soap\\cilantro

Hello there – Lim here with a review! Let me start with sensory impressions: this poem made me imagine a small bathroom with a sink and a spot for cilantro soap, ‘organic’ colours like tan and mint green, possibly because of the soap/ cilantro/ shower curtain images in the piece. But underneath that calm scene there seems to be something else, hinted at with the sudden appearance of a ‘negative’ word like “refusal” at the end of the first stanza. It feels like the tone gets more intense at the third stanza, where “soap\\cilantro” leads into “breathe\\drown”, and continues to stay intense up to the end. Conceptually, the poem seems to be structured around contrasts and complements. Like “dried\\fresh” are contrasting, while “soap\\cilantro” seems to be more complementary. I feel like there’s more nuance to that though, like “lost\\found” can be read as a contrast, but also read together as a coherent idea (like ‘lost n found’).

*Having read the other review: I think me interpreting soap\\cilantro to mean cilantro-flavoured soap rather than cilantro tasting like soap is kind of big in my reading of the poem, as because of that the repetition of the “soap\\cilantro” line does transform it for me, through association with different surrounding images (the more ordinary and sedate ones in the first stanza, and then the more intense ones in the later stanzas).

Something I really like about the poem’s structure is how you’ve managed to fit in rhyme (certain/ curtain) and also matching the number of syllables for so many of the lines. It makes the poem a delight to read and highlights the parallels between the ideas. It was a fun experience to try and work out the less obvious contrasts like “nectar\\nettle” and “theory\\certain”. Speaking of which, here are some further interpretation thoughts I had:

1) “theory\\certain” is rhymed with “shower\\curtain”. I interpreted the lines as being connected, maybe theory can ‘curtain’ someone’s certainty, or certainty can ‘curtain’ the fact that something is just a theory?
2) “sprout\\weed” was an interesting one, because “weed” is such a specific choice. It made me wonder: why not “sprout\\tree”, or “sprout\\flower”? (Aside from the rhyme scheme!) It feels like in the poem later on there is a theme of death and ageing with “empty\\nest”, “growth\\rot”, “alive\extinct”, so I’m tempted to interpret the weeds as being a contrast in terms of being matured and undesirable, whereas the young sprout has a more positive word.

Another thing I like about this poem is how you’ve grouped the imagery in some stanzas, like all the words in the first stanza have to do with herbs and taste, and all the words in the fourth stanza are a little more abstract but have to do with cyclical processes (like birds growing up and leaving the nest, things growing and then rotting, perhaps also trust eroding into unrest?).

*Having read your reply to floodlights, I’ve re-read the poem and the narrative feels a lot more accessible to me now! I feel like if you’d like readers to take away a story about a character, it might be helpful to hint at that a bit in the title? Even something like “this is cilantro” would drive people a lot more towards that interpretation. If you’re happy with it being more ambiguous, I think that works too c:

Overall, this was an interesting and enriching read that is also a pleasure to read aloud. Though it foregrounds the structural aspect quite a bit, I found I could read imagery, atmosphere and tone into it (even if it may not be the ones intended). Really cool!

Hope this helps, and keep writing!
-Lim

oh why hello there - doing my monthly review!

I am one of the few unfortunate people who have the genetic variation that causes cilantro to taste like soap, so I was very intrigued right away from the title. On the surface, the poem LOOKS minimal, almost aphoristic in some ways, but the structure is doing a lot of philosophical heavy lifting. The constant pairing (dried/fresh, sour/sweet, alive/extinct, etc) immediately situates the poem in a logic of binaries, but what’s interesting is that these binaries aren’t oppositional in a moral sense. I think that is the most typical? I interpreted that they’re experiential, not oscillating more to "one" side of things, whether that is positive or negative. The real meaning happens between them, in the slash itself; difference generates significance, but never resolution.

The recurring culinary/organic lexicon (garnish, flavor, herb, spice, nectar, cilantro) grounds the abstraction in the sensory body. Taste and smell are memory-heavy senses, and I think that matters here. Nearly every word belongs to the body or to consumption. There is clearly some memory beneath the experimentality of this poem that is shining - no one writes a poem about FOOD alone! Pairing those with concepts like refusal, theory, trust, unrest creates a friction that feels intentional, and that pairing of cilantro and soap reappearing later gives it a kind of leitmotif quality, like the poem is reminding us that we don’t "get over" certain contradictions. In general, with life, we just keep encountering them in new contexts (like how hunger can mean multiple things, how growth can represent literal and figurative ideas, etc). All of the vague and abstract ideas connecting back with the concrete feels like exactly that, a repetitive cycle that never truly ends.

That said, I do think the poem’s greatest strength, its abstraction, is also where it could find itself leading to alienation. This poem is very idea-forward. It is ALL idea, really. There is almost no overt speaker, no identifiable narrative situation, no emotional confession in the traditional sense, or anything to ground it. Are WE the narrator (or at least, is the narrator meant to be intentionally open)? I am very comfortable with abstraction in poetry, but with something as succinct as this, it's going to be hard to read it and consume it in the way you'd like. This is not to say it is a negative quality, but experimental poetry tends itself to be, well, experimentally read. I don’t think clarity is mandatory in poetry (far from it), but orientation can be helpful. The poem is exquisitely curated right now, but that means it is also intentionally withholding. WHO? Think: owl.

^ I would also like to mention the reuse of certain pairings, particularly "herb\spice" and "soap\cilantro" - they are interesting, don't get me wrong - though I do feel they are somewhat underdeveloped. Repetition implies evolution, but the poem doesn’t clearly signal how these repetitions are meant to change meaning over time. There is no development because the poem keeps the same formatting throughout, with little to no narrative (intentionally, of course ... unless not?). They do accrue resonance through proximity to darker pairings like "breathe\drown" and "alive\extinct," but the poem doesn’t quite capitalize on that shift. Why are certain words placed next to certain phrases? I can intuit some commentary on how we, as humans, view those words in relation to each other (or in juxtaposition with each other), but that isn't explicit in the text. I could be so far off I am in another narrative continent, and I'd never know!

I mean, the poem does work though; that is something a lot of experimental poetry struggles with at first. I appreciate that the poem never tells us how to feel about these binaries mentioned. There’s no moral hierarchy imposed like there is in most works of thought, art or otherwise. Things are IMPLIED, but as we know it, art is always holding some implications of sorts. Meaning itself is provisional/contextual/deeply entangled in cultural values anyway, so it's quite realistic. Overall, I did enjoy this a lot. Rarely do I get the chance to review a poem like this, and it's a beautiful day when I do.

If you’re interested in pushing it further, I’d be curious to see what happens when this structure is disrupted. How would that look? Perhaps something to consider if you ever want to revise this later.

best,
floodlights