering a regular beat and then breaking it up. I also incidentally agree with Willem that sometimes it is better to forget the technicalities and just write, but not in this particular case, as Jenni says, it has to be spot on.

we /SHARED/ our / a /DULT/ hood / and /TEENS was very funny because I read what you said again and again without bothering to read your final thought on it. Each time I read the line I couldn't make my stresses fit with your suggestion - finally I gave up and read on, only to discover of course that I read it AD/ult/HOOD as a Brit. (Although some ill-educated (lol) Brits do it the other way). As to who is right - well I reckon somewhere on the way over the puritans ate something that disagreed with them and forgot how to speak proper .. heh heh.

I reckoned ... ME - tro - NOM - i - CAL - y but I will be corrected by you ... as always.

"Time passes, slows, so long and long" again I see exactly what you mean now you point it out (you're really quite good at this aren't you). I shall review that line anyway I didn't like it much, I originally had "so long so long" which sounded like saying a casual goodbye so I changed it and got another "and" for my pains.

"I drown in my arterial song" definitely has an extra unstressed syllable at the end of ar/TER/i/al. Again I think we are maybe suffering from the great trans Atlantic divide. I pronounce arterial ar - TER - rial. (ie as in real). On reflection tho I'll have another look at the meter of that whole section.

Ahh yes the "and's". I wondered if anyone would mention that. You were exactly right - I noticed a lot of and's were creeping in and then I thought well why not it keeps the meter tripping along. I even changed "I whisper out a long held .." to "And whisper out ...". But once again maybe you are right - perhaps it is a little over the top ...

Thanks to all.

Philip


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