So, one of the things I've been having trouble with this semester is that I don't have my usual expansive crew of writer friends readily available to help my workshop my work. I never realized how much I relied on that in my editing process until I didn't have it. A couple people have read this poem, which I wrote recently, and given me great feedback that I really appreciate. Right now, I figure that if nothing else, I can use this blog as the occasional workshopping corner. So, please: turn this post into a discussion board; rip it apart, argue with me about word choice and line breaks, tell me what works and what doesn't. Explain to me what images stick out to you and which ones don't, which ones shouldn't and do, which ones should and aren't. It's not titled yet.
We rowed across the night sky
sailing between islands
built on a seafloor of constellations
swinging around the course in Orion’s belt
playing with how tight
that longboat could turn
and it handled so smooth
when the tide came in on the milky way
carrying us into blue.
I leaned over the starboard side
when we passed over reefs
left by colors of a supernova
trailed my fingers in the air
pulling ripples
and rearranging stars.
We moored in the dipper
and we dipped
in the deep reservoir it made
swimming through the night,
diving down
pulling you under
so you could see what it looks like
to blow bubbles in midnight,
daring you to follow
when I balance beamed to the tip of the handle
we stood with our toes over the edge
dove off the deep end
and raced to the North Star.
We learned what light was
when our fingertips grazed bright white
in the same breath
stunned,
chests heaving
eyes locked
treading bottomless sky
no sound but endless galaxy
ringing in our ears
until you grinned
and I laughed.
We had a splash fight with the night
beads of air dripping
from the tips of our noses
you shook your head, spraying me
with drops from your wet hair
and the pitch of my shrieks and giggles
dissolving into the key of your chuckle
made the stars shiver and blink.
We backstroked to the boat
in lazy crooked lines, listening to the splashes
our skin made against the dark waves
and I bet you if we rode Pegasus
I could stay on longer
so we found wind
to fill our sails
and raced the burning tails of meteors
hoping we’d never reach daylight.
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So, part of the end-of-semester grading process for WRT 301 involves taking a critical look at everyone's blog and making suggestions for improvement. In particular I'm looking at two things: does this writing represent your work at its best; and are you making the best use of the blog medium? So here goes.
ReplyDeleteI love this poem: it's one your most accomplished to date, IMHO. In he past you often seemed to be trying very hard with language--trying to impress, trying to squeeze the very last drop out of it--yet here you seemed to have relaxed a little, allowing yourself to be playful with both your subject and your language, without losing control of the overall creation. That's a wonderful and very important development, and I can't tell you how happy it makes me.
The flip side is that it's now time to look a little more carefully at the smaller-scale items. For example: you have developed a lovely, flexible rhythm here, both adventurous and lively, and in general you're entirely aware of where to break your lines in order to support and re-launch that rhythm. Yet you're not really sure what to do with punctuation, especially line-end punctuation. The second stanza, very much like the first, is surely two sentences? And in the third stanza, if you're going to have a comma after "stunned," surely we need something after "breath"? And in the fourth stanza, after "noses"? You seem to be caught between wanting to write the entire poem so its own rhythm carries is without any punctuation whatever (a tough ambition, but workable) and realizing that you're actually going to need punctuation for the construction to make sense (a realistic ambition but one that demands consistency), and I think you fall a little between the two stools. But please don't take these observations as detracting in any substantial way from my admiration of the poem or my pleasure at your progress.
As for your use of the blog medium--well, at the moment you're just using it to put some of your work out into the public eye and call for comments. Nothing at all wrong there (though you may want to rotate poems, in particular, in and out so when you submit something for paper publication it is fresh to the reader), but your blog is affording you a lot of opportunities that you haven't yet begun to use. You may want to be creating some outreach yourself by considering online poetry groups of groups of friends or kindred spirits in general. You might want to look for ways to announce that you've posted something new so your readers know to come and check it out. Apart from anything else, we're planning to use the website of the Champlain College Publishing Initiative to act as an index to our students' pages/blogs. You may want to take advantage of that just to see if it brings more traffic to you.
Cheers,
Tim