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broken lines
| Critical Analysis #1 |
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broken lines |
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Greg_s Junior Member
since 2000-11-23
Posts 36Los Angeles, CA |
— my suddenness comes in all sizes. — their being is not so much a repetition. — beauty doesn’t come entirely with eyes. — irascible change. — the invisible cycle. — yellow thins out, becomes cold. — the difference is still, and unrecognizable. — the observer and the sudden dash. — a newly disallowed moon. — drawn up into, my last step removed from earth. |
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| © Copyright 2001 Greg Sargent - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Marq Member
since 1999-10-18
Posts 222 |
This is good. I like the beauty, irascible, and yellow lines the best. |
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roxane Senior Member
since 1999-09-02
Posts 505us |
you've got a lot of good lines here, but it's almost like a comedy being comprised solely of random, uncooperative jokes. i think i've probably said this too much, but, for me, i think a poem should have 1) imagery: you've got that, lots of images, lots of figurative language 2) a story told through that imagery: and of course, this does not have to be the traditional "beginning, middle, end, climax, resolution" stuff from grade school but rather something that just tells me something about a character, or a moral and lets me draw my own conclusions. regardless, there should be something of a story, even a partially told one within the poem. (and i would argue that you could probably not find one published poem that doesn't tell a story) 3) a point or universal truth, lesson, moral, realization, etc that comes from something in the story described by the images: you have images, if i strained, i could piece together a story of some sort, but you haven't really got a purpose here from what i can tell. rhyme, rhythm, structure, other facets of academic poetry have their place, but i think the only thing that keeps your broken lines from being a complete poem are a tale of some sort and a reason to live. let me know if i missed something huge, okay? |
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Kirk T Walker Member
since 2000-01-13
Posts 357Liberty, MO |
Like roxane, I had a hard time getting "THE" meaning out of this poem. I could probably figure out a couple different possible meanings. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the abstract beauty of this poem. Disclaimer: The preceding statement is just my opinion. |
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anonymous albert ?
since 2001-03-23
Posts 2979 |
i thought this was very goood so...keep writing   ...?death is not the greatest loss in life. the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. -norman cousins |
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Greg_s Junior Member
since 2000-11-23
Posts 36Los Angeles, CA |
Kirk- I would consider any poem a success if one is able to find multiple meanings within it. there is no singular meaning that I intend for the reader to gather. It is my feeling that good poems are always left to interpretation. roxane- while I am thankful for your comments, I think what you may be missing is a clearer understanding of the range that your second point has taken in contemporary poetry. You say that my poem needs "a tale of some sort and a reason to live." I believe that my poem has both. I think that what might not be clear is the scope of the appearance of a tale in poetry. When I say this, I am considering the works of poets like Lyn Hejinian, Geoffrey Nutter, Cort Day, and even Gertrude Stein. Their ways of telling stories are far from the conventions of even modern era poetry. One of my aims in writing this poem was to blur (break?) the lines of story telling and surprise. I want the connections to be difficult, but I believe that they exist, and that each line is where it wants to be. Some direction as to the where of this poem: the first two lines are a bit of the abject/erotic (or perhaps they are not). The next few lines contain thought iginited by Georges Bataille in his essays "Eye" and "The Big Toe." The line(s) about cycles came from his "Solar Anus." The sixth line is a pointed reference to Gertrude Stein's poem "Objects." The closing lines are a bit of the abject/erotic (and most likely are not). |
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jenni Member
since 1999-09-11
Posts 478Washington D.C. |
hi greg-- this piece kind of reminds me of a poem i wrote once as a sort of exercise. i was trying to write a piece of utter nonsense, with completely no meaning (don't ask why, lol), 8 or 10 lines consisting of 12 words taken randomly from the dictionary. the thing is, the exercise was harder than you might think; i kept seeing connections all over the place. this piece is obviously not utter nonsense by any means. but for me, anyway, the "connections" were often too private, too obscure (especially concerning the observer and "disallowed moon" lines, but others, too), to have any "meaning" for me beyond, "well, that's an interesting line...and that one's interesting too". the references were totally lost on me, i gotta say, and i suspect they would be on most readers. "good poems are always left to interpretation," you say. well, yes. but if you want the reader to interpret something, shouldn't there be something to interpret? this is an old debate. one person's "nonsense" is another's "ambiguity." i look at this poem like a mark rothko painting. or rather, like a series of rothko paintings. know what i mean? like a big canvas, 12'x10', painted red, say, with a slightly different shade of red along the bottom, a little thin red wash around the edges. nothing else, no "picture," nothing. then another one, blue, with a slight green tinge mixed in. and another, and another, and so on. now, i like rothko. in this, i guess, i kind of disagree with rox; i don't think art, any art, painting or poetry or whatever, HAS to tell a story or have a "point" (although, yeah, i do prefer it, especially in fiction and poetry). all your lines here were interesting (except "the invisible cycle", in my opinion), and, to that extent, this piece "worked" for me. but i gather the "rothko effect" is not what you were shooting for here, at least not entirely; you say, quoting rox, that the poem has both "'a tale of some sort and a reason to live.'" in that sense, i think you missed the mark here. to say that the connections here are "difficult" is an incredible understatement. and if you blur or break the lines of story telling to such an extent that the reader is doing all the work, with little or no guidance from you, the writer, what story have you, the writer, told? the reader as co-creator with the author is a cool concept, no doubt (not one i'm a huge fan of, incidentally, although i know plenty of people who like that approach), but i'm not sure you quite pull it off here. i guess what i'm saying is, if you, greg, have a "story" of sorts to tell me here (which you say you do), it just ain't coming across. in the end, i don't think it necessarily matters, but, given your comments above, i thought you'd like to know that. anyway, there's my thoughts. thanks for a very stimulating read. jenni |
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Greg_s Junior Member
since 2000-11-23
Posts 36Los Angeles, CA |
jenni- thank you for your well thought-out comments. I concede that the poem is obscure. Though I had hopes that there might be some connections that the reader could make that would be meaningful, it appears that the connections are too personal. I know how I connectec them when I was writing, but this is not a faculty shared by all. Your comments about nonsense bring up some interesting points. Reminds me of Wittgenstein. (No more references). All in all, the labyrinth of language has caught me again. Language as labyrinth. Some final thoughts: "'The question is,' said Alice,'whether you can make words mean so many things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty,'which is to be master--that's all.'" -Lewis Carroll "Through the Looking Glass"- "What if the act of writing was, precisely, losing the thread?" -Denis Hollier "Against Architechture" "And yet the labyrinth is a place of violent oppositions...A debayte in which sense is always threatened but nonsense is never triumphant" -Georges Bataille "Le Labyrinthe"- This nonsense poem was not triumphant, but it sure was fun threatening sense. |
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