Ranger6 May 2006

Well first off, thank you for the spending the time on this, I know all too well how long these things take. Now let's see what kind of a response I can come up with. Let's start with the punctuation. It's something which I'm working on in poetic writing - I'm actually more of a storywriter outside of poemranker so I find punctuation and grammar in prose easy enough. I don't, however, always appreciate it being used in the same way in poetry and in the past I've preferred to let the line breaks do much of the work. I do see your point though, and will adjust accordingly in future. I'm not sure about the first stanza being fragmentary though...how so? I know it requires the reader to do a bit of interpretation but then again, that's what I aim for in poetry. I'll return to that later though.
Same again with the choppy style. The surface poem is meant to be just a description of Jesus talking to Judas. The 'meaning' (what I'm 'getting at') of the poem is hidden beneath the surface though. Seriously, every line, every word was selected here and although I don't pretend to think that I've got it perfect I do think that I arrived precisely where I meant to arrive. To be honest though, I get the impression that you struggled with the same thing on your last post - you said that a lot of people had misinterpreted it and missed the point entirely. I gave a similar reading to that poem as I did to this one while I was writing it. This poem is about rebirth. To put it simply, it's Jesus telling Judas that in time he, like Jesus will be reborn (i.e. with the discovery of this new gospel). To open up a bit more of the complexity in it, the silence of Judas is based on one of zodiac's poems (Gethsemane (or, Jesus learns what's up with dying)). That, along with continuing the theme of rebirth, is the purpose of the last line of every stanza. 'Lazarus'. He, to me, is one of the most symbolic characters in any text.
Umm, where was I? Similes. I am now totally confused about that point, having been told to use them more often by god'swife in response to my glosa of her 'Blueprint'. I guess that's something I'll have to unravel myself with experience.

(to be continued in the next box...)