'Quark, quark, quark'

. -

The first one read a little bit like a machine gun. It was fast and rushed, and I felt myself tumbling through it rather than enjoying some of the more masterful imagery you have created here.

Your imagery (and I think this is the case with both poems) is beautiful, but overdone. It seems that you have grabbed on to eighty different metaphors at once, and the result is not (I don't think) a cohesive poem. I think if you slow down and find a different, perhaps slower, pace, you will be fine.

In general, I don't even know if I would say that your pacing is to blame. But for the pace you have, the poems are both very wordy. They seem like they don't go together.

But both are very interesting pieces! =)

First thought is wow; these poems just sucked me in, from the moment I read the titles and through the poems themselves. I can definitely see how they are related. There are words that stand out in each of them and they both seem to be just slightly out of touch with reality, yet in a scientific way.

I didn't much care for the lack of capitalization in the first poem, but it is at least intentional and does kind of fit with the poem. 'Unicol, Otago' is very fast paced and, combined with the lack of capitalization, it make it hard to absorb. I had no real trouble reading it, but I didn't retain a lot of it from the first read through and the lines kept jumping places. In fact, I didn't really understand that it was an actual story until I read it again. But, I loved the language within it, how otherworldly it felt. And this is a poem that would sound awesome read out loud. The words just flow from one to another and it has a definite rhythm to it.

The only thing I have to remark on is this:

you dig the earplugs in deeper but

It felt like the 'in' was missing.

I do agree that 'Quark, quark, quark' is a lighter poem and not just in terms of words. With the young couple out for a stroll and encountering all of those things. As with the other poem, I love the language. Another thing that makes this poem lighter is that this poem doesn't fling the words at us, instead they are gently worked in. I loved the start of the poem:

The way you handed me three apples and
said, look here, these are quarks, and I
laughed about proton pie

Proton pie just sounds awesome. And I don't have anything to really say against this poem, although the description of the old man always seems to make me stumble, wondering about the appendages and which one was the skinny one.

All in all, I really enjoyed these two poems.

- Tatra

I absolutely loved these poems, especially the second one. It was so light-hearted and funny. And I agree with Tatra, proton pie does sound awesome. I like the first one, but not as much because it's sort of daunting. Big words in long lines don't mix that well for my slow lil' brain. Perhaps if you were to shorten up the lines? Then it would be much easier to read, and therefore easier to appreciate.

Awesome works!
-Dreamy

Navita --

Hey! More science poems. Seems to be a glut of these on here recently, but I can't deny that not only were you the trendsetter, but you also execute said science poems with grace and skill. These were definitely entertaining reads.

With the first, "unicol, otago", I was immediately biased against it, because I was to blame for its existence. I was thinking throughout the first stanza -- surely I'm not so heavy-handed. Because I thought the first stanza was a tad overbaked in places. I thought, surely I'm not always tangenting in different directions like this, careening with run-on sentences, ect. Let's take a look at it:

chaplipped stars flag out the night; smooth-busted moons
curve from the darkness like hyacinth thorns splitting the axis of the
sky in two, and you turn the pages of lecture notes by
rodlight inside (1) , batting stray moths and the reflections of
silvermouthed dogs on your window (2). the crickets are
drowned in bass, they cower in shellshocked crevasses,
bodies crumpled like cravats (3) while outside bearbellied (4) stereos
assert themselves and bludgeon out sound, the bricked arms
of amplified longitudes sweep sideways and plunge
through the wooden walls, tightening around your eardrums.

Haha, yes, I do sometimes have the propensity to compound words to near nonsense, but for this, I am unapologetic. It's fun isn't it? You should read some Cormac McCarthy. Not only is he a genius, but he has some interesting compound words. Anyway.

1.) "Inside" throws off the tip-of-your-tongue flow you've got going. I'd cut it. Also, I've no idea what "rodlight" is.

2.) This is what I meant by careening. How do the moths and dogs have anything to do with turning lecture note pages. I am always seeking equilibrium between original image and coherency. Maybe if you spent a little time shaving this sentence down a little, things would be a little less frenetic.

3.) I don't follow with the simile. You are referring to the crickets, correct? Mentioning cravats is wonderful, but I question the image of crickets crumpling like cravats (however symphonic the alliteration may be).

4.) love it. Very strong image for me.

The following stanza I think I enjoyed more. It was tighter, smoother. Maybe because the first three or four lines aren't imagery oriented at all. it was a good choice to space things out with the stanza beginning as it does.

you wear earplugs. the string theorists are discussing quantum
gravity, a supernova erupts a billion light years away and we
catch the photons minutes apart. they unravel the ten
dimensional universe – manmade invisibility cloaks (5) now
worn, microwaves bent to a sliver of light where your
body might be (6); how here you tap out the eighth symphony
of skybugs unzipping the inkstained palms of space (7),
guilty, refusing to conform into a bundle, the grand
unified theory coalesces in shaky-spined numerals that
could taper off after the nearest astronomer’s eye pinpoints
the straitjacketed (8) slingshot that usurps the string.

5.) I think of Harry Potter . Plus the image is a little clunky. Something else, besides invisibility cloaks, please?

6.) I smell a reference to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle! Lovely.

7.) Great line.

8.) I don't care for the use of the word "straitjacketed". I'd nix it.

I noticed no problems with the rest of the poem. You picked up speed, and wrapped it up well. I would suggest shortening your lines/breaking up stanzas in the future. It's something that I'm trying to work on, for sure. I put off reading this for some time as a result.

--

I didn't care for "Quark, Quark, Quark". I'll be brief, though, as I exhausted most of my energy above. To be honest, I didn't see the resemblance to Kooser at all here. Kooser's poems are to the point, simplistic, and oriented toward a single image. This was even more helter-skelter than the last one. Mentioning apples, quarks, dining forks, confetti, and prosthetic legs. It didn't have any sort of concentration, and it was a little too fantastic for my taste -- "proton pie"?

The two images I didn't like in particular where those of the "dining forks" and "confetti". I actually despise the use of confetti as a poetic image. In this case, it reflects the colorful zaniness, and confusion of the poem itself. The mentions of subatomic particles was appreciated, but also diminished by the fact that there was nothing holding them up, nothing making them concrete to the poem.

Hope I was of some help!

-Kylan

Thanks everyone!

Shepherd - I know what you mean about pacing. Since the first is so long, one tends to glaze over the words to devour them faster, meaning they make little sense. It's taken me some time to hone my reading skills, actually, to read this style at a comfortable pace.

Tatra - yep, the second was originally called 'Proton Pie,' but I thought 'Quark, quark, quark' was more fitting due to the theme - trinity - more on this later.

Dreamy - thanks! Can you picture how long the first would be if the lines were shorter? I tried to - it's going to zoom vertically down like an elephant's trunk!

Kylan - haha, I guess this gave you an interesting perspective on your own poetry by reading it written by someone else . Yeah, crazy compound words, run-on sentences, tangential imagery (which I, as the writer, did not feel was too tangential; but of course I'd be wrong there, since I cannot read it like a first-time reader would!) -- all good fun, but utterly meaningless on my part in this case. Oh, I had to say - invisibility cloaks are theoretically possible, I think; I was reading some findings in 06 about how microwaves are bent around a person to render them invisible, just a sliver of light. But I guess no one non-physicsy is going to appreciate that one.

And the second poem - look at through the lens of 'trinities' - every description hints at that. And the final lines beg the question - at first, there's the two lovers and their shadow (three in total). When the shadow disappears, what happens to the third dimension? What is the third dimension?

Anyway, thanks once again .