Published June 30, 2011
i say to her
i am being cirrus right now
she turns the tea cup over
like an ear reversed
for an inspection of softness
and looks above my head
where what crowns me are thistles
of sun spot, clouds with the plumb gut
of feral horse, rounding and
seen only from the back—
un-cirrus as bathed women, the mirth of legs
folded under haunch, doing up hair
to a coiffure of southeaster wind,
with a tortoise shell comb
bristled out of a heading from kept islands.
soon, the snow melts off the mountain
dribbles into a dementia of streams,
cool slack parallels
over egos of stone.
what marks my arms latitudinally
are trackings of the level of record flood waters
over the years,
like a child might mark
a door frame for height
until the first lilac-tight summer
of drownings.
i say watch out
i come apart like boys' sighs
i said i am being cirrus
i am the duck's ass swoon,
i am the barn-ruckus field over which clouds tuft
like marriage in winter. i am the first thousand years
when the atmosphere was thin
as her lips and the rain was hot cyanide
and the earth was without sediment.
the balloons let go
are faraway. it is fun to compete to see the red one
but only with the rods of our eyes
when we look
slightly away.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
138,124 Literary Works • 672,071 Reviews
I agree with the review above but still
i read this and i was immediatly though oh my god, i wish i could write like that
I especially liked this line:
she turns the tea cup over
like an ear reversed
There was one part that was kind of awkward (sorry for not being specific... i'm on my phone right now and am having trouble finding it) like good vocabular is GREAT, but sometimes the perfect word is something simple (I'll tell you which part later)
keep it up, though! It really is a great poem
So this has got pontenital but you've got some serious polishing to do before that.
* Capitals for god sake!
* Punctuation.. There are WAY too few dots and commas.. To read this in one breath could make you suffocate ^^
* Also.. STRUCTURE, your stanzas are of different forms and shapes, and your lines differ in length and cuts the flow off.
But I like the story you're telling and even if you could use some more imagery the one you've used wasn't too bad. Tell me when or if you fix this one up and I'll come back to see the result. I do think this could be something great!!!
Good Luck & Keep Writing
// Demoness
I need to get into more of your works to get a feel for your style, so probably everything I say will be entirely irrelevant. I want to see William Kentridge animate this. He would fail, but it would be beautiful. I think that you got the tone of this exactly right, the images suspended, drawn across one another, it's lovely. The stream of consciousness feel, drawing you into this kind of ee cummings lovers' euphoria. I would like to see this develop into several poems, to see you manipulate style and rhythm, there is more juice in this.
Sweet, unpretentious opening. It pulls you in slowly, and immediately introduces this easy whimsy. Your structure is clear and practical.
The line break "reversed/for" needed a double read, the meaning is slightly obscured. The cup to the ear is already a little jump, 'like and ear reversed for an inspection of softness', it loses some immediacy. It could just be a messing around with line breaks thing. Even if it's drifting, I think clear focal points are important. Tension and release.
Good execution, you support your images well, drawing it out, specifics without adjectives. The softness becoming thistles becoming sun, it's very exact yet seemingly effortless.
Chagall? This is very much a painted horse for me. It is ordered and stamped with perspective, it has brushstrokes. It's made human through observation. Vivid, but through layers.
'bathed' I found a curious choice, kind of baffled me. Bathing is clear, so is it the evolution of those women, aware and armoured, or something else? How does the bath relate? Steam, reddened flesh. It is at this point that I realise you have no other sense imagery. Why? I understand the visions, but the presence of the girl may illicit complimentary, if equally translucent, sensory responses. (Not like that, get your mind out of the gutter). Is it a deliberate choice, to remove them from the physical? I guess that's what ruins clouds, they seem so deliciously tactile, and then if you're inside them they're just wet and muggy.
'Coiffure' is almost onomatopoeic for wind, I like it, one of the few instances it feels appropriate. Tortoise shell is very evocative, the images are well balanced, real and sublime.
Nope, you lost me. Cumbersome line. Clean it up.
And it was all going so well. What happened? 'dementia of steams'? 'egos of stone'? Here you were being all deft and dextrous, interplay of different elements, this is heavy handed. 'dribbles into dimentia' I kind of like, but as soon as you bring in the 'of's, it's a little 'heart of shadows', 'river of sorrow'. Egos of stone, I get what you mean, but say it better, maybe throw in a Shinto allusion, or Rumi, if you don't object. (Ridiculously inappropriate tangent: there's this 70s film, "Alice in Wonderland: an X-Rated Musical Fantasy, has random classical musical quotes through the soundtrack. But it would make you look differently at personifying rocks...) I want to like 'cool slack parallels'. I think I do.
And there you go supporting your images again, trying to win back the love. Beautiful, practical, vivid, visceral. Slightly bloated, keep reading your lines aloud.
Much better.
Too much. You expect so much of your final lines, you can't just let them sit, they have to do something revolutionary. It's okay. Think music, the final chord is usually softer, it's lead into. It's enough, you're words are enough, let them be. Don't work so hard. You're a good poet. Relax.
This is an incredibly offensive analogy, but I remember the exact moment I gave up on Stephen King. "The Langoliers", he was describing, in third person, a girl seeing the boy who just saved her life, "She looked at him like he s***ed diamonds out of a platinum a**hole". Defend your choices, you can convince me, but that is what 'duck's ass swoon' was to me.
Much much better. Lovely even. Fine and raw.
Absolutely perfect. If you haven't read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, do so. You would love them.
Nice enough, and certainly understated as the ending should be.
I disagree with Hannah in the whole making it something bigger, I think there is plenty big in the poem already, you are just kind of modest about it and try to compensate. It could very easily be crushed with a larger purpose, it's meant to be fluid, illusive. It is a common experience, a common state of mind, and I love your tying it to the underlying scientific mechanisms. Having said that, like I said, I haven't read enough of you to know any better, but I have every intention of shredding more.
Good evening, Kylan. It is always a pleasure and an honor to get to take my red pen to your work. Actually, I really think of it as a test of my reviewing skills because it’s always difficult to find things too terribly wrong with your poems.
But the major point has been pointed out already and that is the shifting in tones. It’s very much in your word choice.
One particular line that struck uncomfortably for me was:
I think the main reason for that though is the use of “un-cirrus.” I can’t even begin to conjure up an antonym for cirrus that could take the place of “un-cirrus” but a different line would nice, at least to my eyes.
These two lines feel odd to me. I love the concept because it’s familiar for me and it links back to my childhood but the way you pulled the words together seems odd. Were the line breaks were removed from the equation, then as a phrase, the words seem to string together clumsily.
The only other thing that I wanted to make note of is in the third stanza. I don’t know what it is to me but astatically the five little eyes streaming down the left hand side of the poem sudden makes it look wrong to me. I think part of it applies to repetition and part of it is very much just the look it gives on the page.
It was an honor to read your scary good poem as it always is. *bows*
~lilster
Alright, Kylan.
I remember the reason I used to be so thrilled by what you wrote was that you had this intense focus, the way that all the words seemed to string together to a common purpose, each word building the tone or breaking it where necessary. Now, that's not to say that's the only way to write, because it isn't. I also just loved a poem of Mustard's that brought me easily through different associations and though it had a kind of theme hovering, it followed it through completely unrelated points. So, one is not better than the other, a duh. But this doesn't work. There is no string here, whether all tied back to the first point, or just leading off on a winding path. I have nothing to follow.
There are high points. There are high points that I'd like to see connected to something brilliant.
For example, so shocking:
SO BEAUTIFUL, so strong. There is something behind these words, and I might not want you to show it to me, but I wanna see the ripples of it. I wanna see what it's tied to and what happens when you move it.
From that point on, it's all stronger, but separately. Beautiful images, hinting at emotions in the idea of seeing the balloons only when we slightly look away (by the way I think the word compete in that stanza is out of place, too hard and sporty), but I wanna know why this is with something else. Maybe they'd stand alone just fine.
That's a nice poem by itself, isn't it? A nice vague feeling? But I know you want to do more than that. You want to make this feeling relevant, and I want it to be relevant and more lasting, too. So it's gotta be tied to something that we've experienced before. I can't find the story. If you have it, bring it out. If you don't, please find one so that these words stick with me instead of sliding off my back.
Love ya,
Hannah
Hi Kylan,
I really should stop reading you because it makes me too jealous.
The opening lines drew me in straight away and I loved "like an ear reversed". I love the final two lines of the first stanza. As a whole I think the first stanza would benefit from breaking it up into two sentences (you'd get totally breathless if you tried to read this aloud!)
I love "dementia of streams" and "lilac-tight summer/of drownings." Haunting and beautiful and, as usual, you use language skillfully.
I'll admit that I felt a little let down by the second stanza. "i say watch out
i come apart like boys' sighs" bored me in light of what had come before as it was a little bland and I couldn't see it. I think that:
"i am the duck's ass swoon,
i am the barn-ruckus field "
jarred with the rest of your tone and language, and that this didn't really work, especially because:
"over which clouds tuft
like marriage in winter. i am the first thousand years
when the atmosphere was thin
as her lips and the rain was hot cyanide
and the earth was without sediment."
was one of the strongest points in the poem.
I enjoyed the sentiment of the final stanza but felt the language and imagery were a little weaker than some other points in the poem, and would look at it again.
A pleasure, as usual.
Hope this helps,
Jas