Waist deep in Gods

Waist deep in Gods
I fell to my knees
a palpitating heart

my veins were anxious
the sky was deserted
on my porch

a hand
a waste
a peep
a glob of sunlight

it was a soundless morning
a concrete concaved morning
subtle as your hair
alive like the seething foam
on lips tired
my memory flew like a dove

off your window white

an apple green
was left with a fresh wound
on your pillow

Olympus was your cheeks
constipated wind was my drink

and we were raw on our beds
roughly drawn

... Yeh... first rule of poetry 101, Grammar! Puntuation. Don't act like it our job to fix your grammar. You post this rather poor poem and to add insult to injury you expect us to get a headache not only from reading it but from lack of grammar.

This is so abstract, the meaning is lost. You give the people headache trying to work out the meaning. It also incredibly verbose not helpful, just seemed you wanted to make it sound better.

Word choice affects theme too, you use big words but most likely wrong. I really couldn't work this out, any meaning.

Overall: Less being vageu and actually just make it so much clearer and proofread your poem if you're posting it here. Put in grammar and puctuation. That is all.

Good luck
VSN

who told you poetry was about grammar and punctuation?

I've read a few poets who've been published who intentionally leave out punctuation and use even odd punctuation.

Look at the modernist and especially post-modernist for this. Punctuation is something that in poetry I would guess is an aesthetic choice.

I'm one of those poets that disregards punctuation on purpose. Each line has it's own meaning. As for the rest i'll review it later. The meaning of the poem is intentionally vague.

In fact, it has been argued that poetry where you get the meaning right away and have one meaning of it is poetry not worth studying at all. See T.S. Eliot for the prime example of this those that are for ambiguity.

MRMarathon wrote:who told you poetry was about grammar and punctuation?

I've read a few poets who've been published who intentionally leave out punctuation and use even odd punctuation.

Look at the modernist and especially post-modernist for this. Punctuation is something that in poetry I would guess is an aesthetic choice.

I'm one of those poets that disregards punctuation on purpose. Each line has it's own meaning. As for the rest i'll review it later. The meaning of the poem is intentionally vague.

In fact, it has been argued that poetry where you get the meaning right away and have one meaning of it is poetry not worth studying at all. See T.S. Eliot for the prime example of this those that are for ambiguity.

Of course poetry where you get the meaning right away is bad poetry. BUT that doesn't justify writing a vague, abstract poem and then attacking your reviewer when he says it's difficult to understand. "The meaning of the poem is intentionally vague" is a poor (and pretentious) excuse for writing something disjointed and rambling.

I think Vernon's suggestion about the punctuation was fair. Just saying "Other people have done it" doesn't mean you can leave it out. It is an aesthetic choice, of course, and it is the poet's choice--but I don't think your poem benefits from not having it.

But really, all that said, the poem is not so bad--in fact, I think you have some fantastic lines in here. (Do you listen to the Mountain Goats? Some of these lines put me in mind of John Darnielle's lyrics.) The problem is that I feel the thread tying them all together is very loose, and I do think the poem needs more direction (especially in the beginning), not just "It's vague on purpose".
Why should people read and appreciate the poem if they don't take something away when they leave it? When I walk away from this poem, I don't feel like I've gained some sort of understanding, been forced to look at something from a fresh perspective. I'm saying, "Some great lines," but that's it, I'm coming away with an appreciation for parts of this poem, but we know that the overall effect should be greater than the sum of its parts, and here I feel it isn't.

Good luck!
Colleen

Trying to ignore those arguments previously mentioned, Colly is right. Some of these lines are fantastic. I for one am I strong believe in punctuation making a poem stronger, because you can use it to guide your reader to subtle conclusions and so forth, but if your poem can survive without it, than good for you. I don't neccessarily think this survives, because it seems so without structure and a place to go. Like Colly, I do not find a strong central focus behind it. It seems like several ideas mixed together to form verse that doesn't neccessarily mean anything. "Intentionally vague" is a bad argument, but reading over your description of what you were trying to do, before I read the poem, gave me the idea that you might like the Imagists (See: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams.) . I was somewhat disappointed not to see that reflected in your poetry. Instead of an image, I was given strings of words and thoughts that didn't link together in a chain.

I think you would like Imagism. I suggest you read something by Pound, and in fact I'll give you a little bit of it right now, here is his poem In the Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

And that's it. As you can see, it is vague. There is no deeper meaning, and it relies only on an image. Why? Because it leaves the reader to, ultimately, decide what the poem is about. Imagism is an interesting things, and I didn't start appreciating it until just the other day. (Oh, lit class! How I love thee.) If you think that you would be more apt to work with Imagism as an inspiration, I suggest reading A Few Don'ts by Ezra Pound. Not only is it a wonderful guide to Imagism, but also to poetry in general.

Hope you found this useful.

I'd like to apologize for sounding like an attacker and thank suzanne for cutting the legs off my pedestal if it seemed like that.

I'll still stand by my choice of not using punctuation. The only punctuation I find myself using is commas and line breaks.

I'd admit this poem is ambiguous and it probably doesn't help the effect of the poem. I wrote it starting with "waist deep in gods" and moved from there.

I've read pound and william carlos williams. I like some of their stuff. I haven't heard the moutain goats.

the main thing I see and realized before was that my poem didn't have a larger meaning which I've had problems with before. I'll look it over, but thanks for the advice.

Be careful of confusing line breaks with punctuation; a line break does not denote a pause.

Other than that, Suzanne's response was very good. She knows her stuff.