a poem.

[kleenexwoman]

We’d tangle like rats
in old newspapers yellow with dust,
worm-pink tails
twined in shoelace knots.

I wrote that for my boyfriend a while back. I kept meaning to add to it, but it always seemed finished. It's surprisingly easy to write a love poem to nobody, and surprisingly hard to write a love poem to someone you love beyond all ration.

Comments

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

You're right, it's complete as it is; and it expresses a lot in not many words. Rhythm and rhyme don't really do a lot for pieces as short as that, as they develop power over the length of a poem (and after enough length, drive you crazy). The opening assonance is very good.

The difficulty is in making what you do well work well over longer works, where the rhythm and rhyme keep the stress evident, and give power to assonance and alliteration that does not emerge nearly so easily without the rhythm and the rhyme. But I'd really like to see you do that; your imagery is good. Sprung metre would be a very good starting point.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually written anything new in...wow, months. Ever since my Advanced Poetry class ended. I got burned out on it. Even the stuff I've posted on my writing journal is old.

I did just do a presentation on H.P. Lovecraft's poetry, and he was very enthusiastic about strict form. It made me want to take a look at some of mine again...if you're online something and free to talk shop about the stuff you mentioned in this entry (http://kleenexwoman.livejournal.com/253217.html?nc=11) or anything else.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

I came back here at your suggestion ---

I found this on Googling for Lovecraft poetry

Whilst dismembering rhythmical poetry is too much of a fashion these days, Lovecraft could do with both your assonance and your bite. You can probably see from his poetry that for some, formalism becomes simple. (It is for me, except that I invent forms to suit what they are describing, and that is hard). With practice this would be the case for you, I think, and if so, then the things that you already do well would make you a far better poet than Lovecract.

As an alternative to rhyme, are you familiar with pararhyme, usually associated with Wilfred Owen? The following shows this and another trick, rhyming off-stress, which can occasionally be useful; I find it produces a very delicate effect in the right circumstances, and have used it just once in my own 'Aurorielle', whereas to date pararhyme has not entered my repertoire. Thinking about it, there is a place it would work well in the later parts of what I am now writing ---


Arms and the Boy

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges whose fine zinc teeth,
Are sharp with sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.