-=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.
replying on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning
3 May 2004, 3:12 PM
Is she also gay?
I think it's a bum cadence, and worse, it doesn't make any damn sense. I got the thing about the fear of a dead mother while delirious a few months ago with the superflu and posted it because it's right next to JBH's about a poet hanging himself and because it somehow appeals to me as a Southerner, despite myself.
I suppose on the most straightforward level, the mother is the betrayed motherland, which is how we actually think of it down here. Yes, we are a sick, sad people. Haven't you ever read any O'Connor? She's my thesis, by the way. And that, too, strikes me as faintly sad and absurd right now.
The clay is on his Oxfords from his youth in the South. The mother's not really dead. Oxford is, incidentally, the Mississippi hometown of Faulkner.
You may call me JB. ;-)
yep might change the bit about tall. I meant to its height really, not absolute tallness.
It does have a comedic feel to is somehow, doesn't it?
Okay, Z - lets have a go at this...
I like the cadence of it, first off.
"backwards gravity" got it, like it - falls up (geographically).
then an image of the black mother (had to look up "rucked") making sexual advances (I see...)
I liked the car "idled into emptiness"; left running - good.
I wasn't able to associate with the rot-sweetness of tragedy or the puritan wet-dreams, but I understood it to be a description of something that may be a demographic universal.
then there's the suicide scene (is it?) - which I think is a little rushed - or perhaps too complex. I liked the red clay on the shoes - does this mean she's been buried? Made me think so, anyway.
I guess I'm not sure what exactly *is* going on in those last two-odd stanzas. A bit more sculpting maybe?
The first verse is funny, since witch hazel is used on bruises and inflammations, and mint tea is supposed to be very healtful for many ills. Mint doesn't propogate well from seeds; shoots are best. I don't know about witch hazel. Mint doesn't grow tall, witch hazel does. "To taste if need be" but does anyone taste witch hazel?
The word "can" just irks me. Given your propensity toward an economy of words you could easily just loose "can" and put an s on "cure[s]" - does it hurt the meter then? I don't think so; up to you.
For some reason I read this as an Amish person might - and it cracks me up. Actually it has a comedic feel because this concoction sounds useless; it has all these disclaimers and ways for it to be messed up.
In some,
most things - short of illness,
as long as the soil is hand-turned, specific planting depth, frequent watering, etc...
So, I'm going with that you did this effect on purpose and I give you a nine for now (until you change it, because you will - and there's not a thing wrong with doing that).
Good. The first bit appeals to me most, my mother-in-law being the craziest homeopath in an area chock full of crazy homeopaths. Not being much of a gardener myself, I don't get a lot from the rest. Kind of a Seamus Heaney feel, I guess, only miniaturized - a teaspoonful of dirt turned.
"Grow mature and tall" bugs me a little. I don't know if that's gardener talk or not, but it seems one of those adjectives should be replaced with a better one - doesn't matter which.
Good as ever.
Second and third verses are good. The enjambment of the first seems a bit forced.
Succinctly put. 'pon for a samurai though? Is he an Englishe gentleman samurai.
I agree with nowhereman. This poeme shouts anorexia nervosa.
I get a sense of anorexogenic environment (the expectations) and an anorexic mindset (the repetition of tighten the belt and the disordered nature of the poem as it draws in all its threads).
Cute, the inversion in the second verse is a little baffling (lightly breaking the rain rather than the rain lightly breaking).
Alright, not mad keen on the first verses, I can't work myself out sentiment. Tire should be tyre I think.
Like the final verse.
Man is purely a interaction between his environment and genetics. To be cowardly, to accept challenge, suggests that you believe in a thing called a soul as something directing behaviour rather than what it is an epiphenomenon of our ability to communicate and use tools.
What a great poem...
Everywhere is one word- S6 L2
...loved "You raped my mind professionally"
Brilliant *10*
Das a good'n idear.
Oh God...
put down the pen.. and slowly back away from the paper. Pick up a chair and begin to bludgeon yourself until you can no longer stand.