from The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press)
poem found here
First lines:
She is sprawled arms akimbo
Yawns and stretches luxuriously
exploring a poem (organic form and pop conventionality)
Simply, there are some interesting moments in the poem and in what the poem is working to do, and I want to explore.
There is between the first two lines a shift from the descriptive to the active, from a view of a still scene to a participating in action, and there is nothing to give the reader a clue as to the coming shift. To me it reads as a clumsiness, something which perhaps is very visible when the lines are brought together within a quote: "She is sprawled arms akimbo / Yawns and stretches luxuriously." What is happeing is the second line is clashing with the syntactic expectation created by the first line, which would read something like this: "She is sprawled arms akimbo / Yawning and stretching luxuriously." As such, it reads to me as an error in the poem.
It happens again at lines 4 and 5: "she is curled on a lush divan / Shrugs off the cat" (instead of "she is curled on a lush divan / Shrugging off the cat"). That it happens twice cues to me it is not a mistake but an attempt at something structural. Amd there is something worth saving in the play of introducing through the static "is" and then developing through motion. Can the felt clumsiness be cured by creating a structure that sets off the latter type of lines as different from the former? For example:
|
She is sprawled arms akimbo— Yawns and stretches luxuriously In black and white, tosses a satin pillow Or she is curled on a lush divan— Shrugs off the cat Reaches for her cell phone playing Bach |
