Undertows

A grouping of poems similar in theme

undertows

a grapefuit on the counter,
split in half, pink flesh
like a wounded knee, the segments
patterned and radial, spoken in the nautilus
language of such godfearing
numbers as fibonacci ratios, as if there was some
meaning here, meaning in
the symmetry of cut things, split things –
these halves heaving
like the red sea back upon the egyptians,
upon me. the pink, startling, uneaten
a female cancer – i
turn away.

because i have never been less hungry
in my life
and it is lunch again already.

i have decided
that it is these afternoons
that drive me crazy – wondering
where morning went like a phantom limb.
small nestward march of the tulips,
shadows borrowed, clouds big and full of life
lifted, hiked like lace skirts to cross a stream
and the drowse of insects,
the browse of grass, broken bottle
glass. you know,

something has died under the porch –
the smell poisons everything
i wonder where the shovel is.
the grapefruit
halves lie titled like beached boats.
i sit on the couch with the tv off,
worrying about my posture, getting old,
whether or not i will be able to sleep tonight.

the flowers are ignited
by april in the yard, wild and frantic
as currents, undertows.

plums (this fell sergeant)

accelerated,
like dog years
we hold our breath and
reassure ourselves
with the throbbing, like
petals in may. it is easy
to think about things like this –
things like war and car accident
statistics, or how many people
have died in their own bathrooms
and have faith lost
in the love of mothers
and life after death.

of course it is common
and the light enters our bedroom
window through the drapes,
like a shrug of the shoulders,
fills us urns. for a whole summer,
we do not pick the plums from
the tree growing into
the old fence and they rot,
until all that is left of their dark skin
and ovarian tribes are artifactual pits,
knitted trains of ants. rot
and sit, and the ants come marching
two by two, the same way things fall
apart.

if we do not deny it,
we are obsessed with it.
is it in people we live on
a memory, a kept voice, our
features in the mind of a friend
growing worn around the edges
like a favorite tool?

the worth of
this moment as
you sleep like a crooked road,
as I stroke the white shells
of your small places. is this real this
intangible unrecordable fluttering this
quickness of a tight heart, how
things seem to be in place –
our knees touching,
right, settled.

it is only when you laugh
that I am real, fleshed,
round and stopped, to be picked.


religion

it is mid-apocalypse
like it is mid-afternoon,
in a hammock sagging like a wheeze,
and the wind pushes against our skin
gently, as if it is the door to the
bedroom of a sleeping child, to peak in –
our organs churn fitfully,
bones bending to beaches.

smaller beauties,
the darker skin of a child,
the posture of a blossom,
stillness, the twin wombs of infinity's number.
do these things prove otherwise?
these patterns, how light dispels shadow,
how there are sounds in the night –
spilled crickets,
the passing of headlights against the wall,
your voice in my ear like a valley:
full of life, a green dusk.

no;
it is newton's first law, after all.
we are mid-fall,
but it doesn't feel that way
yet. the earth tears like a voice,
the sun is a blister from shoveling,
we are a prayer, nightly.
church steeples of this city
catch fire at sundown,
like a field of wheat,
wavering and there are hymns about peace,
be still

but

how can there be stillness
in a world of rivers and
death

halves lie titled like beached boats. <-- I think you mean tilted? I can't imagine beached boats being titled, soooo...

My favorite of these poems is the first. I think that has the richer characterization and the more interesting images, plus the inherent conflict and frustration involved. I like the frustration about it, in particular... the narrator seems flustered at the little things. It's really pretty neat.

The plums one has the most interesting idea, but the execution is only okay. Whatever. The religion one seems a bit random. The images aren't really cohesive. Maybe it's supposed to seem more chaotic, but I don't care for it.

And, mostly, I wanted to comment on the style. I haven't read your poetry in a while (gasp!) so I was pretty interested to see how exactly it's changed. The more you write, it seems, the more your poems seem to have a Spanish flair to them. By Spanish, I don't necessarily mean Spain. But your style is less like ee cummings or Plath (both of which I know you like) and more like Neruda. Just saying. It's interesting.

Holy sh- uhh, cow.

That was crazy good. I usually don't give reviews like this.. I can be quite harsh at times, I'm sorry to say. But that was beautifully executed. Especially the first piece.. I had to scroll down the page, but was too enveloped in the poem to see it beforehand.. and when I got to the bottom of the page, my mind kind of freaked out for a moment and went, "No, no, no! I can't have to pause for a moment! I'll lose the rhythm! No, don't kill the poem!"
And you know what? I did have to pause for a moment. And you know what else? The rhythm and flow were so strong, that it didn't matter.

I didn't know it was possible to create a piece of writing that enveloping, about a... a.. a grapefruit. Excellent.

I love your style.. it's very simplistic, but has all of these similes and metaphors that make absolutely perfect sense, and yet are things that I've never connected before. It's a style of writing that doesn't quite make sense, but seems to convey emotions rather than logical connections. And it's beautiful. That's what I'm still trying to learn to do. I'm not even quite there to learning it yet. I'm TRYING to learn it.

Okay. I'm going to stop ranting about how awesome your writing is. Maybe I'll go try to learn how to do something of the like.. the emotion-conveying-style-of-awesome. Wish me luck.

And great job, again.

-Coral-

Whoa...this is one heck of a poem...or should I say three? I must admit I had no idea what in the world you were talking about half the time, but I bet that's how you intended it. Abstract is one of my favorite forms of poetry, and you have clearly perfected the art. I can only wonder what goes on inside your head when you look at random things like teacups and butterflies and television sets, but it would certainly be interesting to know.

Crit owed.

Hey Kylan -

Feels like it's been a long time, no read. And it interests me how you have grouped these according to theme - something even larger to unravel, then, what with a common theme running (like an undercurrent, aptly titled) across various fragments, snapshots, instants in a life. Heh; might even be something to consider when compiling an anthology, this idea of letting the poetry speak volumes collectively as well as singly.

I think you already realise the fact that each of these are not particularly...tight. There are overarching ideas, yes, but no one idea that unlocks the reason behind every image; no one thread that I could pull on and expect the entire fabric to come undone. Obviously, you like your baubles, little sequins and beads of imagery adorning the main fabric, loosening it out. As parts, subparts, I like them too - they just lack the grace and elegance of something that unravels perfectly.

And yes, I am searching for symmetry in your poetry, as you contemplate searching for symmetry in the simplest of things. Symmetry being some kind of perfection, I'll admit - that said, I find it interesting that 'undertows' was not nearly as symmetrical, cohesive, idea-wise as 'religion'. I asked this before: is asymmetry, incompleteness of image or thought, necessarily a bad thing? Is the fluidity here, the changingness, the way the poems trickle through my fingers and out again, as imperfect and fleeting as life - is there anything necessarily wrong here, besides the fact that I cannot get that 'stillness,' that solidity that you keep reminding us of? Perhaps this trio of poems can work by the unintended irony of them not working; after all, you are speaking of such things as the need for symmetry, patterns, something to ground us - and what better way to depict this than to leave us dissatisfied with the mild haphazardness of your writing while simultaneously hinting at what could be?

This may seem like a good divergence from what we have discussed before. However, I have been reading widely, really thinking about what a poem should entail, how it should come across. It's bizarre, I find, that the same need to have perfection in writing arises from that need to have perfection in life. And yet - I think one can work on a double layer here, regardless: what if underneath the seeming imperfections, there was perfection? Symmetry beneath the seeming asymmetry? And how does one do this? I think it would have to involve the complex kind of multilaryering, branching and interweaving, so that poetry can be the same paradox of life - imperfect and perfect at once. It would be marvellous to see it unravel in one go, to tease open each avenue, to see how the threads link up, even while the piece as a whole retains that sense of dissatisfaction. Apparent simplicity, apparent imperfection; hidden complexity. Yes.

undertows

I can see why this strikes a quicker chord with the reader than the other two - you portray general problems through the medium of the individual, hence the voice is stronger, more relatable. In the others, the plural first person pronoun 'we' doesn't have that ability to connect as swiftly. It's vague, more vague in comparison, that is.

like a wounded knee, the segments
patterned and radial, spoken in the nautilus
language of such godfearing
numbers as fibonacci ratios, as if there was some
meaning here, meaning in
the symmetry of cut things, split things –

'wounded knee' - really, does not belong. Ratios, mathematics, patterns, symmetry, religion, meaning, geometry, division, halving - this is a heck of a lot of ideas to introduce in so small a space. You get away with this only because they're so similar, hence easily digestible (no pun intended...). And I think it is nice to point the reader in the right direction on the phrase 'as if there was some / meaning here, meaning in / the symmetry' - just a tad too obvious for my liking, but since it's said innocently enough, it's fine.

these halves heaving
like the red sea back upon the egyptians,
upon me. the pink, startling, uneaten
a female cancer – i
turn away.

Besides the glaring fact (of which you are well aware) that the red seas, Egyptians, cancers are also bizarrely out of place - I find this bit interesting. Searching for meaning in symmetry - this is what you say just before. Meaning in cut things, split things. And why, then, does it disgust the narrator? 'Startling, uneaten / a female cancer...never been less hungry in my life' - all at once, the symmetry and solidity we are wanting is replusive. Why? Was this intended on your part? For all this talk of tradition, all at once the perfection is unappealing.

i have decided
that it is these afternoons
that drive me crazy – wondering
where morning went like a phantom limb.
small nestward march of the tulips,
shadows borrowed, clouds big and full of life
lifted, hiked like lace skirts to cross a stream
and the drowse of insects,
the browse of grass, broken bottle
glass. you know,

First four lines - wonderful. I never thought of such an inventive way of describing lost mornings. But as a whole - no. First stanza is inside; almost as if the conflict, the meanderings of thought are more internal too (even if depicted externally), and now this flinging-back of the reader to the bright and sunny outside world, with not a single mention of symmetry and halving and everything else they're wanting to know about...I didn't like that. The only tiny way I could relate it in is with the line 'something has died under the porch' - contrasting life and death, change and stillness, imperfection and perfection, but it's really pushing it.

something has died under the porch –
the smell poisons everything
i wonder where the shovel is.

The same effect here - from praising the grapefruit to abhorring it: here we go from wonder at summer outside to a dusky, musty death, closed in and needing removal. Hm. As if...death = perfection because it is stillness therefore symmetry, and again you are throwing up the idea of abhorring this stillness, even while wanting it.

halves lie titled like beached boats.
i sit on the couch with the tv off,
worrying about my posture, getting old,
whether or not i will be able to sleep tonight.

Further emphasises the repulsiveness of the grapefruit (of course, simultaneously they are charming, what with the interesting vocabulary), hence aversion to perfection/symmetry. And I had to think with regards to the last three lines there (because you just tipped the balance in the opposite direction all over again) - the narrator worries over the asymmetries, the imperfections of life. So at the same time, we want symmetry.

the flowers are ignited
by april in the yard, wild and frantic
as currents, undertows.

And I wonder what the undertows are. The constant battle between change/imperfection/asymmetry and stability/perfection/symmetry? Why are the flowers the undertows? What's special about the flowers that we must end on them, and not the grapefruit? (Because they are sort of like the 'undercurrent' clump of cells that'll form the grapefruit?!) On a thematic level, it's melding in okay. On an aesthetic level, not so.

I shall be back for the other two in a moment.


Navita

Okay, yes. I'm back.

plums (this fell sergeant)

Your titles are really something. 'Sergeant' - I want to know what this is referring to. This poem seems even more fleeting than the last in terms of spontaneity of expression - I will have to decode it part by part. No overarching impressions from me from the outset, then.

accelerated,
like dog years
we hold our breath and
reassure ourselves
with the throbbing, like
petals in may.

Fine, a vague beginning. 'Dog years' - not fine. Clever, but too banal, too vulgar almost. I take 'accelerated' to be significant - what, that life goes too fast? That we are always changing, always fluid, always - here comes the link to 'undertows' - wanting stability ('to hold our breath and / reassure ourselves')? I shall see:

it is easy
to think about things like this –
things like war and car accident
statistics, or how many people
have died in their own bathrooms
and have faith lost
in the love of mothers
and life after death.

Why is it easy to think about death, I wonder. Perhaps because death is final, an ultimatum, a point of stability, as it were, in this changing, accelerating world, where there is little room for stillness, symmetry. Why, though, does the lack of faith (in love/life after death) also count in this category? Lack of faith is surely a loss of stability, is it not? A kind of disjointedness, fluidity in thought as opposed to stability in it. I don't understand - unless you are playing around with paradoxes again by saying it is as easy to think about stability as it is to think about change. (Personally, I think it would be nice if we could get at least one clear opinion in this first and most important stanza out of you.)

Oh yes, and I should be thinking about how the title fits in too...I'll keep a lookout for these plums of yours, then . (Bit of a fruity theme we've got going here, obviously.)

of course it is common
and the light enters our bedroom
window through the drapes,
like a shrug of the shoulders,
fills us urns. for a whole summer,
we do not pick the plums from
the tree growing into
the old fence and they rot,
until all that is left of their dark skin
and ovarian tribes are artifactual pits,
knitted trains of ants. rot
and sit, and the ants come marching
two by two, the same way things fall
apart.

I feel rather nervous of this stanza. I want to be able to slot it in sharply from the beginning - but that's exactly the problem. It doesn't want to hook itself in with the rest. 'Light...fills us urns' - and that, in a word, is the issue. Loss of reader-text connection. Am I to conclude, then, that the point of view here is tha of an urn? Sure, you could mean it in the metaphorical sense, but you're so dead serious for the majority of it, that I hardly think so. And also, you say 'it is easy to think about things like this' - thinking, obviously, being something an inanimate object would be incapable of.

I shall ignore this for the moment. A stanza, then, on things falling apart. Disintegrating. Dying and then disintegrating. Well. Some kind of 'change' suggested (via decomposition) even after 'death' (the supposed point of all stillness)? And again, that effortless beauty you give to the contemplation of death in the first stanza is here refuted, overturned by the way you portray it as horrific, something to abhor. Some Shakespearean (again!) feeling-cycles going on here. All to highlight the paradox, the duality of our perception of things, I presume.

if we do not deny it,
we are obsessed with it.
is it in people we live on
a memory, a kept voice, our
features in the mind of a friend
growing worn around the edges
like a favorite tool?

Life and death as obsessions, yes. But that 'we' is annoying me. You've been hazy up to this point, and that 'we' just muddles it further. I feel little connection with the poem here; more like the writer (whoever he is ) is a wise old sage scribbling about life from his dusty room, curtains closed, trying to come up with a commentary of society in the most archaic of manners. This stanza is as ephemeral and unmemorable as the idea it conveys - fittingly, I guess - the need to remember something, to hold on to a thought, an instant to remind oneself that we have truly lived. 'Favourite tool' - too concrete, too garden-sheddy for this soft-spoken poem. Pick something else.

And it would be good to see you play around with 'acceleration' here as well, the idea of things going too fast - stylistically, that is. I mean, it'd be interesting to see you speed up a stanza instead of this sighing stillness in order to make the irrepressible need to grasp on to a memory more urgent, potent. At the moment, it's too quiet and reflective to achieve that.

the worth of
this moment as
you sleep like a crooked road,
as I stroke the white shells
of your small places. is this real this
intangible unrecordable fluttering this
quickness of a tight heart, how
things seem to be in place –
our knees touching,
right, settled.

Narrator-switching issues aside ('we' to 'you' to 'I'), this feels like a repeat - and an unecessary one at that - of the idea in the above stanza. It's not poignant enough to make us want it to stay - instead, it's kind of draggy and well-worn. You want the moment to remain; but that 'need' is more like an amusing, flitting thought in this summer-slow stanza, rather than something incredibly crucial, which is how I feel it should be given how you have approached the idea from the outset.

I don't care for that stanza.

it is only when you laugh
that I am real, fleshed,
round and stopped, to be picked.

And I would almost say an even bigger failure of an ending - cohesiveness, symmetry, multilayering-wise - than the last poem's. It fell flat. Too preachy. Throw up some questions, instead of an all-encompassing statement. Don't confuse the reader haphazardly - make the confusion have some kind of purpose. And what do I conclude from this? That reality - or rather, stability, a point of stillness as opposed to the fleeting changingness and acceleration - is to be found in joy in interpersonal relationships. Love. Boo.

I mean, pretty idea, but I was rather enjoying your black-white-black-white play around with audience emotions from before, and I think that by this point, I had seen enough sweetness. Something darker, more poignant, more conflict oriented (showing the duality/paradox of emotions) would have struck a stronger note with me.

And I still have not figured out the title, but no matter. The poem is not about plums anyway.

Since I'm on a bit of a dissection roll tonight, I might as well continue.

religion

I actually used this one to help unlock the other two. Maybe I was in the right frame of mind, then, for picking up all the details you left (I mean, the concept of chaos and order, change and stillness fascinates me no end - see the nonfic piece of mine - so of course that would leap out at me). This one had the potential to be the tightest, and yet felt the loosest. I think I should be coherent enough to explain why:

it is mid-apocalypse
like it is mid-afternoon,
in a hammock sagging like a wheeze,
and the wind pushes against our skin
gently, as if it is the door to the
bedroom of a sleeping child, to peak in –
our organs churn fitfully,
bones bending to beaches.

Mid-apocalypse - very similar to the 'accelerated' beginning in the former poem. An introduction to an imminent doom. Death. Acceleration, in this case, leading to death - although that's inferred from the former poem, of course. Interesting concept - too much fluidity is death. And yet, you also explore how too much stagnancy is death, what with the unappealing descriptions of the grapefruit and the plums.

I must say, it's intriguing analysisng a poem in the context of other poetry.

But this stanza is exactly what I mean about the looseness. Mid-apocalypse - you would think this would be a very tight thing, something to get panicky and crazed about - and still, much like in parts of 'plums,' you have this ridiculously relaxed outlook on this apocalypse. You almost do not seem to care, in these soft, slow descriptions of beaches, hammocks, sleep. Quite a contradiction to the first poem, which seems much more afraid and uncertain in comparison. A kind of acceptance of the apocalypse, then. But I still think it's stronger to throw up questions and churning emotions than to sit back, like you are now, in the old-and-wise sort of mentality and contemplate them like passing thoughts. At least, for the sake of the flow if nothing else - a little too drowsy, I'd say.

smaller beauties,
the darker skin of a child,
the posture of a blossom,
stillness, the twin wombs of infinity's number.
do these things prove otherwise?
these patterns, how light dispels shadow,
how there are sounds in the night –
spilled crickets,
the passing of headlights against the wall,
your voice in my ear like a valley:
full of life, a green dusk.

I've had the bolded line in my head all day. A powerful question. Examples of things that follow a pattern, that have some kind of stability to them, some kind of sureness, reality, tangibility - an innocent grocery-shopping list of examples, enchanting, fluid, changing, loose, even while recounting something as strong and tight as the potency of memory and experience. Did you intend for this paradox? Would it not be better to highlight the strength of something tangible by making it tangible, tight, strong, (symmetric!) instead of rattling off a string of images, unconnected, fluid, thus intangible?

no;
it is newton's first law, after all.
we are mid-fall,
but it doesn't feel that way
yet. the earth tears like a voice,
the sun is a blister from shoveling,
we are a prayer, nightly.
church steeples of this city
catch fire at sundown,
like a field of wheat,
wavering and there are hymns about peace,
be still

Hmph. Newton's First Law. The stanza functions fine - better, in fact - without it. 'Earth tears like a voice...church steeples of this city / catch fire' - my favourite parts. Let me think, for a moment. We are, as you suggested before, in mid-apocalypse, free-fall, accelerating, hurtling, changing, ephemeral. Symbolically, what do you suggest we are hurtling towards? The ground, where there are church steeples and 'hymns about peace'. Essentially, we are tending towards religion; but we just don't know it - 'it doesn't feel that way'. We are tending towards a state of surety, certainty, something more tangible than this free fall.

And yet, I still feel an undercurrent - undertow, more appropriately - of aversion to complete stillness. The 'earth tears like a voice' - where the earth is a symbol of the stillness/religion we are moving towards. 'Tearing' being the strong negative verb here. Like the grapefruit lying 'tilted like beached boats' and the plums, rotten. Even so, you make a strong case for religion.

but

how can there be stillness
in a world of rivers and
death

Rivers = fluidity = change = acceleration -- this I am happy with. However, the only place yet where I've felt the need to actively object to your theme is here, at this very end. You ask 'how can there be stillness in a world of rivers and death'? But I respond: you have so convincingly shown death as a form of stillness before, regardless of whether that was intended of not. So. So there can be stillness where there is death. There can be a symmetry, a perfection, an ultimatum, then. Perhaps you mean - 'death' as in 'death by free fall' by accelerating, by moving too fast, death by too much change - but again, I am only extrapolating haphazardly, and I would rather it were more straightforward than that, since I think this too important a question to phrase incorrectly.

---

Enough from me. I think I've said it about as coherently as I will say it already. It would be nice to know if I came close to your intended themes, whether I grasped the undercurrents correctly.

Thanks for the read - and the intellectual analysis -


Navita


EDIT: intended or not, something about the trio made me laugh. You're talking about religion and there is already an immediate allusion to the Holy Trinity what with the three poems. Nice.

Jesus Christ Navita. xD

You've had a thorough analysis of your piece so I'm going to keep this general.

I think you should get a pat on the back for doing something you usually don't do very well. You're typically disconnected from your poem, and it can be felt if you pay close attention, so either here you covered that up really well, or you actually did connect with your poem. You're talented at descriptions, there's no doubt about that. When you appeal emotionally to a reader, with the kind of words you use. It all comes together really well.

You start to lose that in the second poem and it dwindles of in the third. Honestly, I read the three a couple times. I can remember bits and pieces of the second and none of the third. The first one is a real good one.

You've created a sense of frustration, discomfort and thoughtfulness that you get across really well. Sure there are a couple things that weaken the poem. For example:

the flowers are ignited
by april in the yard, wild and frantic
as currents, undertows.

titled like beached boats.

Note: tilted*

like the red sea back upon the egyptians,
upon me

Your lack of consistent imagery. Patterns and the grapefruit are the only two that are consistent in this. You throw in some images the cross over a little bit but you drop them quickly. So you've left some loose threads.

Honestly it doesn't matter. Keep writing like this. Please and thank you.

--

The other two, you go back to your comfort zone, and they're lovely as usual. But underneath the one you wrote, they're unmemorable. I don't want to see anymore like this, poems dressed in pretty colours, sparkles and bittersweetness. I don't care much for that anymore. I want you to focus on connecting with your poem. Feel what you want your reader to feel.
Smell what you want your reader to smell. It'll bring a whole new dimension to your poetry that'll knock you right out of the ballpark.

Thanks for the read.

Kamas