Young Writers Society

haha, thanks Hannah. Did you like it at all? And Clo, I'll get around to it. I promise.

--

april 6

your iron hymn

“your house sang softly of balance,
of the rightness of placed things.”
– Derek Walcott, Chapter 2

you press the fabric through the old Singer sewing machine,
peddling with your foot, the stitch humping through the blue
cloth, like a serpentine seabeast, inseaming the coming summer into
these tablecloths, your eyes pinched, back bent and the yaw
and clatter of the old foot-peddled machine clobbering long into the night,
overruling the crickets.

maman, you spread your sewing patterns, and tell us about the past
and what you know, and all of what you know is fact, and the peonies
on the windowsill are the only pretentious things you keep, loose, lacy
things, like a whore's laughter. it is sunday, and the baby cries, the light is
thin through the curtained windows as bible pages turned, the heat
flypapering the town, and an abacus of soapbubbles wax and wane,
mneumonic, delicate as words learned in a new language.

you are flat-fingered, as all women your age are, your thimbles lined
up on your dresser-drawers, iron-hymned iron maidens. we decide to walk
to church instead of ride the bus. the trees crinolined in blossoms, the poppies
clotted, shivering in the heat, feeling for fever, like red cross nurses, the old
men watching us from the porches, starchy music coming from their open screendoors,
as the turntable spins its heartland records and the sparrows row into the oncoming
dusk, argonauts nightward, the rickshawed bees blot toward the under-eaved
hives. we pass the sandwhich counters marked whites
only and see colored men sitting there, sitting as if they'd always been
there, and as if they'd be there forever more, hunched forward, rubbing their eyes.

maman, your church smells of aunties, and dresses pressed and rearranged,
the baby cries, and the preacher speaks louder in his southern drawl,
like taffy pulled apart on a hot summer day, his underlip thrust forward,
arms heavenward, his hosannas passed from person to person and kept like
some recessive gene. the hymn book is battered, the spine flapped,
the pages written in and the quarter notes pressing on in their workhouses,
black as flowers depetaled for the sake of he-loves-me-not.

the evening clouds are babies hushed as we leave the church, the full moon
yellowish, like a locketed photograph. the radium of appearing fireflies, carcinoma
of light and dust, you bring us home and tuck us in and sew into the night,
genome of stitches, looping and sighing, and counting out your unattained
dreams like loose change at the end of the day.

So, I have avoided this a little, I'll admit - reading your poetry is daunting, you know, in fact reading anything of yours is daunting and you know why? Because you don't know the meaning of light. It escapes you. Even your poetry is long and dense haha, which isn't to say its a bad thing - in fact, I prefer your poetry to your stories, I think their great but I can't help but think (more than likely because I am used to reading your fiction) that they are in a lot of ways, distilled versions of the stories you wrote to begin with.

I can has light poetry? Not inconsequential or meaningless but something a little less, to make your storytelling a touch more ephemeral. I'm not going to say do something different, I'm not sure you can or even if you should anymore, this time, these characters, and the setting are obviously the main source of your inspiration so full steam ahead there.

I don't know much about this poetry critiquing business for NaPo to be honest, I thought the point was more to collate some poetry and reach the deadline, like NaNo but that doesn't seem to be the way people are operating right now...anyway, thats my two pennies worth, such as it is. Good stuff as always, buddy.

Cheers

So, as my writing computer just died, I've been relocated to a brave new laptop for the remainder of NaPoWriMo. I'm quirky in that it's hard for me to write well on any other computer than the one I'm used to, so I'm not sure how the rest of NaPo will go, now that one of my secret weapons is gone. I tried to make this poem shorter, and maybe a tad lighter.

--

april 7

a letter from gettysburg

the out-of-season sunflowers crane their heads and shake
their gullied faces like obeah-men, tall and black in their priestly
vestments of sun-tongued petals and their gourded rattling scepter of legend
and seeds. the day is hot and the ladies at tea seem to swell, their
wrists pushing at the lace of their sleeves, delicate and glyphed
as they rise, rise as sweating, pale bread-dough on a hot afternoon.
sipping tea, gossiping and talking about the promenade
this weekend, the bees humming their
precise syntax, and the sound of the gardeners along the front
of the plantation, their shears snipping like sarcasm, a dull, concubinage
of beheaded roses, their skirts lifted, revealing their quiet, chloroplastic
and fusty organs.

she reads the letter on the front porch, where she can see everything –
the cotton fields, their boles flagged and tufted, like the ears of elderly men,
the sickle-backed slaves, their papery negro spirituals caught in the wind, dangling their
participles, sub-dialects of nasal consonants and a lack of yod-dropping, the sistine
sunset painted on the chapel of the oncoming night, the light feeling, reaching
like god's finger to adam's and she reads the letter for the fifth time, counting
the words this time and trying not to cry. the poppies loom beside her, many-faced,
like multiple personalities.

down by the bayou that night, she moves among the knot-kneed trees, in their
widowy shawls of moss, as the stars pierce the cushioned night like sewwing
needles at rest, hearing the breasting bullfrogs, she drops his promise ring
into the deep and listens as the houseboats move snailward on still waters.

Kylan, I did like the oregon trail one! ^_^

Now, there were a few phrases that seemed really off in 'your iron hymn'.

like a whore's laughter.

iron-hymned iron maidens

And I hope that this is meant as a metaphor for a feeling rather than the actual scene:

we pass the sandwhich counters marked whites
only and see colored men sitting there, sitting as if they'd always been
there, and as if they'd be there forever more, hunched forward, rubbing their eyes.

Because otherwise it reaches out to a specific point in history too obviously to fit in comfortably with the rest of the poem.

To be honest, I couldn't really read most of the 'letter from gettysburg', but I did get to the last stanza and that almost was all I needed. You don't need the rest. Maybe make the line breaks shorter and just have the last stanza, and if you wanted, add a little more imagery, but it's so much more powerful without the rest.

-Hannah-

april 8

judas stars

from the equator of your belly, i trace the cancers and meridians of your skin,
all the way up to your sternum, pushing through the arctic of your
ribs like an icebreaker. you lie here, smiling as if i have come across you
completely by surprise, pushing your toes into the cool sublayer of
sand, the sun purpling in the fleshed coastal evening, like a depitted
peach, my whispers spelunking down the nautilus of your ear canal,
our shirts starched stiff from swimming in the sea this afternoon
and looking for conchs, spit-valved, crooning the ocean's psaltery into our ears,
and sand-dollars the broken pottery of some indigenous cliffside settlement.

seagulls creaking like rusted hinges, the broken shambled skeletons of
washed up creatures ragpicked, their bones utensils, their vertebrae a punctuated
morse, spelling out final thoughts and mammal instincts. the teatime
sea blossoms growing where the sand meets the soil are frail and squatting
like a colony of lepers. i press your hand, and your sunburned skin
is overexposed for a moment. we walk up and down the beach, and the night
begins to plush, like developing honeybees, and if you were anymore slight,
the wind would pick you up and fling you to the sea, and all that i would
have to string you down would be these thoughts we share in silence,
these thoughts that wind around our brainstems like climbing summer peas
around a garden lattice.

icarus light, falling featherless, the waxless winged sea birds winding down.
you say to me that it is at night when the beach is most spectacular. we come across
a beached jellyfish, in a leukemia of membranous skirts, sea-duchess, bunched
like lacy underclothes around your ankles.

i can barely see your face now, the moon shows its craters and pockmarks
like a lover revealing a hidden birthmark, and the clouds are dark ferries
across the sky, empty and mum as a saint's vault. it is here that I first see
the milky way, galactic lactation, trailing bridal train – i hold my breath
and pull you closer, as we read the night writing of the judas stars,
like decipherers of some sacred text.

i smell your hair, and i can feel the pulse in your neck, against
my chest, each bloodbeat same-sounding
but different, pronounced by your arteries and coronary tubes
like homonyms --

i repeat them under my breath, and i like the taste.

I love seven and eight. So beautiful.

I'll try to be a bit more active here...

I'm tired. I hope what I write makes sense.

I admire the fact that you have the time to write such large poems each day. I try to make my poems longer, but I dwell on each line forever, and they're not even as long as yours -- and then before I know, it's midnight. How do you do it! You must have some sort of time machine, or some really boring periods at school.

from the equator of your belly, i trace the cancers and meridians of your skin,
all the way up to your sternum, pushing through the arctic of your
ribs like an icebreaker.

I am huge fan of the intimate and sexual imagery here. And the language is painting a landscape image -- equator, meridians, arctic -- and then sternum? Sternum sticks out like a sore spot to me here, haha.

you lie here, smiling as if i have come across you
completely by surprise, pushing your toes into the cool sublayer of
sand, the sun purpling in the fleshed coastal evening, like a depitted
peach, my whispers spelunking down the nautilus of your ear canal,
our shirts starched stiff from swimming in the sea this afternoon
and looking for conchs, spit-valved, crooning the ocean's psaltery into our ears,
and sand-dollars the broken pottery of some indigenous cliffside settlement.

Again, I continue to adore the topic of this poem. This part needs to be weeded a bit though... "the sun purpling in the flesh coastal evening" seems too wordy an image considering it's not adding to the image of the exploration, just making a setting -- I feel it should be more brief. And you see I have striked out canal, because I am that vicious and merciless and the "s" button was just sitting up there. The word is a hard sounding one, and too diagram-anatomical for the images I think you're trying to accomplish with the poem. And I enjoy the rest of this stanza -- maybe you could have moved that setting line to the later part of this stanza, seeing as how it seems to fit more here, and the setting description feels more appropriate?

The second stanza seems appropriate all around. Maybe some words can be picked out, but the imagery phenomenal, and I'm especially excited by everything after "if you were anymore slight". It's romantic, in a complex and interesting way, because the consideration of her form (or his, I guess) is so simple and yet such an interesting worry and thought to have about a partner in a setting such as this.

icarus light, falling featherless, the waxless winged sea birds winding down.
you say to me that it is at night when the beach is most spectacular. we come across
a beached jellyfish, in a leukemia of membranous skirts, sea-duchess, bunched
like lacy underclothes around your ankles.

I'm not sure how the icarus image fits with the poem -- is she icarus? how?

i can barely see your face now, the moon shows its craters and pockmarks
like a lover revealing a hidden birthmark, and the clouds are dark ferries
across the sky, empty and mum as a saint's vault. it is here that I first see
the milky way, galactic lactation, trailing bridal train – i hold my breath
and pull you closer, as we read the night writing of the judas stars,
like decipherers of some sacred text.

Nearing a close, I can feel it. This imagery is all too bulky though, and words can be snipped out -- using "galactic lactation" AND "a trailing bridal train" just weighs down the line there until its sunk too far for the reader to consider much. Let ONE image sizzle for a while before moving on to another new metaphor.

arteries and coronary tubes

Good ending as well. I only question these words. I find it strange, the landscape/body imagery you use so well, then peppered with anatomical terms that are strung out throughout -- maybe I can accept them, haha.

I really loved this poem, Kylan. You are a master of imagery, and quick storytelling.

<3 Clo

You write some of the most amazing imagery and with one of the largest vocabularies in a single poem I have ever seen.

I have reread all of your poems in one go. I am carried on a wave of words and sounds, the pictures your deft hand has painted in my mind. I am always curious to know just how far your imagination stretches, and, I have to admit, it is limitless. You can describe the same thing in so many different ways. Had you another life, I would think it that of a painter - or a magician - for your words are stunning placed together, in a plethora of different combinations, to conjure up the most fantastical scenes. Imagery, I believe, is your strongest point.

I get a very snapshot-feeling when I read your poems (aside from jaw-dropping wonder at how you can so seemlessly melt so many different words together). By this, I mean that I feel like I have been given the chance to peek into the lives of others, from whatever age they may be. I almost think I am chanting 'thank you' the whole time I am reading - both wonder at letting us in on your ability and gratitude for transporting us to such a marvellous place. When I want to drown in words, this is what I want to read. When I want to escape everything, every little mundane scrap of reality, this is what I will read. That is what your poetry is: escapist. Far, far away and long, long ago.

But, we don't always read poetry to escape. We also read poetry to find our place more firmly in the world, I think. We love the beauty of words and imagination, but to make poetry accessible for ALL audiences, it has to intellectually-moving as well as emotionally. We have to feel something and learn something for the poem to be...complete in every way. Currently, your poem focusses on IMAGERY, which is a tool for conveying a sense of meaning, purpose, theme and feeling to us. It is not the be-all and end-all of writing. A three-dimensional poem sits out in front of us, telling a story, painting a picture, while also wrenching our hearts and minds.

I cannot say which of your poems I loved the best. This is because I get the same feeling from having read them each time - fantastical, imaginative, wow, and any other commonly-associated feeling about whatever you are writing about. You need to experiment with different forms of audience-manipulation. Make me feel something different each time. That way each poem will stand out and make a unique, rather than a collective mark on me.

In addition, I cannot hear YOUR voice. I do not know what you are really thinking when you have written these. I do not know what I have learnt after reading a poem - only that I have been transported, been shown something shiny and indescribably magical. I want a message, something intellectual you may leave us with, long after we have read your poem. Not just the feeling of your magical words, not just any other feeling you may incorporate into it, but something tangible, something my mind can hold on to and say: this is why I read it, really; this is what I understood.

I used to write like this. Until I realised that it was head + heart (intellect and emotion) that were the guts of the poem, and the imagery was the TOOL. It is still possible, I believe, to carry on writing this wildly but still have a purpose in mind, an exact feeling you want to convey. You said that you were pleased my 'voice did not overpower the imagery.' I beg to differ: voice is just as important as the imagery. It is the voice we will remember, not the images, since they are so out-there, so different, so densely packed together. Sometimes, I almost think every poem of yours is the same: told in the same tone, the same style, the same beautiful-fluid-imaginative-imagery-that's-always-different-to-what-I-expect. Being consistently different means every poem actually reads like every other. Be differently different instead.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: I love your poetry, and it is a huge challenge for me to read as well. Once I start, I cannot stop - but STARTING is the problem. The first way we judge a poem, is by the way the writer has splattered it over the page. And, by golly, have you done a good job of splattering - or rather, the fact that it is so huge, so dense, is rather overwhelming. I have to think twice before I start. I have to hold my breath and plunge in and I know, somehow, that I will get swallowed up in the depth of your scene. I need to resurface as well, to take a quick peek back at reality and the simple things in life, but the words just do not let me do that. They pull me further and further, and I drown in the escape I planned for myself. Think about structure, as opposed to writing in one great big chunk. Make it easy on the eyes. Plan it. Let me resurface, once in a while.

So...here is the second major thing (the first one was imagery + head + heart = poem): reality and imagination dance hand in hand. What you say imaginatively is made all the more powerful by what you say literally and vice versa. A poem that is pure imagination will float above the sky, will be intagible, unattainable, less memorable, and, similarly, a poem that is glued to the ground is too-literal, too-in-your-face, too-direct, too-bland, tasteless. The trick is to find a balance. Somewhere, where the poem hangs out in front of us, at times a little too high out of reach, and at times cradled in our hands, below us. Make it flicker between the two. Say enough imaginatively, enough literally, but also learn the art of silence. The silences in a poem speak more than words, and, using this analogy, your poems are chanting, forever chanting, tossing me about in words and waves of pictures.

We KNOW you're amazing at making the poems paint pictures, speak to us of foreign lands, of love, and sunsets, and flowers and all the rest of it. You do not need to shout that aloud. Simplicity mixed in with imagery/imagination, each figure of speech carefully chosen, will make each image stand out all the more. Put a cap on your imagination, so to speak. Let it run wild, but show us your ultimate skill in restraining it so the main idea behind it can be heard. It's called CONTROL - and the better sense of control you have over the poem, the more it will tend to perfection. Clean, carefully-balanced, well-pitched contol will leave us gobsmacked, but still thirsty for more , instead of reading one and thinking that's enough, that's more than enough.

I hope that has helped. I look forward to the rest.


(P.S. I have realised two things from this: (1.) that my reviews are longer than your poems and(2.) that someone REALLY needs to teach me a sense of control when I write these reviews. Admittedly, I tend to write longer ones for poems that I truly enjoyed, but that I think are this far off perfection (***holds up forefinger and thumb close together***)).

Navita >> You should never tone down your critiques, Navita -- they're perfect. I am left feeling flattered, yet chastened, and above all, I want to go out and write better poetry. So thank you.

Honestly, you hit the nail right on the head. My problem is that I don't have any real meaning behind my poetry. It's all scraps of stories, images, recycled impressions. For the longest time, I have been conscious of this, but ignoring it. I've wanted to incorporate deeper meaning (or "head", as you called it), but I just can't seem to find new ideas to communicate in the imagery-oriented way that I'd like to. Of course, you'd counter that a departure from imagery might be warranted. I'd respond that my favorite part of writing is the image, and it would take a lot of the joy that I glean from writing out of the equation. Now, I know that there's a way to incorporate intellectual nuggets and imagery, I just need to find the way. Any tips?

You mentioned that all my poetry takes you far, far away and to a place a long, long time ago. Alright. I can see that, especially in these eight poems -- but you should know that for the longest time, I've been writing poetry about my childhood experiences. As usual, though, they were snapshots, which is how I've described my writing as before. I'd like to change that. You talked about blending fantasy and realism...This part confused me a little bit, as I don't see these poems in any way as fantastic poetry. To me, they're based very much in reality. Or do you mean that there should be more exposition, and less tangential imagery? In that case, I grasp your point.

And voice. Again, you hit the nail on the head. I am voiceless. I realized that today. Sure, I have a style, but my poems are fairly stagnant when it comes to voice. You articulated that perfectly. And the bit about them all being so different that they're the same? This expresses my feelings about my work recently to a T.

Now, the bit about voice being more important than the image -- I guess this is a point that we can agree to disagree on. I see this as more of a stylistic, personal choice.

Thank you for the best critique I've ever received. I'm aiming for some catharsis tonight.

Clo >> Thank you for your comments! Very helpful indeed. Just as a side note, each poem I write takes about 45 minutes. Of course, I'm thinking about them for the majority of the day, while I do other stuff, so that figures in for some time as well.

-Kylan

april 9

tb, again

her eyelids translucent as white lies, among the olfactory of summer roses
she sits in her wheelchair and the maid holds the parasol over her head, and the crows
settle to her breadcrumbs like eyelashes. strutting, the poppies roost, blood-dropped
as rooster combs, and her prized immortelles are spotted on the inseams
of their petals, like strep throats. the doctor with his black bag is sitting beside
her, his stethoscope around his neck that he had passed over her chest a few times
indoors for their routine checkup, as if he was minesweeping for heartbeats, for
some sign of improvement, for the dull diastole and systole, beats curved
and clear as belljars. he nods gravely at everything she says, his diagnoses
deadly and pleasing.

she is so concerned about dying – I hardly care about her anymore. she is
always bringing her gloved hand up to her mouth with a handkerchief and spotting
blood, blood, deciding that it is finally tuberculosis that has overtaken her.
her lips wrinkle around her words like boiled peachskins. she claims it is africa
that is killing her – this beastly, heathen place. her hands croak up and down
her throat and the tsetse flies clip like the disapproving tongue clicks of a governess
behind the mosquito net. she watches the native girls walk down the red, sunsewn
path with baskets of water on their heads, balancing them as delicately
as a tulip balances its bloom upon a stem, and coughs into her linen
handkerchief.

she has imported bees specifically for the upkeep of her garden, black, swarming
voodoo syllables in a beebox, because there are no natural pollinators for roses and
poppies and immortelles in africa. these bees muzzling among the blossoms, green
and spread with their organs easily picked out and oiled, like new whores.

the doctor fans her, the maid sweats on her upper lip,
and she bats africa away with her crumpling, bone-stricken hand
as it buzzes and ripens around her.

--

to marie, on her most special day

I opened her bible today –
on the inside cover, it is dated
march 6th, 1952 in a shaky, shy handwriting,
ribbed and cracked, like tectonic faultlines.

it says, to marie on her most special day and
I wonder what that day was. the bible smells
of old skin and attics. it smells like
it was packed away with her handmedown
wedding dress. the ink from notations
made in the margins has leaked through,
onto other pages, quiet and spreading
and feminine, like a breast cancer.

did she find god in these pages?
was she able to glimpse into the cosmos,
the galaxies stirred, rippling, as if He
had dipped His toes into the cool irrigation
water of the universe? did she find god, among these
middle eastern names and capitalized Hs
like one finds a misplaced pair of spectacles?

she must have looked up one night
after reading in proverbs and seen the phylum of stars,
outside her window, their light gentle and premarital
like chaste brushes of the lips on a cheek. she must have
wondered why her, why us, why then, why now, is
there anybody out there?

she must have placed her bible on the night dresser
and curled up in bed, like a
question mark without a sentence.

april 10

for the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me

you flour your hands daintily before kneading the dough,
the talcum grind between your palms, streaks of flour on your
underchin and in your hair, pushing and pulling at the dough
as if it were a tough decision that you had to make. you would hum
the old negro spirituals under your breath, and sometimes sing them
replacing jesus with freedom in the chorus, which I at first thought was heresy
until you explained that they were the same thing, that they were words

called synonyms, and cinnamon in your spice cupboard which was damp and
frustrated with scents, the little squat jars dusty, like unrubbed
djinni lamps, the cat curling around your shins, the cut tulips on the table
shocked, like struck matches, and grandpa in the living room
snoring with a tent of newspapers on his chest, his hands unsanded
and rough as summerwood because of long hours of work in the factory, and as a child
in the cottonfields downvalley, the boles shuttled in
hulls of crinkling crepe, like dreams untold.

it was that summer that you were arrested. you were sent singing and laughing
to the county jail, with a whole lot of other colored folk – clapping your
hands, smiling, big slugged underlips of the men warbling, and the women in their
heels and kid-gloves, singing about freedom (jesus) and mean old
george wallace. you got out a day later, because the jails were too full of niggers – you
are grinning in your mugshot, which is framed in the living room.

and on sunday afternoons we would go pick peaches by the river, big
and bruised, like egos, kids skinny-dipping in a swimming-hole approved
for negroes, the flowers nubile and arpeggioed. we'd walk home with the fruit
bunched up in our shirts, the clouds rumbling by like paddywagons. on these walks,
you would teach us the words to 'this little light of mine' – they were not hard,
they were words that rose out of my soul and into my throat, like earthworms
rising through the earth during the rainstorm. you tell me that these songs
are heirlooms of africa, that my ancestors had not been able to carry things
like handmirrors or rocking chairs to the americas, that all they had been
able to hold in their pockets and hands were notes and rests,
which were matched to songs of abraham
and jesus (freedom) once they reached the New World.

you would take us to church, where we would listen to the blue-suited reverends
talk, brass-voiced and beaten looking, like pawned instruments. you have me give
a violet to one visiting preacher, which he perched on his finger like a songless
songbird and smiled and said, god bless you
child.

our walls are paper-thin, and at night I can hear you singing in the kitchen
'we shall overcome', the grass outside moonlit and bent by the wind into italics
and the bullfrogs hold back their hiccups and the reeds wind down like
tired hand-pumped church organs, accompanying your voice:
“we shall overcome, we shall overcome
we shall overcome someday;
oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
we shall overcome
someday.”

Kylan, that shorter poem from April the ninth...I was crying as I read it.

You've done it. You know what you're doing. You can write beautiful imagery, and make it matter to us. You know what I'm talking about. Such a powerful question held within that poem - not necessarily a new one - but the way you phrased it made all the difference. As it always does, in poetry.

I'm not going to say it is perfect, but I'll say it's nearly there. A very fine balance you have achieved of imagery and reality, normal-sounding phrases made all the more heartbreaking with the few images, carefully chosen and carefully placed. No overwriting to throw us too deep into the image and lose the meaning of the poem.

I opened her bible today –
on the inside cover, it is dated
march 6th, 1952 in a shaky, shy handwriting,
ribbed and cracked, like tectonic faultlines

Nice beginning - it hooks us, without being flamboyant - there is a quiet sense of purpose, and the date makes it all the more real. 'Shaky shy handwriting' stands out to us, as does 'ribbed and cracked' and so makes that image more vivid, rather than clouding it with other images. 'Tectonic faultlines' does not work too well - it is scientific, where the poem is emotional - but it is a small thing to change

it says, to marie on her most special day and
I wonder what that day was. the bible smells
of old skin and attics. it smells like
it was packed away with her handmedown
wedding dress. the ink from notations
made in the margins has leaked through,
onto other pages, quiet and spreading
and feminine, like a breast cancer

This is oh-so-sweet and simple - esp the first two lines, moving into some subtle imagery that we can close our eyes to, and really, truly imagine the smell, and you develop the image with a deft hand. The last line, again, I do not care for - 'breast cancer' being scientific in a poem where it does not belong; it stands out unnecessarily, detracting from your key question of religion. If your intention was to fit it in, I would suggest not tacking it on the end of stanzas.

I loved the third stanza entirely - 'did she find God in those pages?' - a simple, an innocent, almost a child-like question, yet we can just as easily imagine an adult asking it. Just the 'misplaced pair of spectacles' bothered me - but not extravagantly - it kind of belittles your big questions from before.

The ending is an interesting one - I don't think the 'without a sentence' is needed, really - 'like a question mark....' definitely needs something after it - have a play.

I liked the tone, the emotion you evoked here. So different from all the rest! And that's what made it unique. Just a little question gnawing at your mind, and you have phrased it nice and succinctly. Well done

Kylan, you're name -- it's now like mine. But you know what's more important? YOUR POEMS.

---

to marie, on her most special day:

I've been attracted to these shorter lines, not because they are short but because I like to see what punches can be pulled in these sort of shorter stanzas. Right at the very beginning you start us off with strong imagery, and I find it delightfully succinct. Forcing us to pause and move on at "tectonic faultlines" -- I think it just strengthens the lines and imagery within the stanza.

I don't know why, but I also really like "feminine, like a breast cancer". I think the line is normal enough, but also startling in its imagery to give an eerie and disturbing feel to the approach of the diary without making it too out of place. In the lines "dipped His toes into the cool irrigation/water of the universe? did she find god, among these", I kind of want to snip out "water" because I feel it disrupts the flow (that is horrible accidental pun right there, ew) of the lines moving from one to the other, and irrigation alone creates the same image.

The question of "why is there anybody out there" is an interesting one too. There are so many "why" questions, but this one is more typically phrased as "Why do we exist?" and yet you sort of turned it on its head and come at differently by phrasing it differently.

I really, really like this poem. It's filled of strong images and metaphors, but it's so much tighter than the other poems, almost like a quick swing at the reader, haha, giving one better options in a neater row. Though I think the romantic nature of "Judas Stars" still had me won over.


for the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me:

you flour your hands daintily before kneading the dough,
the talcum grind between your palms, streaks of flour on your
underchin and in your hair, pushing and pulling at the dough
as if it were a tough decision that you had to make. you would hum
the old negro spirituals under your breath, and sometimes sing them
replacing jesus with freedom in the chorus, which I at first thought was heresy
until you explained that they were the same thing, that they were words

I liked how you ended the lines here. The repetition used worked, and the sounds all went together: "flour on your", "hum" and "them" -- it kept the lines musical, and the story is just so charming at the beginning here.

called synonyms, and cinnamon in your spice cupboard which was damp and
frustrated with scents, the little squat jars dusty, like unrubbed
djinni lamps, the cat curling around your shins, the cut tulips on the table

I love "frustrated with scents". The image is here is almost too literal here, with the damp part. I think frustrated with scents would be fine on its own to set up the sight, without the particular description of the dampness of the cupboard. It's thrown in there between two images and I find it more jarring to the flow than anything.

george wallace. you got out a day later, because the jails were too full of niggers – you
are grinning in your mugshot, which is framed in the living room.

Hmmm... I'm conflicted. That word strikes out -- almost too much -- for the poem. I might be biased though, since I'm a strong advocate against non-historical use of any word like that. I guess this has the historical context -- you're assuming a character, clearly, but boy, does that word strike out. It's certainly a hot potato, and you might want to be more careful with it. But then again, I would ask someone else for another opinion: I feel uptight, haha.

You love this vein of storyline don't you? I think of Holy Rolling, and a few other things by you, though obviously to a lesser extreme. I questioned the lyrics at the end for a moment, but then I found it fitting for what you were talking about -- throughout the entire poem -- so then I think it is an appropriate ending.

You're a very bold poet, Kylan -- you take leaps and bounds with your imagery and stretch your imagination to very far places.

<3 Clo

Believe it or not, this poem has a deeper meaning. Also, it used to written in third person, until I decided to make the deeper meaning slightly more obvious.

Also, this was a bit of self-gratification

april 11

the botanist, or, depetaling a metaphor

where the land-lilies stand as supplicating handmaids,
togaed in their scrubbed petals, cupped in the sunlight
like a face held in both hands for a kiss – in solemn procession
they populate my growbox, their every want
seen to in my obsession

with flowers – flowers sewn shut by night, like shoes buttonhooked,
flowers with stamen and pistallate flushing the air, swabs, flowers to whom bees
perfunctory and solid as pronouns attend. my thoughts are green as thumbs with
chloroplast and angiosperm.

i trim the dizzyspells of poppies in the garden, alone,
their inner throats leopard-spotted and hidden like fettishes.
my daydreams milking and twining roots, my nightdreams
purple and out-of-focus, smelling of lilac the same way a mother
smells of milk and warmth. i oils my shears, suck at the dirt
under my fingernails

and play violin to the upcoming flowers, to my carnations
in their rows, red and narrow as bottlerockets, the light compressed
through the hothouse windows, the talltale sunflowers outside
in their stiff, lordly collars

pollen caught in my eyebrows, my boots constantly muddied, I watch the
sunset from my veranda, where hanging flowers drop like an
escape route of knotted bedsheets out a window.

all the flowers doze, not even bothering to step out
of their party-dress. i am careful not to touch their petals too much,
for fear that they might brown and wilt. night settles –
the flowers close like childish minds.

i wait for them to reawaken.

Hi, Kylan.

judas stars

I liked them, they were good and entrancing, but after pulling myself out of the poem, I think you could completely do away with the second and the third stanza. From the ending, I find an intense connection between the two subjects of the poem, and those stanzas have almost nothing to do with them. I understand the moment about thoughts, believe me, I do. Those thoughts are the most beautiful things in the poem, giving me imagery far beyond that of seagulls or sand-dollars, but for now they have no place in those stanzas. I want you to keep part of the first stanza, because the part about whispering implies those shared thoughts. Perhaps if you mentioned whispers in return it would be even more obvious. I don't like the word spelunking (in this context -- it's such a fun word though), and I think you might consider reworking the description of the sand dollar to be more personal or take it out.

My reasoning is thus: You have touched on something powerful. In the moment in your poem, the two bodies are the only things that exist in the world. Sure, they are decorated by the sea and sand, but there is no reason for us to branch out and think of indigenous settlements. What do we care for the past? We want the heat of the beach! Underclothes was a word that would work well with the theme, but it's not used effectively, and the image of a sunburn is one that would also work well with the heat, but you'd have to work it in in another way. This is, of course, my own reading of the poem, and if that focus is not the one you wanted, then by all means ignore this.

I do agree with Clo about slimming down some of the descriptions, too.

tb, again

The title here, is effective, as is the beginning of the second stanza. The lines I appreciated the most were:

she bats africa away with her crumpling, bone-stricken hand
as it buzzes and ripens around her.

But I felt no interest in this poem. I don't mean to be harsh, I really don't, but perhaps I'm just in a mood! So, to make it constructive, I will try to find out why, for you. Well, I do know what I like. I like the personality that slipped in: 'I hardly care anymore'. I suppose I find the wrong focus in your poems sometimes, but I would like this to be more prominent, if even only by subtle hints. It is so though provoking and it stabs at us, but then it disappears into the jungle and I'm left discarding the rest of the poem to chase after this question. Who cares about the flowers and the bees -- why does this person not care that she is dying? If this was your intention, then well done, though it seems odd to intend to make a reader discard one's poem. Odd is interesting. But I don't think it was your intention.

No, I don't think I'm in the mood for the description of dead things anymore. Poppies are alive, yes, and bees, too, but they are not alive at the same time. This woman is alive, and why do you take the camera off of her? Why don't you chase the offending person? Why don't we know more about the doctor? The only image I can really hold on to, here, is the woman, and the rest are layered on too quickly to identify with one. Perhaps take your time with images, and let them ferment instead of shooting them at us like it's a watermelon seed-spitting contest.

to marie, on her most special day

What I wonder, with my own question mark, is what special day this was. I felt a connection to the end of this poem. I could imagine her curled up in bed, in the dark, alone with her questions, but nothing else moved me. Look at the images: how should I feel about shaky lines? how can I grasp the vague smell of 'old skin' or 'attics'?

The imagery of the universe was good, especially in the third stanza, and I wondered if she were using Clo's Bad Radio. Teehee. ^_^

for the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me

it was that summer that you were arrested. you were sent singing and laughing
to the county jail, with a whole lot of other colored folk – clapping your
hands, smiling, big slugged underlips of the men warbling, and the women in their
heels and kid-gloves, singing about freedom (jesus) and mean old
george wallace. you got out a day later, because the jails were too full of niggers – you
are grinning in your mugshot, which is framed in the living room.

This was my favorite image of the poem, and for some reason I just... I can't get connected into these poems today. This was the only image that I could see, that I could relate to. It would probably have been weaker without the singing descriptions before it, but I think that something needs to be more powerful here. The positioning of synonym and cinnamon was obvious and I didn't want it to be.

I skipped over the text at the end, and that was not a good way to end. I think this is because I knew it, however, as my teacher once said: if you write something, make sure that you write the beginning and the end and put quotes between, because you wouldn't want someone else to take care of the important parts for you. The ending is important. I've liked most of your endings the most until now. This one just left me rushing on afterward and no more poem was there.

the botanist

i oils my shears

First, I caught a place where you forgot to change the verb. ^_^

suck at the dirt
under my fingernails

This was a good image. It reached out to me, called to my humanity because humans shouldn't suck on their own fingers, especially not when they are dirty, and this dirty image reminded me of that kind of human rule and the breaking of it, the Earth and the juxtaposition of nature with society. That was a big place to go, but explaining it seems it make more complicated than it came to me. It came to me as simple as dirt.

Again, you end strong here, but I... can't connect to the rest. It seems dead. This could be my fault, as you state that there is a deeper meaning here, or it could be something you should look at, finding words to better hint what you're aiming for. I see dreams blooming now, and you wait for them to grow another day. I see they're your obsession, and of course I see 'depetaling a metaphor', but I suppose I'm just off in these reviews.

If these are horrid, I apologize and you may dismiss me, but I have a hunch there may be some kernels of truths hidden somewhere in here.

This all being said, I can still see the images I liked. I can see the couple on the beach and their heat, and I can see the people being carted off to jail with their songs. I can see a woman curled up to herself in the darkness, questions hovering above and the universe like an ocean. I can see someone sucking dirt from their fingernail, but I can't really see anything else. Make me remember it all. Make me love the whole poem, a selection of images, or make the image the whole poem.

I love your poetry, Kylan, but somehow I am not connecting to it tonight. Maybe tomorrow will be a different story. PM with questions, arguments, discussions.

-Hannah-