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Letter To A Great Poet (revised)
| Critical Analysis #1 |
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Letter To A Great Poet (revised) |
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Anson Beau Cavell Junior Member
since 2001-05-12
Posts 49Ohio,US |
Do you perform subtle deeds, wet felt pen tips with your tongue only to find their drought connected to your writer’s block of uncarved stone? Do you divine in inkwells, swirling nouns past pieces of broken sunlight, the page of your days remaining vacuous? Perhaps you write with pencils. Do you write with pencils? Does lead dull in your hand, so blunt it comes outright but still sounds wrong? Do you have any Gods locked in clammy cellars of your contemplation, moaning for release, clawing at vaulted domes of your reason? Are poems to you just nouns and verbs, waiting to be exhaled or something greater or perhaps less? Do you have volumes of forgotten lore, hidden young you fear the world may find, inspiration coming at awkward times, like teething children, gnawing on their fathers nerves with empty brimming? If I asked would you show me your worst, bare your crooked teeth, strip down to birthmarks of your inability, reveal to me subtle flaws of your art, broken arm of David, blind eyes of Cistene Chapel? I read somewhere you build open doors, always open doors, for you to run away when you want to. Is this true? If so, then I suppose, all I am asking is, can you, (with eyes as open as your doors and windows you broke for unobstructed views) stand and look out across your field of what you are and see any hope for me growing lanky in your shade? [This message has been edited by Anson Beau Cavell (edited 06-08-2001).] |
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| © Copyright 2001 Anson Beau Cavell - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Kirk T Walker Member
since 2000-01-13
Posts 357Liberty, MO |
I thought I should read this one since it is a letter addressed to me--only kidding, of course, I'm not quite that conceited. Here are my comments/suggestions: -I really liked the following lines/images/ideas: "Do you have any Gods locked in clammy cellars of your contemplation, moaning for release, clawing at vaulted domes of your reason?" "inspiration coming at awkward times like teething children" "Are poems to you just nouns and verbs waiting to be exhaled " "growing lanky in your shade" - bare your crooked teeth instead of teeth that are crooked? -You use questions a lot to state your ideas. THis can be a good tool, and I think it may work fine here, but for your own information you might want to consider making a draft of the poem where questions are made declarative sentences and see how it effects the strength of your ideas and the mood of the poem. Just as an experiment. I hope my comments were helpful. Disclaimer: The preceding statement is just my opinion. |
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jenni Member
since 1999-09-11
Posts 478Washington D.C. |
anson-- i liked this piece, i thought it was pretty interesting. i pretty much have the same comments and suggestions as kirk, both as to the lines he praised (the vaulted domes of reason i enjoyed especially) and fixing the crooked teeth line. the first stanza seemed a little awkward to me; first of all, if you use the plural felt pen tipS, you should have "their" drought instead of "its". the next line, "somehow connected" seemed a little clumsy. i was also wondering why the poem is in the form of an actual letter? i thought "dear you" and "sincerely, anson beau cavell" gave the piece a veneer of cuteness that the body of the poem doesn't deserve. perhaps that is YOUR open door for you to run away. still, i thought the piece would be stronger without the gimmick. the body of the "letter" was quite interesting, and you have a lot of very nice imagery here. well done! thanks for posting this. jenni |
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Anson Beau Cavell Junior Member
since 2001-05-12
Posts 49Ohio,US |
Kirk T Walker/jenni -Excelent critique, I cleaned up the edges you pointed out and it helped so much thank you, thank you. This poem is for you my great poetic friends. Do you think "dear Vincent," is alright? killed my Buddha, killed my Christ |
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Joricho Member
since 2001-05-06
Posts 56Australia |
Just wanted to say I thought the revisions were a big improvement - I think its great! |
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jenni Member
since 1999-09-11
Posts 478Washington D.C. |
anson-- i really like what you did to this, i think it's a definite improvement over the earlier version. something you did with the line breaks really makes the lines: inspiration coming at awkward times, like teething children, gnawing on their fathers nerves with empty brimming even more vivid than they were before. very good writing there, anson! a couple of things i should have mentioned before, though, lol....  the Sistine Chapel is spelled like that, lol, not with a "c". regardless of how it's spelled, though, i didn't quite get the "blind eyes" reference. i seem to recall some blind prophet or somebody depicted on the ceiling, or perhaps in the "last judgment" on the wall behind the altar, but if that's what you mean, how is something like that a reference to a "subtle flaw" in the art? is the depiction of the prophet flawed in some way? or do you mean that the figures on the ceiling generally have "blind eyes"? the david's broken arm i can kind of get, yes (although does it really have a broken arm? i assume you mean michelangelo's david?), although even that i would say is not a subtle flaw of michelangelo's ART but damage from the passage of time (unless he broke it while sculpting?). see what i mean? anyway, david isn't as troublesome as the blind eyes of the sistine chapel, i just don't know what that refers to. on top of that, i thought it was odd that there were two references to specific works by michelangelo back to back, although, yes, they certainly are both among the most famous works of art. i guess what i'm saying is, as generic examples, they suffer from both being from the same artist, and as specific or particularized examples, i don't see how they work as images of "subtle flaws of...art." and...lol...one more thing with that stanza, i think it needs to end with a question mark. the phrase "for you to run away / when you want to" in the eighth stanza ends with a preposition, which is always kind of awkward, and i think it could be tightened a little, too; maybe simply "for escape", or "to escape when you want"? i don't really like either of those, and it's YOUR poem anyway, lol, but you might want to play around with the wording there a bit more. just a thought. on "dear vincent", i'd still do without it. who is vincent? if the name is significant, i'd make the title "letter to vincent" and leave it at that. it's not a real letter anyway, but a poem, a letter by poetic imagination only (and a beautiful work of poetic imagination at that), don't muck it up with unnecessary stuff, lol. ok, i'll shut up now, lol. jenni |
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Anson Beau Cavell Junior Member
since 2001-05-12
Posts 49Ohio,US |
Again Excellent suggestions, the implicit sense of God's majesty (rather than His fatherhood) is made explicit in the most alarming Last Judgment known to us. It is Michelangelo's final condemnation of a world he saw as irredeemably corrupt, a verdict essentially heretical, though at that time is was thought profoundly orthodox. His judging Christ is a great, vengeful Apollo, and the power in this terrible painting comes from the artist's tragic despairs. He paints himself into the judgment, not as an integral person, but as a flayed skin, an empty envelope of dead surface, drained of his personhood by artistic pressure. The only consolation, when even the Virgin shrinks from this thunderous colossus, is that the skin belongs to St Bartholomew, and through this martyr's promise of salvation we understand that perhaps, though flayed alive, the artist is miraculously saved. Michelangelo was not only a painter, but also a sculptor and architect. It was obvious he was talented at an early age. He produced two sculptures by the age of 16. He was commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1506 to paint the Sistine Chapel frescoes. In 1534-1541, Michelangelo was commissioned yet again for more work in the chapel. This time, he was commissioned to do the frescoes of the Last Judgment, which depicted Judgment Day. The frescoes depict passages in Genesis, beginning with God separating light from darkness (Flaws in God's art?), and include the creation of Adam and Eve (More Flaws?) and the story of Noah. The scenes comprise the backbone of the ceiling and alternate in size. It is rumored that after these frescoes were completed, Michelangelo was nearly blind. The mixture that he applied to the ceiling constantly dripped into his eyes as he worked Here is a rather lecherously charged, polysemic and obtuse stanza indited by Michelangelo: "You entered me through my eyes (whence I spill tears) as a cluster of unripe fruit goes into a bottle and, once past the neck, grows where it is wider; so does your image, which when outside soaks me, grow once it's inside the eyes, so that I stretch like a skin inside of which the pulp is swelling; having entered me by such a narrow route I can hardly dare to believe you'll ever get out." You are correct it is Sistine not Cistine, I thought it such a subtle flaw. Michelangelo's David was carved between 1501 and April 1504, and was finished a month after the sculptor's 29th birthday. David, a fully-grown man, not the boy described in the Bible, is shown clutching the stone in his right hand and the sling is over the left shoulder. In 1527, during an uprising, the left arm was broken off by a bench that was flung from the palace. The fragments were recovered and restoration was carried out in 1543. More subtle flaws in the art of nature and man. "Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. " Dylan Thomas speaking of our greatest flaw, spiritual death (often taking place in chapels). Only Art lovers will probably get this much from such an obscure line but I put it there anyway. I seldom explain my poems this much, but you asked. I agree with no formal greeting, Dear Vincent has been removed. I don’t know how I missed the question mark. “The phrase "for you to run away / when you want to" in the eighth stanza ends with a preposition, which is always kind of awkward, and i think it could be tightened a little, too; maybe simply "for escape", or "to escape when you want"? “ This is a rather obscure reference to a poem by Carl Sandburg “Broken Faced Gargoyles” in which I use a phrase very similar to his to honor his writing style, seeing how it is a letter to great poets, about great poets. Don’t know if intellectualizing makes it better, but there it is, I suppose it goes back to Archibald Macleish and Ars Poetica “a poem shouldn’t mean but be,” perhaps this poem means too much and can never be, a flaw that is not subtle. Thanks for the critique, I very much appreciate it and will revise this poem until only subtly flawed. P.S. Would you like me to explain stanza 5? [This message has been edited by Anson Beau Cavell (edited 06-08-2001).] |
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jenni Member
since 1999-09-11
Posts 478Washington D.C. |
anson-- sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this. well, after your explanation, all i can say is... i still don't get it, lol. (i'm dense, i know, but i'm used to it by now, lol. )i don't think the fifth stanza (or anything else, actually) needs any explaining, but i'd love to hear what you had in mind there. thanks for all the great info! jenni |
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