The Fool

Hello, Kyllorac.

Motley was a great word to begin with, but it went south after there. I would ask you to look at the poem and attempt to summarize what it says. First, what does it say literally? Second, what do you think it expresses underneath the words?

The image that I retain after glancing over it a few times is maybe, just maybe, a man in a motley jacket that falls (though tumbles is a more appropriate word) down a hill and gets back up, keeps going with a silly, ashamed smile on his face. But, frankly, I believe that is wishful thinking. You give the character no personality though you say he/she roams freely. That should be a statement in itself, but without explanation to back it up, we don't feel the freedom or the rolling of the hills.

I hope that you might consider a more concrete scene in which to display this fool. Show us his teeth and the cavities in his teeth. Show us the size and shape of his patches.

Consider, before you revise, what YOU personally get out of the poem. Write it all down. What are you TRYING to say in many more words than you allowed in the poem? Keep that beside you as you pick out images and comparisons. Good luck!

Let me know if you have any questions or would like a review on anything else!
-Hannah-

Edit: I hope you read this addition. In defense of motley as a good word choice, I thought that it was good because though there are varying definitions for it, the one that came to my mind was the VERY concrete definition of motley as a multicolored coat, which would serve as a very nice prop laid out in a single word. 'Coat of many colors' doesn't do it as well as 'motley', and I have a special fondness for it. ANYWAYS. The end of my defense of motley.

Hi Kyllorac! I like this poem and I love the metaphor. I really think the only thing you have to work on is the enjambment. I almost feel as though you wrote this without stanzas or sentences, then just hit the Enter key at random intervals. Of course, I don't believe that this is true, but it is what some readers may be led to think.

e.g.

Perhaps you could change

Kyllorac wrote:Motley describes your very mien,
your ragtag cloak a lesson
in history, a library of your wanderings through
the world
and its secrets.

... to ...

Motley describes your very mien,
your ragtag cloak
a lesson in history
a library of your wanderings
through the world
and its secrets.

This would just give the poem a more refined feel and a bit more order -- that is, it would have a pattern, in a sense

Overall, the imagery was very descriptive and vivid. Great work!

- Abigail

Hey Kyllorac –

Before I tell you how this poem bored me, I shall enlighten you on how it interested me.

King Lear – so many parallels. The Fool says, ‘A sweet and bitter fool / the one in motley here, the other found out there.’ Cloaks remind me of Lear’s obsession with his train, ‘Cut off my train?...A little to disquantity your train…Call your train together.’ (Where train refers to clothing, servants, etc) Tumbling through life like a stone down a mountain slide is what the Fool says Lear is doing – ‘When a great wheel rolls down a hill’ – the Wheel of Fortune concept, in this case; coming to the end of one’s luck cyclically. The emphasis on clothing/rags also makes me think of, ‘Off, off you lendings!’ and ‘A tailor made thee,’ (Reply: ‘Art mad? A tailor make a man?’) and ‘Fathers that wear rags / do make their children blind.’ ETC.

In essence, that Lear’s identity is wound up in his kingship, which is wound up in his ‘train’ and clothing – so when he abdicates, he essentially becomes nothing, a fool (which is what the real Fool is trying to convince him) – and a greater fool at that since he is officially nothing but thinks he is king; he is, thus, a great wheel rolling down a hill. Mad.

I have no idea if that was on purpose on your part. Actually, aesthetically, I don’t particularly care if it was. It doesn’t make the poem any more pleasant a read.

First of all: structure. Centring poetry like that is purposeless and juvenile. Unless your theme was, say, symmetry – which it is not – then it may be acceptable, but here it is as pretentious as the vocabulary. It tries to be grandiose. Keyword: tries. It is trying to make up for the lack of poetry I’m seeing in the words themselves. They could just as easily be sentences. There’s nothing poignant or artful in the phrasing, nothing remotely intangible nor abstract. No feeling. You may tell of feeling, but you don’t convince the reader. It’s just there.

On the topic of structure, this is what I attempted to do with the lines:

in your
cloak, a lesson

soft-spoken, breathless
in history, a dirty library of

how you walk through
black hallways
moth to the liquid light

of pages winged
in mid-flight
as you hold them gently

down into dust

Okay, perhaps veering into abstractions here, but it is an example, only, of enjambment for effect. Tried to keep to your themes of wandering the world / secrets but in less explicit and boring terms, and with the extended metaphor of the library – knowledge and truth = light, but the irony is that the cloak is dirty with knowledge / history, rusty with it, black with it.

Anyway. Instead of clever irony, you’ve got unpalatable inconsistency.

Motley describes your very mien,

Why are you still doing this? That ridiculously overwrought wording? Motley, describes, mien. Is this a thesis, a Shakespearean play? No – it is a poem in the and for the modern age and sensibility. Such pompousness has no value to us, since we already side with the underdog, the individual – not the prancing monarchs from whom such a speech might be acceptable.

It means nothing to anyone – both emotionally, in how it lacks aesthetic value, and intellectually – I mean, of course the clothing of a fool is haphazard, random, assorted! You’re trying to cover up for the lack of substantial ideas with a thin, see-through layer of complexity and synonyms, and it is going down in flames. Your sentence essentially says, albeit far more pretentiously, that ‘this is how you describe a fool’s appearance: random.’ Please. Burn your thesaurus instead.

your ragtag cloak a lesson

‘Motley’ and ‘ragtag’ bother me for the same reason: they’re what I’d call ‘confetti’ words. Frisky, intangible, trying too hard to convey diversity and variety without any real thought given to the implications of it. They’re there for the sake of being there. I don’t see what ragtag adds that motley didn’t – in fact, I don’t see what motley adds that ‘fool’ doesn’t cover in all its immediate connotations. This is why it’s so dull – because you’re essentially describing things anyone will divine from your title and you’re doing so in the most self-important manner possible, pretending there is some worth to stating the obvious as long as you sound (messily) conceited about it.

A poet’s purpose should be, at the very least, to delight – if information of the reader is out of question. You can’t delight someone with things they’ve seen before. You delight them less – you frustrate them, that is – when you pretend that what you’re describing is actually different, when all the world knows it is not, with only halfway conquered vocabulary usage.



And now we veer into mundaneness that isn’t even disguised with face-paint like it has been earlier on. You give up, after two lines, on being pompous all for the sake of trying to draw the reader in – failing miserably, I might add – and we have another hoard of synonyms. Lesson, history, library, even secrets.

His cloak is a lesson in history and is dirty with all his wanderings. Fine. This is the underlying theme here, the one I would talk about in an English essay about your poetry – not the one I would actually read, so explicitly, in the poem. The worst kind of metaphor is one that whacks you right in the face and screams that it’s a metaphor, hence demolishing the entire point of a metaphor – to allow for the association between two things to occur in the reader’s subconscious. No need to thrust it in their face so desperately.

This is what you are doing: either pretentiously stating things, or mundanely stating them – both of which are utterly simplistic; the first tries to look complex and fails, while the second doesn’t even try. What you want is this: have complex ideas, yes – and extended metaphor, if you can muster it – but state them simply – not simplistically – in a manner that appeals to the reader’s sensibilities.

Forget any one of these, and the poem turns into a load of words centred on the page unceremoniously.

You roam freely, without care, blithe and
gregarious in your way, naive in others'. And you
tumble through life like a stone down a mountainside,
a boulder pulled down to the
foothills to break.

Statement, statement, statement. The nose of a metaphor, immediately beaten black and bruised and bloody by what follows after – ‘without care, blithe and / gregarious, naïve in others’.’ Personally, I much preferred the light/dark, ignorance/truth, dirt/purity theme you had potential for from the first stanza – see rearrangement I did of it – than this altogether predictable ‘you are a fool therefore you do crazy things, live vicariously and ultimately die, just like everyone else’ theme that any ten-year old who’s been to a circus is well aware of.

But you will argue that ‘surely even the blatantly obvious must have some value!’ And I would reply that it only has value if you support it with something, some hidden insight, mysterious and maddeningly enchanting detail that other cannot see, that it takes a poet to discern. Anyone can put words on paper about things in a logical fashion. It’s the intricacies of life in a poem that touch us, more than anything so obvious that it’s a cliché.

Only you don't.

This is one of those ‘BOO!’ or ‘SURPRISE’ or madman-jumping-out-from-behind-a-rubbish-bin (as the above stanzas are) lines. You’re essentially saying ‘I LIED!’ at the reader, destroying any hope at credibility at all. You talk of the fool tumbling through life down a mountainslide and then say he doesn’t. So what? Why not? Is this fool immortal? Does he not face the same fall into old age, sadness, death as the rest of us? And you qualify it with this –

And the avalanche becomes yet another tale, another
patch you add to your ragged cloak.

That the fool takes each of life’s hardships and adds them to their cloak. But a fall down a mountainslide is hardly a ‘hardship’ or a cyclical fall into misfortune/sadness etc – a fall of the kind you have described is death in the most literal sense. That, essentially, is why this statement above does not work, despite the altogether obviousness of the metaphor in the first place.

And this poem depresses me, not nearly as much with the content itself as with the execution of it. I have read poems about hardship and downfall and fools and madmen that described the bleakest situation possible, but did so interestingly enough to hold my attention throughout the piece. Their content didn’t matter, really; I was swept up by the charm of the wording, little details and insights; things I could easily reread and pick apart and find another layer to each time.

Here, there’s nothing. Metaphors in every stanza, disconnected with each other, disconnected with the reader emotionally as well as intellectually by the very fact that they are so naked. Yeah. This poem is the emperor with no clothes – pompous, obvious, ugly.

At least Lear stood in the rain and knew he was naked. The Emperor is too dull to know that.


I want to see elegance from you.



Navita

Crit ticket (since I never got to your last one)

Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter
fool and a sweet fool?

Spoiler

Intended or not, Shakespeare will be mentioned. But first the little things;

Kyllorac wrote:The Fool
Motley describes your very mien, This is a strong opening line.
your ragtag cloak a lesson
in history, a library of
your wanderings through
the world
and its secrets. Is this line necessary? Does it add anything? No and no.

You roam freely, without care, blithe and Economy of language.
gregarious in your way, naive in others'. And you
tumble through life like a stone down a mountainside,
a boulder pulled down to the
foothills to break. The double use of "to" is odd. Consider changing the first "to" into "upon".

Only you don't. This doesn't work, for reasons explained below.

And the avalanche becomes yet another tale, another
patch you add to your ragged cloak. Underwhelming ending, although I think that it might be the set-up and not the actual ending lines.

A lot of this ground has been covered by Navita, but I'm not sure you even intended to make this poem about Lear's fool. Perhaps he was an inspiration, or perhaps the subject, or perhaps neither. There isn't enough of a hint here to make me suspect either of these options.

And that's a bad thing, because even if you weren't referring to Lear, there's not much that's concrete here. This is a poem that does most of its work through telling, and it comes out unfulfilled as a result. Poems need to begin proportional to their subjects; if you're going to write about the Trojan War, you're going to write an Epic. Now as we both know, the magic of poetry comes in condensing great ideas into small packages, but I don't get the sense of that process here. There's no evident background, subtext, or allusion present, and so in the end we're given a very poor image of this character. I think that's where Navita and I inserted The Fool from Lear into it, because without any kind of contrary description, we grabbed the most available character available to us.

Your choice of wording and structure did little to prop up the poverty of your theme. the poem begins strong—I looked up "mein" in the dictionary to make sure I had the correct definition of it—but it loses steam from there. The eloquence of the initial line is completely absent in the remainder. And while the mundane character of the words bears the weight for at least the first stanza, it breaks down in the second. I don't mean you need to break out a thesaurus on the reader, but that where simple language excels is in the service of eloquence in imagery. That's not present.

Finally, your metaphor, that of the rock-slide is alright, but ultimately a little baffling. This is largely thanks to the one-line stanza that essentially rejects the metaphor before, and leaves the reader wondering what stands in for what, and how we're supposed to view your fool. Is he a loose rock or not? Is he rolling or sitting still? Is he out of control, or in control? That one line (which, by the way, shoots the poem's flow in the foot) muddles the waters at a poor time, and then the poem never attempts to clear things up.

There's undoubtedly potential here, but this poem is in its infancy in terms of cohesion.

Finally have some time. I'll keep this general and opinionated, as you've had some marvelous reviews prior to this.

I found this almost like chewing on a brick that was painted a pretty colour. The only thing I say, was that the opening line is the only little stream of light this poem let out before being swallowed up.

You have good ideas Ky, I'm not saying the contrary. I think the problem is your strictness in the way you write, and the images you use. Your form, punctuation, line breaks. Everything becomes sterile.

Think of your poetry as a kind of bird, a lovely one with a lovely song. But out of habit, or some sort of tension, you clamp the beak shut and tie down the wings. I don't know what causes this, whether it be just the way you write, the way you think, etc.

You have form, a knowledge of poetry, a voice and good ideas. But somehow, you can't get the glue to hold them together right. That glue, I would say, is a sort of freedom of thought process.

It's honestly something you have to work on, because in my opinion, before anything else can happen, this has to happen.

I don't know how you would on this, maybe take your idea, and just ramble on it. Forget about grammar, format whatever. Just write what comes to mind, make things flow together. Taking out line breaks, capitals, punctuation makes sure there is no interruption in the flow. Then when you have that down, then you can start to consider the rest.

But as I said, this is a very opinionated review. Best of luck

Kamas