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Mm. I'm not crazy about it, frankly. Obviously it's a polemical piece, and as a proclamation it just about works. As a poem? Not so much.
Just about everything I've ever had to say about poetry I've collected here, so I'm just gonna poach a bit of what I've said before...
The great paradox of poetry is that specific, concrete, sensory images are a far better tool for conveying abstract emotional states than are the words for the abstract things themselves. Eliot called it the objective correlative: Uncle Bill summed it up as “no ideas but in things.” It amounts to the same hard truth—that you cannot effectively describe a thing in terms of itself. When you say, “I am me,” what you say may be technically correct, but you’re not actually telling me anything. But images, comparison, appeal to the senses—now you’re talking.
To say that the grind of work “cancels out all of my positivity” is a nothing-phrase, because it is so subjective—positivity may mean something different to me than to you. Specific sense-impressions, though, tend to be universal. When I say that the day sucks the iron out of my spine, you know what I mean in a way that doesn’t come across when I baldly state that it “neutralizes my ambition.” An image will get the job done even (perhaps especially) if it’s fanciful, or funny. My heart, a fluttering budgie in the birdcage of my ribs, however risible a line, at least makes me feel something, while an idea-word like love—or days, or thoughts, or dream, youth, life, or half-a-million others—just hangs there, like vapor, and has no impact whatsoever.
This is what we mean by “Show, don’t tell”—a phrase uttered by every writing teacher, but rarely explained properly.
Looking at this piece, there are some very nice lines. I also liked the passage about the languages that Ender quoted above; I liked "sunshine boned with competence, white-toothed and gentle" even better.
These are also the lines that are the least abstract, the most grounded in sensory experience. This is not a coincidence. |
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