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Underground > Creation >

I am not john milton

  
 
astrojax69
09:17 / 10.04.07
i started this with a scribble i put on daily poetry thread, then got intrigued with it, played, and now here i am... not sure where i've ended up - any comments, first impressions, criticisms, hate mail..? all welcome.

it has no title - suggestions also welcome...



i
dinner on the hob
chicken agnalotti tonight, and you
tapping away infusing that brain
with knowledge, all that stuff. stuff
that seeps outwards through your fingers,
that touch me in the night, quiet
spiders weaving incantations hung
across corners of windows, just now still in evening's
first dimming shawl. i'll grate the cheese,
shall i?


a moon circles the clouds,
the dinner left unfinished, the bed
ruffled and breathing, and a spider scuttles
as a moth hits the trap!


ii
– nowhere is there anything that says
i can't tell you i want to kiss you.
you are free to go, unfinished:
or dinner. a spider speaks.


iii
the plates rock in the morning's bustle
of coffee and talk. you look across the morning
to your work, nourished by information
softer than silk in a dream's embrace.

– somewhere is an everywhere that beckons.
a visionary speaks.


iv
in a child’s play, we would stroll across the lawn
yet we settle back among the covers
and reach among the sheets,
no longer children, shorter visions,
adults who forge their futures inside.

tomorrow: perhaps it will arrive
to compel us both to the window
where dry husks implicate our disinclination
to wipe away the detritus of yesterday.

another night watches from the west, lit
by the onset of now, a glimmering portent
of a spider’s dream.


v
you call my name again and i melt into the web.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:52 / 10.04.07
Am digesting. Not a bad start, not at all...will get back.
 
 
astrojax69
02:30 / 11.04.07
bon apetit, then...
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:08 / 13.04.07
Right, I've read this now and if you wouldn't mind I'd like to try out a new system I've been using in my position as mentor to first-years on my course. Basically, I ask you questions about decisions you've made in the piece (on any thing - grammar, content, anything), and you answer them as best you can - generally, if a given point's defensible, it doesn't need editing, but where you find you don't know why you did something, there you will find the key to making the poem better. The questions aren't meant to be taken as attacks.

So:

1)Why did you not capitalise the first letters on each line?
2)Use of the word stuff - can you think of a better word?
3)Is 'I'll grate the cheese, shall I?' working where it is - perhaps think about T.S. Eliot's 'Do I dare ot eat a peach' from the Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
4)Why a '!' after 'trap'?

Have a think about this. I assume you've been reading Thomas Stearnes E.?
 
 
astrojax69
21:25 / 13.04.07
ok, first on ts eliot, i read him a bit at school - many many moons ago now! - and a little at uni, and have always admired him greatly, but haven't read anything recently. but yes, i guess his work is something of an inspiration if i have to pin it down. often recite the first few lines of 'prufrock' when with some friends and we have to go, now...

capitals, i never use them. well, almost never. it has become something of a personal style for me and all my poetry - and all my email and chats - is devoid of them. partly as a stylised thing, partly as a stand just to be different and partly as i feel the excision of capitals allows me more freedom to move lines/words/ideas about without having to assign prominence to words that i don't want to have such prominence. a kind of 'letter socialism'...

the exclamation mark was to indicate a sort of 'snap!', a singular moment of entrapment when you realise that you are caught. spider webs don't have this, but mouse-traps do, and i guess it was an attempt to invoke something of this... it is also, and more so, an echo of the idea of the attachment one has in a relationship which, by extension, indicates the exertion one must expend in removing oneself from such attachment; should one feel inclined [it asserts this question] - and so a realisation that one is free to choose not to extricate oneself and that this [inaction] is, or can be, an action.

as for 'stuff', that was my major sticking point when i went inside and started to play with the piece. no, i can't think of a better word yet and played around with the words around it, having just 'that stuff, the stuff...' and several other variations - i still feel that i want to use repetition to segue from the assortment of knowledge imbibed by the other person [so, neural happenings] to the kind of sensations i experience when this person 'does stuff' (specifically, to me), playing on 'stuff's' current vernacular of a catch-all widely used across society ["what'cha up to?" "aww, just stuff", etc] but am still not happy. have to think more. any suggestions, from what i've elucidated?

what else did you ask? ah yeah, cheese. well, i wanted to take the reader from a survey of the mundane evening, dinner, you working on your studies, me sitting alone thinking, so moving to the reveries inspired about the 'you', the tenderness and bonds and the sweet moments of togetherness, then bring it back to mundanity to show the 'you' is unaware of any of my musings, just taps away, learning thinking working, and leaves me to finish and serve dinner. then, outside, and into the evening, we move closer to the realm of the reveries i described. so yeah, i feel it works there, but would be quite happy to listen to your responses as to why it might not work there so well for a reader...


thanks for the reading and thinking and questions and interest. happy to hear more, and happy to share more for comment/s...
 
  
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