Galerius meets Richard Siken meets Jacques Brel

the song: Une Valse A Mille Temps - Jacques Brel. For your amusement. It's worth listening to the end.

Hey Navi,

I already told you I liked this, and a bit of the why of it: the structure, the flow, the theme, the imagery, that work quite well together and with the title--three stanzas, three beats in a waltz, and waves, and the turning and roiling and the slight madness that comes with a waltz that's lost it's normal tempo, from three to a thousand (with twenty in-between, if you take the song into account). Plus that pun carried over from the title, that is actually very ironic in context to this poem: "la valse a mis le temps", says the title (and the last line, and some of the irony stems from there also), but the fact is, it hasn't. If anything, it's veered off course, and badly so.

Which brings me down to the theme: this rushing into things, the loss of balance and consideration and caution; in relationships, as is the primary point here, but that can also be expanded to most of everyday life (there are, after all, many sorts of love, and not all of them go under the same name).

I like that it's very explicitly not something normal: it's something new, something that came on relatively recently, as when you say

We no longer
live on the islands, we swim and
we dream our days double

or

like the valse, the trembling
fragile, beautiful valse we sang
before we dived in forever,

It's something recent, and it's not exactly a good thing, not when associated with that imagery of "bloody sea" and "grey" and "flesh hurled across the vague rocks": it's very fleshy, physical, and very harsh/hard at the same time: love versus lust, but (and I may be stretching it here) also possibly convention vs innovation ("too wild to do the waltz proper / so just take her"), reason vs instinct (the ponderated, calculated beat of a classic waltz against the "drooling mouth of storm" and the broken cadence of the poem itself)...

I was a little leery of the changes in tone across the stanzas at first, but on re-reading the poem, I find I really like the effect it has--mainly, that it adds to the offness of it all: how you start with a pretty fast but still semi-controlled rhythm, all enjambments and the slight breathlessness of the plunge, then suddenly halt at the end of the first stanza, pull back to the "We no longer / live on the islands", and then go in again, except this time it's just a quick beat before the "But Love!" interrupts. Then the tone--lifts, for lack of a better word, and there it is, the focus: still the enjambments, but a tad harsher, almost resentful, like an accusation of sorts. And then the shift from second to third stanzas is not so much a transition as a sudden jolt:

So what –
it’s a bloody sea, we ain’t got doors
nor chairs; get used to it.

And it’s too fucking fast to dance in
anyways

the language and the flow very curt before it very suddenly slows again, and fades off, with longer, smoother words ("floundering", "the trembling / fragile, beautiful valse"), and dies on the conclusion.

Yes, I like this poem :P

That said, there were a few parts I wasn't too keen on, issues mostly related to flow/wording:

strewn grey and
blurry by air

The "grey" here just looks... off to me? I don't think I can articulate the why of it :/ I think it's the combination of "strewn" and "grey" that just doesn't read off right, even if the alliteration between those two words and the next line is great.

we swim and
we dream our days double, plunged;

My brain insists on reaidng "plunged" as "plunge", as it has trouble visualizing days being "plunged". I know you're also using it for the repetition, but it's just a bit weird? Or the image is just flying over my head.

we like hurtling
from greyness to greyness

Sounds a bit clumsy, too harsh, and too vague (though those latter two may be intentional).

and that is to hard rock, vague rock,

Took me a second to register "hard rock" as the music genre: great contrast to the more classical waltz, but flowing strangely off that sentence. "vague rock" even moreso (it just occured to me that I could read "vague" as French for "wave", but that sounds even stranger, so I'll assume it's not the case).

the
drooling mouth of storm,

Am not sure whether I think this needs an article in front of "storm" or not. Without makes for personification, but it's also a bit clunky.

That's pretty much it, really: lots of nitpicking. Again, I love this. PM me if/when you want to discuss this a bit more, or hit me in chat if it's not hating on you too much. :P

Navita --

A chance to repay you! Though I don't know if I'll be much help.

I liked this. I think it was a well-executed experiment. With poetry, I rarely initially judge according to language, tone, structure, etc. but rather, the impression that I'm left with by the end. An impression of my own making, built from the individual and personal meaning attributed to each word, image, stanza. The impression I come away with here is a hazy, urgent one. Like a waltz in the fog, so to speak. Lots of grayness and flurries of motion. And whenever a poem is gray to me (as I'm sure you intended), I get a vague, undefined, nebulous sort of reaction. The colors of poems are important.

This isn't the kind of poem that you can take line by line. You have moving parts making up individual stanzas, so I'll take it stanza by stanza. Now, I grasp a little bit more of the meaning each time I read it, so the themes are a tad elusive. It may be because the song you posted at the bottom led me to think of this song, but I take this as a poem about a struggle against monotony. The ocean, with its repetitions, and vastness. I've also been listening to the album The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, which talks a lot about the suburban war against sameness and meaninglessness. You are so fierce here. At least, the voice is fierce, especially in the last half of the poem. See it's funny, because there is so much movement in this poem, though also a fair amount of stagnation. Maybe this is where I'm extracting my interpretation from -- the daily, kinetic struggle against static. Against vague waves (loved the wordplay: vague rock).

I think my favorite stanza was the closing one. Because you harness the tilt-a-whirl motion of the poem and wind it up until it funnels and sucks us up to the end. Where you experimenting in motion at all? Lines like "It’s a whirlwind, it’s a bloody sea/...it’s a whirling sea, it’s a lovely bloody" really accentuate the spin of this piece. Ha, I feel like this poem is a top. The opening stanza is the initial flick of the wrist to get it spinning, the second stanza is the maintaining of the motion, and the third stanza is the top losing energy, spinning on its side, coming to a stop.

A few closing comments:

-- Did you purposefully avoid italicizing the French? Because I think the lack of italics added a nice mood to the piece.

-- I definitely noticed Galerius here. I think you captured his style well, and maybe that's where the opaqueness of the imagery came in. He writes in sprawling terms, with a sense of epic urgency. Which you managed to capture nicely here.

-- " like fleshminds beaten and/ exhausted, floundering in the/ grey sea" Didn't care for "fleshminds". Especially because you already used "backwaterbones" to such effectiveness.

So good stuff. I'm sure my interpretation was wrong, or at least incomplete.

-Kylan

So I am remembering why I never review Galerius' poetry. But whatever, you have threatened and who am I to resist.

Let's see. Criticism-wise-- I have to say, reading this I missed your usual clarity and directness of imagery. I realize, of course, that you were experimenting with a new style and also that you were writing in large part about unclear, indirect things-- anger and boredom and the continual struggle of humans to wrench themselves out of the fog of unthinking living (or at least, that's some of what I got out of it)-- but there were no really beautiful strings of words in here, and knowing as I do how beautiful your strings can be I think that's a pity, and not really a necessary sacrifice.

This is also, in part, my need for instant gratification talking; I admit it. I like to be able to enjoy a poem not only after reading through it enough times to see the care that went into shape, and pacing, and how content and style work together, but also while reading it for the first time, simply on the level of sound and individual segments of thought, and I don't really get as much of that here as I want to.

And now to praise. Seriously, you are brilliant, when it comes to how you build things; I know you are probably tired of me using the word architecture at you, but suck it up, because you balance repetition and rhythm and themes like Frank Lloyd Wright did, idk, timbers. Did Frank Lloyd Wright even use timbers? Okay, wait, no, that's not the point. The point is that you wove every thread together as tightly as could be, and you have no loose ends, and even if I don't really get a lot of the poem's meaning I can-- taste it, almost, because of how you mastered the medium to make it serve that message.



...yeah, I don't really know what I'm saying. Make it prettier because I want you to? I'm impressed, but also not in love, yet? Something like that.