Bombshell

Hey antimelrose –

Long time, no read. I think you need a less magical avatar, since it is so horribly distracting and beautiful when reading your poetry. Plus, I come away from your poetry with a magical feeling, and I cannot say whether that’s due to your avvie or the poem. That irks me.

Un–expectation
is the feeling of
'sucker punch gut'
the kiss of the fist
off–kilter into concave

Oooh, clearly going for some impact via enjambment. There’s something very bare and pointed to these lines, isn’t there? A kind of sucker punch gut feeling to the line breaks themselves. I would rather you not have to resort to quotation marks around ‘sucker punch gut’ since, well, I rather want to recommend something different to you: suckerpunchgut. I don’t like the obvious rhyme of ‘kiss’ and ‘fist’ – more so since fists don’t kiss, so your image stands up to no thought whatsoever. However, ‘hiss of the fist’ would work, since that sharpness, that stomach-twisting feeling is what one feels upon being told unexpected news.

And I love the way you establish character without trying to. That witty, fresh definition of un-expectation – and no mention of the narrator themselves in sight. Subtle.

An example would be

I take this to mean your poetry is an example of the feeling of unexpected things. But it’s both ridiculously obvious and ridiculously vague. Superfluous, as a result. Keep it if it delights you – sure, it has a nice aural quality to its incompleteness – but I’d prefer a cleaner transition to the description of the dance teacher.

She is the giver.
more storyteller than
healer,

No; please don’t do this. A grocery shopping list of adjectives – giver, storyteller, healer. You can be more sophisticated here.

she taught us the
meaning of living architecture,
of cathedrals in motion,
of catharsis in the gasp and the
carnal syntax.
Guiding, dragging us through fields of cursive, always the one to steer.
Even more, she designed
windows so we could peer
into her vision of
the planets' harmony; then
taught us to bend our own glass into molten light, love
so that the music, like honey, would slide
off our fingertips, glistening, sweet,
never saccharine.

Firstly: the shopping list continues – storyteller, healer, giver, architect, grammarian, writer, astronomer, musician. At least it doesn’t continue so blatantly – which I was grateful for – but it continues. You know as well as I do what that means – a certain inconsistency, lack of expansion on a single metaphor or idea; so suddenly the suckerpunchgutness has vanished and been forgotten.

Currently, the only reason why I am so in love with this stanza is the charm to the words, your fluency. The bolded lines especially delighted me. But ‘music, like honey…glistening, sweet, never saccharine’ – ho hum. Bit of a cliché. Seen it before.

Though this rose would bristle
in time and out
with serrated nature: briars (beware) nestled in
a nearby neighborhood of her teeth and tongue.
Again, always the brittle shout
would rattle us,
stiffen our limbs,
silence our faces,
she could have been any cold glittering siren
perched alone upon rocks above
blistering seas,
while shipwrecks below careened to the
pounding throb, masts colliding and timber falling.

Antimelrose, dear. Consider this: you are watching a film. There is a slow motion shot of shock splattered across a character’s face; zooming in and then fading out again. It is replaced by a montage of little images – storytelling, healing, cathedrals, planets, music, honey, roses, sirens, seas, shipwreck – that surface for a two-second shot and vanish again. Is there anything that links them? No. Was it nice to watch? Well, yeah. Was it excellent to watch? No, because the viewer does not have time nor space to take any of them in properly and because you’re not weaving a web of images with your poetry. It’s a straight line from A to B, a montage of pretty words, dot-to-dot. Not even momentary satisfaction, since before we’ve have a chance to appreciate the last one, the next one comes.

The dance teacher, I assume, is the rose here. You say, then, the ‘brittle shout’ – a stretch of association. Do roses shout? Also – if she is now not a rose, but a siren, then I assume the students are either rocks or the seas or the shipwrecks – in fact, I have no idea which, since they are meant to be standing stiff and still. So the metaphor of her being a siren doesn’t work, since it can’t be continued with the students.

Also – think of webs rather than string this way: a poem is short, only has so many lines. If you’re writing about someone, do you simply rattle off a string of adjectives for what they are or do you dwell on the one most important aspect of them, and then hint at the others from there? Revolving around a central axis is better, therefore, than listing, bullet-pointing disguised by the fanciful arrangement of poetry. It’s not well disguised here, either, so.

Yet giving.

You know what you want to say. Now say it properly. This means nothing to anyone. It goes downhill from here, even imagery-wise:

Now my focus turns to
softening the visage,
smoothing the mouth;
perking the corners
and wanting
deeply to

take home
keep home

I'm not allowed, not prepared
to give, the thought sinks.
And so terribly at loss
because her revelation falls stillborn
of where I too, may discover the glass

And the rattling loosed chain
slides out on salt and wet,
there goes our anchor,
severed.

A last ditch attempt to tie in with the sea-image, after stanzas of slightly cheesy-faced sentiment: ‘the thought sinks…terribly at loss…’ Any reason for the comma between ‘too’ and ‘may’?

Webs, antimelrose. Dance is a web of motion not a line from A to B; likewise with poetry. You’ve got enchantment sorted; now find an overarching metaphor so that it’s not just instantaneous enchantment, but something longer lasting, to behold and unravel much, much longer after the first read.

Also – funny this, but – I would not have known your occasion (that it was a dance tutor moving away) had you not said so at the beginning. For all I know, it could have been about anyone, just from the poem. I want to see more dance-oriented wording here, not vague machinations in that direction.

Edit this to all its glory. PM me if you want to discuss it.


Navita