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Something that I find absolutely riviting in poems like this, that start off with daily, mundane life and lurch into something absolutely hammeringly different, is the scattering of hard details.
In one of my favorite poems, Frank O'Hara uses this approach devastatingly. The sprinkling of dates, times, locations, brand names, authors, and publications in the first three stanzas creates a lulling sense of an aimless day off, making the kick in the gut that is the last stanza all the more effective. We all know she's dead, we weren't alive (for the most part) to be that breathlessly affected by her passing, but O'Hara makes us feel it in that last line break.
The Day Lady Died
FRANK O’HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
I think your first stanza is too short. I think this poem would be a bit more affecting if we were a bit more enveloped in a sense of soft early morning befuddlement.
On your way to work
Like every day
Early, dozing, rhythm rocking you to sleep
Reading books or magazines
Staring at nothing
This is a great start. the third line has a lovely rhythm, although I think that the word choice could be a bit tighter. "rocking you to sleep" is a stock phrase here. Although you could make a case that the unchallenging nature of a stock phrase increases the lazy feel of the line, I just find my brain tripping over it, "stock phrase, got it, check."
Reading books or magazines
Staring at nothing
I love these lines, and I wouldn't change them. The remind me of the minimal, impressionistic feel of an early Wire lyric.
Second-third stanzas: I think that you need to focus a bit more on who the "you" is. I understand that we're being given a second-person everySpaniard that expands into everyone affected by this monstrous event in the third stanza, but the jump could be softer. Imagine your anonymous, slightly generic "you" expanding outward to encompass the city in a cloud of detail and language, becoming clearer and broader line by line until it overwhelms the reader. Use station names. Give us clear images. I'm not trying to be ghoulish, but concrete details act as mental paperweights that hold the flow of a poem open against a reader's breezy shortterm memory.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but the writing of the poem is evidence enough that you feel for Madrid. The poem's sentiment is clear without you telling us. Imagine that this is about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, or the destruction of Pompeii, or some other disaster that you feel historically distant from. Keep your head above your heart and really look at what you're writing. If we're given the details of a tragic event in such a sympathetic manner, with such evident sorrow and empathy in the fabric of the poem, the author has no need to pop in and tell us that ze really does feel this. It's kind of like a cheesy loverman R&B singer coming in at the end of a verse and randomly saying "'Cuz I love ya, girl" when we already know that, because the song is called "How much I love you baby"
It may be a quibble on my part, but "haven of civilisation" sounds like the subtitle of a tourist brouchure.
Another quibble: why is Madrid a haven of democracy "now" (7)?
Bringing it back to you in the last stanza works well. However, I wonder if you have to "ask yourself?" The mirroring of lines from the first stanza brings that question up quite easily without any effort on the first-person speaker in the poem. In fact, I think it might be more powerful without you asking anything.
Overall, I think it's quite a good first draft, with a lot of promise. If I've come off as harsh or flippant, I apologize. I've just gotten off a 12 hour graveyard shift, and the brain needs oil. |
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