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Hi, astrojax.
There's much to be commended for striking metaphors ("the throbbing ritual" is salacious but not vulgar, I liked it), musicality ("the quiet of gin and jazz and a black and white ambience") and clever use of verbs ("smiles igniting") in your poem.
However, I think you need to say it with less. The feeling I got was that one had to wade through long passages that were too much similar in construction to prose to get to certain gems. It's like it's poetic in places, and then prosaic, prosaic, prosaic. That is killing the poem, making it drudge. You're saying it with too much, laying the scenes and images in a system that's not that much different from a prose passage - you're only breaking lines for convention's sake.
Wanna make a test? Try to memorize the poem. Good poems are easy to memorize (right now I cannot think of one single exception to that rule) - their own inventiveness and airy-like quality contribute to that. I tried to memorize some stanzas of yours, and it just wasn't happening.
Another thing: Throughout your poem you never stick to a certain rhythmic pattern, and I think your poem suffers the more for that. This poem is huge, made out of compact blocks of text - with rhythm it would feel purposeful, righteous, unstoppable. Without it, it feels meandering, just "taking too long". I'm not saying that you should pick a meter and go marching all the way with it, but there's a reason rhythm should be prized, since it's the easiest way to ensnare someone's attention. Once you get the reader nodding along to a tempo, or feeling it inside his body - the more inconspicuously the better -, it will be a battle half-won already.
As a killer example of valiantly variant rhythm, check this out (by old E Pound):
Child of the grass
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Child of the grass
The years pass Above us
Shadows of air All these shall Love us
Winds for our fellows
The browns and the yellows
Of autumn our colors
Now at our life's morn. Be we well sworn
Ne'er to grow older
Our spirits be bolder At meeting
Than e'er before All the old lore
Of the forests & woodways
Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal
Ne'er shall we feel
Aught of sorrow
Let light flow about thee
As a cloak of air
This is not rigid, right? But read it aloud and you'll know what I mean. I think you missed some chances to make your poem organically more alive, for instance the stanza
"its timbre reaches into the cosmos and plucks
comets tails and galactic dust and sparkles
tinkling into silver flutes, evocative…"
With some tweaking it could go chugging along real easy - the fall from COSmos to PLUCK, then a little afterwards gaLACtic DUST, you see what I mean? The ending, "evocative", is a double wammy in the sense that not only it tells us that something is evocative (when we should get that by ourselves), but that it also kills the rhythm that was sort of peering through the stanza.
"Excruciatingly alive" tells me nothing. It's one of those adverbs that help no more. The idea, the feeling, is of course right, I don't doubt the motivation behind it, but "excruciatingly" is one of "those" words to use sparingly, if at all.
There's some misses re: spelling, too, check them out.
The most important point, though, is the one I think bears repeating: Cut down on the prose passages - there's a leap from that sort of construction to the more airy space where poems are indeed poems, and that leap is near impossible to verbalize. It has to do with taking unexpected shortcuts, with having an eye for all the possibilities that words and sentences give you in terms of syntactical manipulation.
Let me know what you make of my comments. |
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