A mashup of assignment 3
Hey all, this is going to seem super lame after the inordinate amount of time I took to complete this assignment, but no matter how hard I tried for a five-part epic, the poem wanted to be a one-hit-wonder. So I slaved over this little ditty and exchanged a lot of packets in my pursuit of inspiration. Some links I traveled to are at the bottom, though I lost track of many others. One prerogative: I'm trying to challenge myself to write longer lines. Nonetheless, sorry for the sleight of hand, and I think neither the poem nor the puns should be easily forgiven.
Carry me there in concrete shoes
The fop's a flop, Billie Jean: No one believes he's a Jackson.
Daughter Darling does, at least, believe love is another
sequined glove: ugly with the effort of animation
where once was. Jack White makes a living off
this knucklebeat, plays it so we can feel it fuck
up our bloodheat. See, a synesthete of finger and fantasy
can come pretty in the face of baseballsand flesh and feel
certain of Peter Pan. Big Nose, beware the palimpsest: bodies
stitched over each other by amateur loom and doom, a hodgepodge
pashmina heavy with pitch. It'll bury you in the breathe of it.
Some links consulted:
http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/Lapis_Lazuli.htm
http://www.balsampillow.com/lapuslazuli
http://www.metrolyrics.com/aeroplane-lyrics-jethro-tull.html
http://www.mtv.com/videos/michael-jackson/26708/billie-jean.jhtml
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jackson-obit26-2009jun26,0,1970798.story?page=2
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2824/were-concrete-shoes-a-favored-technique-of-mob-hitmen
http://www.lyriczz.com/lyrics/michael-jackson/58958-free-willy/
http://chestofbooks.com/crafts/scientific-american/sup4/Electricity-And-Prestidigitation.html
abbreviated comments, because work’s a-calling:
ReplyDeleteI like the title a lot, and I love the referent, but it feels a little jokey. and I think some of the wordplay you have here, the repetitive rhythms and the rhyming structures, also feel jokey, or at least a bit posturing. The speaker has enough personal clout to call out many of these figures, but does it in a kind of self-righteous/self-assured way that I do find v. interesting, but also distracting from the actual point of the poem.
for instance: the last stanza (which is by far my favorite, as it starts playing with it’s own imagery). You’ve got Peter Pan and Big Nose right next to each other, which seems to be calling Michael jackson’s nose out? which, okay, if the speaker hates that his nose was changed, and is basically teasing him in his grave, okay, but that might be a comment that no one needed. then you’ve got this awesome palimpsest part, yes yes yes yes yes, but I like amateur loom but do you have to include “doom?” what does “amateur loom and doom” impart outside of the rhyme, which here feels too easy. “a hodgepodge pashmina heavy with pitch” might be right on, but the consonance is too much – you’ve created a really wild image, but your homophonic language is kinda taking it away from the reader (I hope I’m using homophonic in the right way). the very last sentence is good, but still the consonance is there. You’re over-using the consonance here, and moreso you’re overusing the same pattern: fop’s a flop (which, whoa weird judgment), darling daughter, where once was, finger and fantasy, flesh and feel, peter pan, big nose beware, bury you in the breathe, etc.
it’s dense as all get out, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what jack white is doing in the poem. the speaker once again makes a weird judgment about jack white, by assigning him a specific ability, which is non-descriptive, that he does to all of us – the ability to play “knuckleheat” to fuck up our “bloodheat,” which I parse as the speaker liking Jack White’s music, because I can’t figure out what else it contains.
I like speakers in poems who feel free to comment – there are lots of contemporary poets that use it as well – but this speaker comments without referencing the original, and seems more interested in her/his own way of talking about it. So, in a sense, the perfect caricature of the critic. but the caricature isn’t particularly helpful.
I mean, you get a million points for palimpsest alone (not really, because that would seriously retard our point tracking), and it was entertaining, but I think the poem’s getting caught up in itself, and because of it’s own internal joy, is not open or engaging with anything else.
oh, and btw, it’s not failure to do something different than the assignment kids, as long as it was spurred on by it. what else are assignments for anyways?
so i just re-read my comments - weirdly aggro. I still think the points I tried to make are salient, but all apologies if it seemed like I was shaming you. I love that it's scattershot, dense, and lovely. I'm just concerned about the sonics of it, some of the rhythms, and the angle of the speaker. so, truly, sorry if those comments are way too much - it says I wrote it at 525 AM, which I find unbelievable, but it was really fucking early.
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