I might be wrong: Kylan's NaPo

1, 2, 3, 4

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Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Fri Apr 08, 2011 5:23 am

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Kylan says...

april 7

churn(butter) noble(y)

i turn to thoughts of snow—
omen robins red as hatchet-swings
their color struggling through snow
like ford-horses, slow stemless gathered
darkened hearts i'm surprised
they haven't burst to flame yet
or melted to a slag of
spring-song napalm between
deer-rubbed yew.

chandelier of geiger counts (geigs?), morse
as a zulu tongue, tugging ahead
of us witchwaterward. i turn to thoughts
of snow for coolness and to melt
cleanly into my canteen and
to keep from thinking of the
rut streams, and the wood processing
plant and the broom handles
from kimova, glowing
like porch nights filled with jar-catchers.

none of them wear
anything pick up stones to skip
in the resevoir as carelessly
as windfall apples for a sill pie.
an eighty-year-old woman
approaches me and asks if the
milk from her cow is good to drink—
her skin let slip with age from her bones
like sunlight through corn-silk, hands
curling from the good swerve
of plow-years, in
shin-high rubber boots. i say, drink
all you want, mother.

the most terrifying
are the trees, silken with windlessness
as alien intelligence, having
kept everything else
for so long.

Last edited by Kylan on Fri Apr 08, 2011 6:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

Gender:

Points: 719
Reviews: 562

Fri Apr 08, 2011 5:41 am

Button says...

This:

omen robins red as hatchet-swings
their color struggling through snow
like ford-horses, slow stemless gathered
darkened hearts i'm surprised
they haven't burst to flame yet
or melted to a slag of
spring-song napalm between

and this:

an eighty-year-old woman
approaches me and asks if the
milk from her cow is good to drink—
her skin let slip with age from her bones
like sunlight through corn-silk, hands
curling from the good swerve
of many years of plowing, in
shin-high rubber boots. i say, drink
all you want, mother.

Excellent.

Gender:

Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Sat Apr 09, 2011 7:46 am

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Kylan says...

april 8

neruda

to be a poet is to have died
for the poor of chile on the southern
mountains hung with basal clouds,
sleuthing through dry stone like the words of god
in the ears of relic, stake-bound saints—
to have died for the red roads and
woman's foot bent like the rim
of an albatross. every revolutionary
of the ascensores a poet, the blind white
milk of youthful reverence dripping
down their chins, having drunk their
fill of our goat- song, stooped doors,
our national flowers lit and lonely
as beach fires, but proud
as the daughters of braided, patched lieutenants.

dust roads winding
like a tradition of rope, all your stone
broke open unwillingly by locusts
like a song you stay away from on purpose,
a song sung only by old men with
voices barn-rough and sweet-stiff
as saddle-blankets and only in the presence
of many young, unaligned relatives.
you keep a handful of words in your
pocket just to look crooked
when you spit them out
like sunflower seeds. your hands
are something to be proud of,
warped as sea-wood, fingers which
justify the pen from all the years
of brown, shale work.

care less about che—
care more about roses on
doorsteps, left behind
like tombless brooches, or the white
churchyard of shells in the cool of the yard,
or the coast and the dark cliffs swelling
out of the ocean like the origin
of leopard legends. i don't understand
the poetry of flags, or the
brass mason romance in a
courtyard execution by soldiers.

to be a poet
you must have climbed
from a year of burials
from the stumble of andes goats,
from the startledness
of hearing water again
through your own hands,
washing out a morning of chores.

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

Gender:

Points: 300
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Sat Apr 09, 2011 7:51 am

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Uraziel says...

Neruda is one of my favorites.

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Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Mon Apr 11, 2011 2:31 am

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Kylan says...

in partial response to Hannah's "Neighbors and Flight".

---

april 9

gomorrah

outside, the crab-apples cripple
like the sound of a scream
in a box-canyon. faucet light,
the last plains of semi-dark settling in
like a well-to-do river in its
shoulders of stone. you keep the windows
open on a hot night, chain-link
fence rattling with dog, lightbulbs
unbearable and cloying as flies drove in by the rain
and a crowbar sun hooked under each
clap of sidewalk. you roll over on your side
with your shoes still on.

your kid with pink eye,
the resonance of pewter in your hands
the croaking hair in the burlap of your groin
nappy as dishtowel terry-cloth. yes,
and the blood oozes between stands
of bones like opium sap from the
spring-welts of poppy, it is sweet.
you know that it is not the soap
that is killing you,
but the elastic.

billie holiday's voice
skinny and cleopatric on the turntable, your own
voice rolled aside like a stone at easter
and you can't sing along, fat
curling around the reed-song of your tibias
like basket cobras. you can't take
enough pills and you can't dream enough
of hatcheting it all off, hoisting
it above your head like a cavalry scalp
by the light of a cave of fire.

the bed sinks
under the heat of a night
without cars, passing. you let
your lips part on their own,
like deer-tracks through creek mud,
you feel as weak
as a mountain,
and wish for the same
bony sins.

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

Gender:

Points: 25864
Reviews: 1334

Mon Apr 11, 2011 2:51 am

Hannah says...

I could especially feel it here:

your kid with pink eye,
the resonance of pewter in your hands
the croaking hair in the burlap of your groin
nappy as dishtowel terry-cloth.

and here:

and wish for the same
bony sins.

That ending is really strong, Kylan.

you can message me with anything: questions, review requests, rants
are you a green room knight yet?
have you read this week's Squills?

Gender:

Points: 805
Reviews: 336

Mon Apr 11, 2011 2:54 am

Jas says...

the bed sinks
under the heat of a night
without cars, passing. you let
your lips part on their own,
like deer-tracks through creek mud,
you feel as weak
as a mountain,
and wish for the same
bony sins.

I liked this part the most.

Really strong stuff.

I am nothing
but a mouthful of 'sorry's, half-hearted
apologies that roll of my tongue, smoothquick, like 'r's
or maybe like pocket candy
that's just a bit too sweet.

~*~

Gender:

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Mon Apr 11, 2011 11:23 am

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Navita says...

Kylan wrote:I never said these were going to be good.

Didn't have to.

--

gomorrah

A pity I have neither seen the film and nor am particularly familiar with the story. But some place 'made wicked by its inhabitants, destroyed by God,' which I take to mean the body, in this case, destroyed by the the body itself; a kind of self-destruction in how you address us in "it is not the soap / that is killing you, / but the elastic" -- the first thematic hint. Strangely enough, here's something I've noticed in your writing, Kylan -- the places where you are most thematic also happen to be those that are emotionally most powerful, and, simultaneously, aesthetically most clear. For example, in the next stanza, it is parts like 'you can't sing along, fat...you can't take enough pills and you can't dream enough...' that strike me the most, and yet how strange it is that they are also the most simply put, no bells, no whistles. And yet, there's something about your style which demands the duality of fullness for the simplicity to carry weight, to carry greater weight than it would, otherwise.

Not something I am remotely understanding, just yet, but an observation for you.

neruda

We've talked about this, but I don't think I said I liked the 'mountains hung with basal clouds,' and 'dark cliffs swelling,' and, other than that, nothing excited me beyond. Perhaps a case of catching oneself on the intellectual side of the head/heart balance, in this case? But, in response to your theme, yes, I think politics is embedded in so much of South American art that it become difficult for outsiders to understand it (and, I suppose, appreciate it fully) unless they are familiar with the history. But then again, why were South Americans so effusive? Pressure? Political pressure, social upheaval, insecurity, civil wars -- pressure, I suppose, does wonders for art, creativity. It takes on a strange form, a kind of twisted glory, a purposefulness that is beyond just the momentary satisfaction and frustration of desire or pleasure, but something that transcends that, makes a difference, incites change. While I see your take on it in this poem as fairly cynical, an almost aloof attitude that 'oh, to be a poet, you must be a martyr etc' – which I can completely sympathise with, since it would seem alien to us, as poets, in countries where art and life are not capped down – I would also like to see you write an antithesis to this, if not in whole, then in part: something that perhaps uses almost exactly the same words, sans the distant coolness.

An aside – we’re almost lazy as poets. We write for fun and thematic purpose only in how it pertains to each individual. They wrote for wider purpose, societies, change. What validates us, in front of them? And why the difference, the blatant twistedness of their art? Is any a better medium, a more conducive medium for writing, do you think?

churn(butter) noble(y)

Hm – churn buttery noble? About the only sense I can string out of that title alone, and that bothers me, since even that makes no sense. The ‘i turn to thoughts of snow’ repetition glided right off me. It seemed like a rather stale line to repeat so often, especially in a poem where there could otherwise be such vividness in the imagery; instead, even the red robins, darkened hearts, deer-rubbed yew get diluted by the mundaneness of the line. I want to snow-water to rip the poem open more, rather than form a stale grey sheet of ice over each image, like it is now. I loved, ‘chandelier of geiger counts (geigs?), morse / as a zulu tongue, tugging ahead / of us witchwaterward’ – that’s when the flesh reasserted itself, but the ‘I turn to thoughts / of snow for coolness and to melt / cleanly into my canteen and to keep from thinking of the / rut streams’ watered it down again (no pun intended).

In this case, your simplicity didn’t strike like it usually does – something I find bizarre, considering how often it does.

But here:

i say, drink
all you want, mother.

the most terrifying
are the trees, silken with windlessness
as alien intelligence, having
kept everything else
for so long.

It’s what I meant by the Kooseriness, that lyricism that means the whole poem points like an arrow towards the ending lines, which tie it all, resonate and illuminate the whole poem. In this case, you had a dubious middle and beginning, but a fantastic end, which makes me think that this poem shouldn’t really be past salvation.

of lebanon

I will all but ignore this except to say that the imagery is delicious and you know it, and you also know I am finding it hard to put strings together, or find them.

carthage jail

Yesterday, I just finished C D Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation, where she more or less visits four prisons in an hour or a few hours, and documents her experience in formless prose-poetry. Having also attempted to read Aeneid in original Latin, this was a nice refresher. You’re battling two voices in this one. There’s that beautiful summer poetry which everybody loves, in the first stanza and in the fourth stanza, and parallel to this is the more narrative-like straightforwardness of the remaining stanzas (I rather liked, ‘all that was left / of the afternoon was their / pulses against wood, funny in / their non-origin and everyday use / as idioms’ for its character). Both are great. Both work. But not together.

Also, while we’re on the topic of Romans and Greeks and, you know, ancients in general, I meant to mention: I thought of your poetry a fair bit in the Louvre – with marble statues and paintings alike, partly because from your writing, I had learnt things about the classics which I would not have known otherwise, partly because I saw now why and where and how such a style would be needed (since, to do justice to something already so spectacular an art, one must surpass it somehow), and partly because I have honestly never seen that many religious paintings in one place.

farm (i am not a farmer)

Rape, wounds, peroxide, disease, sorrow = deterioration. And then: killed, kicked, ghosts, died = death. Ending on: rain, green, resetting, birth (in the same hands that know death) = life. There is flow in this, and beauty – quiet moments like ‘the isoceles light of afternoon,’ ‘jaw / delicate as shyness / between year-apart brothers,’ ‘or the summer that / every single chicken died, but / we weren’t heartbroken until,’ ‘rain snaps across / the heat-green pastures,’ – but while there is that flow of life, that cycle, and quiet moments of rapture caught between what might otherwise be repulsion at farming, I feel like there’s no real cohesiveness. I think you feel this, and it shows, in the writing, also – here, life is linear: birth, life (/deterioration), death, despite the hint at its circularity; your poem likewise takes on a linear feel, a straight line from A to B, as it were. In some ways, it ties in perfectly with the narrator’s cynical ‘thank god I’m not a farmer’ attitude – instead of seeing how the farmer adds to the cycle of life, they notice only the linearity of it. But on the other hand, it gives the poem a slightly disatisfying feel. I don’t think there’s much you can do to avoid the paradox.

Also? Do one thing for me. Fix that last line.

dust in a jar

I can almost hear myself nodding the first time I read this: how Kylanesque. Nightjars, kettled, honeysuckles, bee-proper sweetness, self-scalping, bear-scored, rutting and blooming, helen baffled in sails (great image)…it’s easy to miss theme entirely and get lost in your characteristic sensory evocations. And the metaphor, it seems, of breaking into womanhood being compared to a volcano…which it looks like is abandoned at some point or another in the last stanza. Please bring it back. Your writing is so mouthwatering that it begs for something grander to give complete it further.

portrait of the artist, with beard

One of my favourites, here, for reasons I’ve already explained. Instead, I’ll give you specifics:

i could hear
grandfather's blood marbling
off of a cot of wristbones, skin
trustling and stillsweet
like months-dry alfalfa
and on his breath the
old currant wine of stories,
sensitivities.

Yes. All I want is that ‘stillsweet’ to lose the ‘sweet’ so that the sweetness of ‘old currant wine’ is enhanced. Otherwise perfect.

he is
mossy with prophecy, parting
through woods,

Made me laugh. ‘Mossy with prophecy’ – why didn’t I think of that first.

he moves by streams,
letting them struggle similar
through stones, the way
summer strains through melons.

Careful, Kylan. Your readers’ spines can only take so much disintegration.

to be aware of
outer life like that again

This means more to me than anything you’ve said so far. End the stanza here.

a castor moon flushes through nearby ponds
like scent through a love-letter—

What did I say about disintegration?!

ransomed
with ticks.

I read this as a pun, the first time. ‘Ticks’ also referring to the days, hours, weeks he has left on the earth; I’ve decided I rather like my misread, even though I don’t think the poem should end on this stanza.

desert

Having just reread all your NaPo in reverse order to review it, I’m noticing something: you are losing some immediacy with your more recent works. They are almost too grandfatherly, soft. This, conversely, has a snapped-beat urgency to it, something less languid and lengthy. It resembles the writing I’ve seen from you in the past months more than the rest of your NaPo does; I like both paces, but this one excites me more, because it’s different, and I’ve seen you do slow before. I like the odd irony of the poem being set in a desert – where one would expect things to move slower with the heat – and I especially like how cohesive the whole poem is. You’ve circularised this one neatly, while leaving doors open, questions open, in that ‘you wonder.’

Some lovely images, despite the bloody fascination/horror at what the ‘you’ contemplates:

stone-ground flowers
caught in the new night
like the sockless creak of
cedar dawn floorboards—
the lyric bone of old hanging-trees,
white and moral

old beds, and
a ballad of delineated canyon-stone—
layers tuned like ham radios
to faraway jurassics, mesozoics,
like hearing transatlantic french in your
own goddam living room.

nerves
snapping and strung
like poppled whipmarks down a back—

coyotes, who are bone-strict and
shambly as panned rivers.
harelip cactus bloom under the crammed
legend of stars and you finally reach
the highway longing between
cousin hills—

All very consistently surprising sections, aided in part by pacing, probably.

And this:

you carry yourself out
knowing how hard it is
to cup water like this,
or much blood.

Torquere – to twist. You may have guessed – I like ends that twist in me.

--

Various thoughts, that’s all. If you want more on any one poem, PM me. I’ve read these several times in any case.

Gender:

Points: 7386
Reviews: 159

Mon Apr 11, 2011 3:45 pm

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MeanMrMustard says...

Oh Kylan.

I like you and we clash and we discuss and you provoke me to interesting things. I'm listening to a poem being read by none other than yourself right now. You know what I mean, or ought to; I'm respecting your privacy because it's worth bothering to mention I respect it. I'll be clear right now, I have a great deal of respect for you. This should be obvious, despite my meanderings into form versus content and back out again and back in, I've written several things on here in response to your opinion and learned a damn great deal.

Now I'm not going to look at any of these individually. Not at all. Why? Because you have others do that, and they tell you things enough. You seem like a confident, capable fellow, right? Or is that always the truth? I could look at all of these if you wish, and you know my opinion will not be the same of others. But for messages, back to my original purpose.

Kylan I feel like I can't leave Eden with you. I feel like you keep writing me Eve, making me Eve, drinking me Eve, singing me Eve, telling me about Eve; Kylan I'm tired of that bitch.
Kylan you have a way with words English and Rhetoric majors cry themselves to sleep over to simply have for a one night's stand if only in sex and passion. And it's always about those damn pastures. Always that theme. I know you've told others to write differently, but the world looks back at you Kylan.
Kylan you're better than most of my teachers I've ever had; these people study, they don't write, they don't live anymore and they know it, so they fall back on textbooks and anthologies and classics....because what else do they have but fall back to misery and being poor?
Kylan you're theory mixed with some life and you're running out of wine and sooner or later blood will be entering that river and don't tell me I didn't tell you so when the god of the river lets the Olympians know; oh yes, you don't write about them.
Kylan, avoid Neruda, it's not that he's a bad poet, it's that I don't like your voice under another's.
Kylan I want to know you, I want to feel you, I want to see you like a picture and take away this little video I'm listening to of you and have a chat with you sitting across from me at this old graffitied table I'm sitting at with Dr. Pepper and Quakers cheese snacks and a Snicker bar to cake my teeth with; laugh, that was supposed to make you laugh.
Kylan how do you keep writing? Maybe I know nothing about you. I'd like to change that. Be honest with yourself, is this you or words displayed for free on the screen?
Kylan we don't talk enough, it's gotten hostile, say we smoke'em peace pipe and give the blankets back to the Europeans?
Kylan you're better than me right now, but you're suspending in distilled water and I'm not going to stand around for the next few years watching you swim while you drown; by the way Billie Holiday's voice is an interesting metaphor and literary device but it's boring as hell.
Kylan don't write for old people.
Kylan I meant this sincerely and not a joke; you're a poet and a writer and we can't just analyze and critique each other, it doesn't do justice to the time you've spent or I've spent, and in reality you and I have the most to offer one another because we're different; you in the fields where my forefathers roamed, me in the streets where my soul was nailed down like a shadow after Nagasaki and Hiroshima; Kylan leave Eden, it's better outside.

Hope this helps Kylan, I've been stewing on this for a while and think with 19 days left I'm going to love watching you thread progress. By the way, your reading voice is ok, but I get the feeling you can do better.

edit: eegads I give up with my typos and misspellings. Do you see how excited this made me???

Gender:

Points: 62375
Reviews: 315

Tue Apr 12, 2011 2:56 am

Navita says...

This. Is. Totally. MMM’s fault.

Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio. Either be silent, or let your speech be better than silence.

In this case, I refuse to be silent. I need to say this. MMM just provided the perfect medium – and, more than likely, started a trend. Dialogue between poets using poetry.

----

Kylan, do you trust my instincts?

Kylan, when I come back from work or a few hours at the gym or a two hundred k busride and the sky is shot up with streetlights and things are breaking like silence and winebottles and dreams and I don’t know how to put any of it together again, it’s like I’ve come home, your style, it’s like

Kylan, it’s like the childhood I never had, it’s where fantasia and fairy tales come from, it’s quiet and I can hear myself think, or not think, and press myself into the earth or lie on grass or just sit and watch the clouds go past and laugh at a trilliontrilliontrillion different physiognomies; I’m a child, Kylan, I never get tired of clouds, or sunsets, and you know

Kylan, you know nothing hurts me more than watching trees sawed down; I can’t do it, I can’t watch it; I cry, Kylan, I wreck things that deserve to be wrecked --- computers and plaster paints and oventops because I can’t put the damn trees back together again, Ky, and there’s just no fucking colour there, in the

Kylan, in the cities, we paint in grey; everything is concrete, the zapped neonlights are hard and cold and unsexed and the acrylics get worn and peel --- and all I want is just some reality some green and it’s there, Ky, it’s everywhere in you, it’s when you

Kylan, when you talk of bones bending to beaches or drowsy summer blossoms or mountains lowering like hatbrims, I want to laugh because, at last, finally, there is someone who understands that I can just sit for hours on end and marvel; I’m a child, Ky, I

Kylan, I’ve lived in almost thirty different houses in my life but you showed me the worth of home; your style’s like home, Kylan, it’s like the grandfathers I never had because my nan killed one with city life and cruelty and the other got murdered for his sugarcane empire in New Delhi – he got gunned by highwaymen on motorbikes, he got kidnapped and the bastards took over the factories and wrecked the fields; I’m so sorry Kylan, I

Kylan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean to call you old; it’s just---

Kylan, it’s just that I wish you could see joy lash across my face when I read something by your hand and realise it’s duality, it’s easy duality, the very young and the aged trapped in the instant; I see you above and below – the wonder of a child’s question in the mouth of the parent, the

Kylan, the world is too huge and too small to do it any justice but if anyone can, you can, despite the terrible unbearable inadequacy of words, you pair wonders with wonders, stitch my mountains together again so I know there’s still some

Kylan, there’s still some beauty left here and God forbid you shut your eyes to it; elation in simplicity, extraordinary in the ordinary, don’t you dare forget that, Kylan; you taught me that, you

Kylan, you taught me more than I can thank you for --- the worth of home, the power of a single instant, the need to meet everything with everything, small glories and silence and succession

Kylan, it’s a teeming forest here, a brilliant bluedom, god in branches and windfalls and snowstorms, and succession is a long, slow evolution, and just as well we’re all young.

Gender:

Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Tue Apr 12, 2011 6:10 am

Kylan says...

april 10

old poets

for nal, in poor response

damn orbits—every
dog returns, entirely composed
of bone, like horses caught
in barn-fires, or blood snarling
an apple nail. i am a fence
to keep milkweed in, sprawling
a wooden pace, like the difficulty
of a father to keep up with his son.
are you tired? let me help, scoop
my hand under your head,
lay you down gently, your child
thoughts whooshing dark and mouseless
in your own shadows
like the movements of owls
above lanes. i return, you
capillary upward, dragging the whole world
behind you the way urns
carry civilizations out of obsidian.
i look back waiting for the familiar
timbre of shin-salt, or an oldness
that you bring to your cheek,
velvet as a houseboat night.
it's true i'm terrified of unraveling
here, of rocking chairs and
photos by flamelight—i dress
in a yellow that belts me
like wheat; i am self-mined for good slack oil
until my own caribou die. you astonish me in
your french cathedrals, pious
to how worn the stone is,
tuned like a wire fence
to a horse summer, and to touch you
with a length grass is to receive a shock that brings
me back to lyrids, pleiades, the
jovian storm of an embryo.
you gave me a head—i
am the child, wake me up
before I calve into pillows like
a continent of ice, before
the poppies gobble me up
widely loved as filmed flesh,
woman, lady, lion
i am not a father.

Spoiler! :

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

Gender:

Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Wed Apr 13, 2011 3:53 am

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Kylan says...

Every day for the past two years, I spent a portion of my day thinking of metaphors, similes, allegories. I locate at least six words or phrases that I want to explore in my own poetry. I record those words in a list on my hard-drive. When I use one of the words or phrases in a poem, I delete it. Therefore, all of these entries are words that I never used, or used and forgot to take them off the list, or are repeats of ideas I've had previously. By looking at this list, you can see the delineation of my thoughts and emphasis on particular images throughout the last few years. I'd write a real poem tonight, but finals are here. Is this a poem or a list? Regardless, voila. I'll try to write a real poem soon.

april 11

idea

Spoiler! :

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

Gender:

Points: 62375
Reviews: 315

Wed Apr 13, 2011 8:30 pm

Navita says...

Oh, thank God you put the right thing in the spoiler.

You asked me to look through this. It's an 88 page list on a word document, Ky. I five-columned it, reduced font size, line spacing, margins, everything I could think of. It's still 14 pages. I'm not printing this like I usually do with your work, much as that would help me read that.

I read through the first words, the last ones -- it's fairly entrancing, the experience; there are stories in every word, stories behind the stories. I see how they fascinate you so. It's easy to get carried away; breathe them, sing to them, talk to them, melt them, mold them, because it's true -- they could easily be entities of themselves. I dislike that. I don't build a story, a whole story, from words -- I decide on the basic story and then decide which words I want to throw in. I'm sure you do this too; and I'm going to hope, for your sake, that this has been used far more for mere reference than active use.

But yes, I've seen words, phrases, concepts of these in your writing. Do I notice a pattern? Well, yes and no; there's a fair element of spontaneity you have got here in how and when the words came to you. Overall, yes. There are bizarre animals here, people characturised, taken from the sideline, strange angles, things nobody notices about -- about, well, everything; landscapes, seascapes, pastscapes aside -- and you know what? It's easier to describe this list with what it doesn't have than what it does, because it has so much. There is, first of all, a sharp focus to everything -- almost all concrete nouns. That I could have anticipated anyway; the way your writing focusses in on a single moment, a single image, ties us down to a singularity, something microscopic, means I'm unlikely to find the more 'macro' (perhaps more intellectual / abstract) words -- less scientific process, politics; sure, it permeates all these characters, all these micro things, but the matter remains -- you tend not to find fascination with all the mentally enormous. Rather, it's ordinary made extraordinary. And since it's mostly nouns, and fewer verbs, we get something else: that characteristic slowness of your pacing.

Another thing I noticed. This is not a criticism, or an opinion, just an observation: the world where you saw beauty most is several centuries back. I've rarely read anything stingingly and obviously modern from you. I mean, on a personal basis, I'm fine with that -- your writing is escape, as opposed to enhancement, of this reality -- but if you were thinking of branching out, you may like to consider time as well as space -- you cover space well enough. Most of these words have a fantastically fairytale-of-the-last-century feel to them -- perhaps it's the agglomerate, I'm not sure.

Also, just wanted to ask you -- are there words you think should never go in a poem? That you would feel repulsed, or strange about, if you were to put in the word list?

Gender:

Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Thu Apr 14, 2011 5:02 am

Kylan says...

NaPo on hold until post-finals. I may post one or two during the next week or so, but I'll be back with a vengeance in the latter third of the month.

'Til then

Kylan

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

Gender:

Points: 27175
Reviews: 387

Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:03 am

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Kylan says...

april 11

veda's bibles

slit doe of plum blossoms
rolling off dusk's shingles
like the words of st. Catherine
in the ear of a burlap maid
at a white Orleans field,
hanging over quartered streets
in sheets of columned cottage-rain.
these new doorpost shadows, warm
and sun-brought, hen-rustling with july
like nail-hung straw hats, where
you find last night's clocharde and
her bible propped open to Nehemiah.
passages of scripture highlighted
to a crayola spectrum, the story
of Job slated in blues and greens
as if the words were local warnings
of a rickety water.

it is not too cold yet, and saffron
peels across Esther's denunciation of Haman,
swirling the way bright fabric does
from african skin, worn reds
in Exodus, slanted sun in
a camelhair desert, John the baptist
breaks scuffed locusts like trellis peas
in colonnades of rose.

she tells me that it is
from god, the drawers of color in her
Gideon-placed bible, serifs
and seraphim walled by dyed cliffs.
god, diffracted, as she bends
over psalms, coloring them the browns
of broken barns in spring—

I turn to doorstep blossoms, the ancient
grammar of honeybees, milk, petals spilling
like an old, lidded testament—I
strain to hear the hues.

.

"I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy."

- Serenade, Adélia Prado

1, 2, 3, 4

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