The Poetry Daily Critique: narration

Statement of Philosophy

A site for exploration and discussion about verse, poetics, the aesthetic, and creative writing in general.

Because there is a profound difference between writing something to be read and writing something worth reading; and in that difference might beauty be found.

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Showing posts with label narration. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

"Salt Water Ducks" by Cleopatra Mathis -- Verse Daily, 1/30/13

from Book of Dogs (Sarabande Books)
poem found here

first lines:
The tide ignores its limits, all last night
climbing over the railing, battering the door.

fortissimo! then not

-- reformatted 11/24/2013

Isn’t there a shift in time and tense between the primary verbs in line one (“ignores”) and line three (“flew”)? Just asking.

All else I want to say is: Storm! Rage! Crashing! Thunder! Chaos! ducks gotta eat.

Kind of radical drop off in tenor, there, no? Four lines of storm ideation and then “ducks have to eat”? I hope it was supposed to be funny, because I laughed.

Question: did that even need to be said? Could you not just ignore the urge to narrate and simply ideate ducks in a squall?

See my previous post on today’s Poetry Daily offering, “Rapprochement,” as to why I stop there.

My Method
This is meant to be a site of discussion, not argument and proof. This is not criticism of an authoritarian, didactic nature, of the kind where you are told what a poem "means," what you are supposed to read out of a poem, but criticism as means to provoke thought about poems, poetry, and literature; criticism as a means to develop discerning thought about poetry; criticism as an attempt to develop an aesthetic conversation about poetry that serves also — if not primarily — the writers of aesthetic literature. Indeed, this project was begun after finding a profound absence within the web of just that kind of discourse.