One Must Scream

under construction

The greatest irony, I was about to say you were getting boring and should post something.

I'll give you my opinion in good time.

Did you happen to watch the Egypt Sunday specials on Green Planet this weekend?

I'm going to start by mentioning what I believe to be your strongest aspect in this poem, (and many other of your poems, for that matter) and that is rhythm. The whole piece has perfect cadence, rhyme, and rhythm.

I have a few nitpicks, things I fear are typos or mistakes:

and... begun.

Here, it sounds to the reader as if you are using "crescent" as a verb. The problem is crescent is not a verb. Now, if you ARE in fact using it as an adjective, then it reads far too run-on, and it becomes "the strung-bow-crescent, the sun..." So this can be fixed simply I think, but it stood out to me.

of ...holding

"with auspicious of the" This is incorrect usage, and really awkward to read. With no added effect I might add. Perhaps reword to: "with the auspicious pick of..." but I know it's more complicated than that and you'll have to work on it.

My only other criticism is the use of brackets in the second stanza. I want to think that it represents lost segments of the scroll, or worn out sections. But that would be making too much of an assumption, since it isn't implied in the slightest before or after. Someone else might say you used them to connect Ramses II and the speaker in the scroll. That also doesn't seem the case to me. So I'm left reading it as a weird gimmick to highlight the repetition of "I" and found it not effective at doing anything, and instead more distracting.

I would like to stress that the above criticisms are all very minor things in comparison to how breathtaking your poem is. Truly. (I know you know I'm a huge fan of yours ) But really, this poem was practically a historical-fiction short story, but poetic from beginning to end. You also managed to effortlessly incorporate a death motif throughout. Your descriptions are terrific and one of the things that made me want to read your poem multiple times, and share it with friends. You really ought to publish yourself. Or at least submit your work to magazines like The New Yorker. You're one of the few people on this site that I honestly think have a good chance of getting in to something like that.

Hey Gal,

I'll keep it short because my arms hurts and you know exactly what you're doing. Thanks for finishing this c:
Took some time to read up on Ramesses II before I got to this just so I wouldn't be completely dumb. I'm always rather struck by the amount you know on mythology and ancient history, but that's for another time.

What this piece suffers from is that it peaks at the third stanza, before falling into well constructed rambling, that despite being well constructed just isn't effective enough to pack a punch on such a long poem. You rely on motifs and gimmicks and references to historical events to serve as the bones for the poem, which works but that I feel personally leaves the poem with a very faint heart beat because it's so solidly detached from anything. There are parts where I get that connection but it's abruptly cut off shortly after.

Little-known... design

Here I really get into what's being said because really you're into it, it's got movement, feeling and reactions which is rather powerful, but that proceeds to indulge in imagery that isn't grounded enough in the connection you've made and you begin to lose your reader. It's overwhelming, an onslaught of ideas and images and words and history that's difficult for any reader to digest at once. Your images make me think of the desert, sun, it works yes. But at the same time in one stanza I'm overwhelmed with the picture of mud and beer and sand and water and veins and shadows and the Nile and Pharaoh's and their riches and wood and I won't go on. All those textures and images in themselves, you've allowed us to picture it but giving us oh so much to swallow isn't going to make it anymore powerful. You have this macro approach to poetry, where every detail is rather insignificant in the construction of something bigger but at the same time, you have to be selective. Stacking everything in a particular manner in a particular pattern will serve you much better then giving us this 360 degree view and barking into our ears what everything is made of and how.

The best,

Kamas

Galeeerius!

You ask for my divine poetry expertise, and so I give it. With all the me-ness of it.

Of course, I must start off by saying how I like this piece! And I really did like it. I'm pleased to see that you stuck with the whole Egyptian mythology thing and didn't go wandering into anything unrelated. Kept the poem in the same metaphor. Yay! There were, however, some odd grammar parts. The most pickiest that you may not find worth considering is this:

for ... proud

You don't have "gods" capitalized anywhere else, so I'm not sure why it is here.

Anyway, they're simple mistakes that can be caught when reading through this again (or maybe I just missed the point of having them), so keep an eye out for those grammar oddities!

I also particularly liked how you had shorter, more legible sentences in the beginning, and the end is more of a run-on with no full stop 'til the end. That worked out very well for me.

All the little Egyptian bits were very cool, and I honestly liked this poem. My only question is what the scroll in the beginning has to do with the rest of the piece. It's as if the speaker started telling the story but never referred to the scroll again. Not even a reference to the laurel leaves or Ramses. Perhaps consider that? (Or maybe I missed a glaring part. Happens!)

That's really the only question I have. When it comes to poem structure, I think it reads well. Then again, I thoroughly loved it and was probably too distracted to notice. The second/third time I read through it though, it read very easily to me and the details didn't distract me all that much. It was the first time through that I took in every single word, careful not to miss anything.

Keep writing!

Jabber, the One and Only!

I have recently been listening to a composer who utilizes silence in his minimalist approach to music, creating an altogether haunting atmosphere surrounding the notes and each separate, individual voice of the composition; minimalism is scoffed at by the majority of the high, cultured musical world, and yet it continues to become more and more popular, just as the modernist composers fought such ignorance for decades. It continues to this day, this struggle of the direction of classical music, but I can't help but feel it's ridiculous; a once voracious think tank in the form of gods themselves can hardly communicate with most of the available audience today, despite the fact that it holds a certain intrinsic splendor if one stops long enough, slows down, and listens.

So how would you approach resurrecting a titan? Shall we go a la Hellenistic means and chain them deep away in forgotten corridors of Hades or hide them under Yggdrasil until the fated horn blowing? We can follow the Native Americans and believe all is bound to the Eternal Return, a series of worlds appearing and reappearing, everything destroyed in succession of the next age, the next ruling period; a finite practice however, when finally the forces of creation meet one another in an immoveable object and unstoppable force exchange.

Good and Evil have no say; they only exist to oppose one another, because they need the other. There is bliss and elegance in Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, and more truth than we two could hope to show in either of our writing so far. The victor writes history and the greatest lies are recorded in history books; imagine the spoils of war, are they from war or what comes after? But still, the events to make war necessary, the drama and fury; here is one composition.

For you, Galerius, there is no review. We know exactly what has been said, and I'm not a patient person, so to get on with it.

.

Hope this helps.

-MMM