"Our Lady of Ash Wednesday" by Joe Hall -- Verse Daily, 6/23/2013

from The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean)
poem found here

 
first lines:

A third virgin carved from horn and this horn slowly beginning to branch

 

a note on the grammar inherent to a poem

There's a very interesting -- and rather nifty, if I may dare the word -- moment in this poem, in the last two lines. The first couple of times I read the poem, I kept stumbling at the end of the second-to-last line and misreading the move to the third, expecting "Mary, Saint" to be opening up a new clause. And it is a quite natural impulse, as the first part of the line, up to the dash, has no verb. So I am expecting a verb to appear after the dash. But "Mary, Saint shake me useless" is grammatically counter to the poem. Without a comma after "Saint," "Mary, Saint" lists two people; and, of course, they are two names for the same person. There needs to be a comma after "Saint" if "Saint" is going to be a second name for Mary in the clause "Mary, Saint, shake me useless."

Then I looked closer at the poem and noticed the use of capitalization to mark new sentences. "Shake" is capitalized, so the last line is an independent sentence. And the second to last line is then to be read as a verbless phrase, that begins and ends on that line. So the correct reading of the end of the poem was made clear, once I figured it out.

Here's the question: is it ok to have a moment that will naturally cause the reader to misread a line or phrase or whatever, forcing them to stop and figure out how to read it correctly?

"Space Junk" by Lisa Olstein -- Poetry Daily, 6/13/2013

from Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press)
poem found here
 

First lines:
There is a point on every mission
when something must be jettisoned
 

meticulous wording: another exercise in close reading

added the correcting paragraph ("However . . .") — 3/17/2013
reformatted with editing — 8/2/14
 

One of the common faults of much of popular poetry is a failure to pay attention to the words in the poem. This is not a small fault: this is a necessary point in the development of sophistication. A poem is a created thing, a crafted thing. Sloppiness in the wording cannot be permitted: sloppiness destroys the poem. You want your audience to read your work, not gloss over it with passing, inattentive glances. As such, you must pay at least equal attention to the writing the poem as you expect in its reading.

I have seen poets often reject the notion of "seeking the perfect word" (as the phrase was used by Mallarmé and such) as a kind of over-obsessiveness with the wording of a poem: and, generally, when you see or read the idea of searching for the perfect word played out in pop criticism, it is usually played out with such obsessiveness in mind. But that is a false concept of the idea, one whose real purpose is to legitimate a casualness with wording, that any pretty phrasing is sufficient to the writing of a poem.

But it is not sufficient to a poem as an unified whole, as a crafted micrososmos. The falsely chosen or mis-placed word will very readily create disruptions, or contradictions, or dead spots in the ideation of the poem, if not create a reading that is simply pointless. Perfection may be the unattainable goal in poetry — and there is an inherent joke in that phrase in that perfection in a clockworks sense is wholly the wrong direction —, but carefulness is most assuredly the lowest bar, and meticulousness rather the expected aim.

Let's take this poem for examples of how the wrong word or the ill-used word (or phrasing) can weaken a poem.

First, let me break the poem into its sentences:

There is a point on every mission when something must be jettisoned into the thin, black air. Nothing likes to be abandoned, no one likes to be compared. There is a point when the plan lifts from our control panels and shimmers while we go ahead and stare. How long do we call the plan the plan after it disappears? There's no such thing as a few minutes alone. There's no such thing as making up your mind when everything is determined: the rate of our turning, our distance from the sun. I followed you here with my naked eye. You've lost your white glove. It travels now like a comet burning up the sky.

A couple of quick notes: First, technically, grammatically, there should be a semi-colon or a period in the second sentence ("Nothing likes . . .") rather than a comma. But, in practice, with the comma being at the end of the line, and with the poem not using terribly complex sentences, Olstein can get away with it. But, that does not mean that the semi-colon is not a better choice: it is, most definitely so, because (1) line-breaks are not being continually used as a form of punctuation; and (2) since Olstein is writing sentences, the use of the comma comes off as looking like she doesn't have a good grasp of grammar.[FN]

———————————————————- [FN] An important correction to that: the idea of the use of the comma coming off as though Olstein was not good at grammar exists very much because this one poem is the only text before us. If there were others, with clean, well-implemented grammar, it might merely look like a goof. ———————————————————-

Second, sentence 4 ("How long . . .") seems to need to be written with the second "the plan" in quotation marks, like this:

How long do we call the plan "the plan" after it disappears?

Or, you can put the words in italics, that works as well. But it should be marked off in some way. Not marking it off creates reading problems. (On my first two readings of the poem, the sentence would not make sense to me: that is because I was trying to find a way to read with the assuming the current punctuatiing of the sentence was correct. I it was not until I realized that the quotation marks were missing that I caught what was meant with the sentence.)

But let's get back to wording. If you look at the sentences, the poem is three parts (or, two parts, with one part split by the other.) The opening and closing lines are both about the same idea, but the middle lines seem to be doing something on their own. I want to look at the opening and closing sentences first, so let me set them out:

There is a point on every mission when something must be jettisoned into the thin, black air. Nothing likes to be abandoned, no one likes to be compared. I followed you here with my naked eye. You've lost your white glove. It travels now like a comet burning up the sky.

First, there's a small problem with the first line, in that there is no air in space. That is rather the definition of "space": being beyond the layer of air of the planet. (Where, precisely, that is is another question, one that came up with Felix Baumgartner's record freefall.) Also, you don't say that air here on the planet is blue, do you? So you wouldn't say air in space is black. Which may seem nit picking, except consider your reader: this is the first stanza, and already there is a moment that gives reader permission to think "this poet doesn't know what she's talking about fact/terminology-wise," which will lead right to the presumption that "she might not then be very good." That's not a good way to start a poem.[FN]

———————————————————- [FN] To note, this problem in line 3 of the poem makes the comma/semi-colon issue in lines 4 and 5 all the worse, because the reader already has lost some confidence in the quality of the poem. ———————————————————-

Second, the word compare requires at least two things to be compared to each other. "No one likes to be compared" only supplies one: the "no one." As such, the clause is cut short. A reader stumbles over the syntax: "No one likes to be compared to what?" they ask: an answer which is not present in the poem. Now, I think the error here is actually that compare is the wrong word altogether. This is what I read out of "no one like to be compared": that there is supposed to be the idea of "equating" an individual with the mass, with everyone else. That, once a person becomes nothing more than a member of the throng, they lose their value and can be jettisoned without loss. I think that is what was intended by the phrase. (Alternatively, but to the same end, no one likes to be compared to other things in a measure of usefulness or value.) The word compare, however, does not get us there. So I want to rewrited it:

Nothing likes to be abandoned. No one likes being unnamed. (Or, in the alternative: Nothing likes to be abandoned. No one likes being undervalued.)

I think that is closer to the intent. (Whatever the intent, the dangling "compared" — without something anchoring the idea — suffers also simply in that left open it is mostly wrong: generally, people very do like to be compared. By being more specific the phrase would gain direction, greater purpose, and greater energy.)

Third, the "here" in "I followed you here" does not wholly fit the rest of the poem. The glove exists as the parallel to stuff that is jettisoned on a mission. But there is nothing in the poem that establishes "missions" as being "here." In fact, it doesn't make sense, especially in that the glove then is jettisoned into space, which is definitely not "here." So the "here" could be eliminated — it really is an unnecessary word —, leaving

I followed you with my naked eye.

Much tighter: it is now in line with the outer space-oriented ideation of the poem by eliminating an unnecessary and confusing (if not contradictory) idea: "here."

Fourth, a comet does not "burn up the sky": it burns in the sky. But moreso, the phrase "burn up the sky" is one that generally gives a positive description. To saying, for example, "the rocket burned up the sky" is to rather elevate the rocket as being more magnificent, more potent than the all-enveloping sky: the rocket is leaving the sky — and the earth — behind for things much better, things much less quotidian: which is not at all an idea that fits with the word "jettison." So I'll change that as well (and get rid of the unnecessary comma while I'm at it).

Fifth, I see no reason to shift tense with "followed," especially now that "here" is eliminated.

What do we have, now?

There is a point on every mission when something must be jettisoned. Nothing likes to be abandoned. No one likes being unnammed. I follow you with my naked eye. You've lost your white glove. It travels now like a comet burning in the sky.

I'm intentionally ignoring the middle lines right now. I'm also breaking the lines in a manner natural to the sentences. And I use a period in the second stanza to give the two lines equal weight. Hopefully you can see how the changes I've made in these lines is not merely cosmetic, but tightens the poem. The wobbly bits — the errors, the potentially questionable grammar, the syntactic and semantic clashes — are gone. That is the very demonstration of tightening: getting rid of what is not needed; getting rid of both actual — and, even if unjustified, unreconcilably perceived — problems; and getting the ideational elements to work together to build an idea, not splay a number of them here and there hoping that the reader will find the intended thread.

However, what I am absolutely not saying is that the above (i.e., my rewrite) is a good poem. I am only saying it is a text that has been tightened up. In fact, I find it now rather bland. But, just as it has been tightened up, so also can it be fed and flourished and filled out. It is not a bad thing to do, though, in the drafting process, to pare down the tree to its core branches to see just where the strength of the poem lies and through where the primary runs of energy are flowing, and to find issues so as to eliminate or correct them.

 

So now there's that middle bit:

There is a point when the plan lifts from our control panels and shimmers while we go ahead and stare. How long do we call the plan "the plan" after it disappears? There's no such thing as a few minutes alone. There's no such thing as making up your mind when everything is determined: the rate of our turning, our distance from the sun.

Now, how does the "plan" idea interact with the "jettison" idea? Through the word "must" in line 2: if it must be jetissoned, then it is done so according to a plan. So you have a link to with which to start this middle bit. But, what comes from it? to where does it lead in the text? to where does the text lead?

There is a point when the plan lifts from our control panels and shimmers while we go ahead and stare.

Focus first on the word shimmer. What idea is that supposed to generate? There definitely should be something, since it is that word that does the greater part of the ideational work in the sentence; it is that word that most catches the reader's mind. It is the focal point of the sentence, the one part that is not normal, not run-of-the-mill, not a part of the ordinary event: "There is a point when the plan lifts from our control panels while we go ahead and stare." Even the staring is subordinate to the shimmering, since, potentially, that is why they are staring. But what does the shimmering have to do with anything?[FN] And then comes:

How long do we call the plan "the plan" after it disappears?

So the shimmering, floating plan disappears? Why? Even in the abstract, even only with the "if it must be jettisoned, then there must be a plan" idea, why does the plan have to disappear? It's a tautology what's been inserted into the poem. There has to be the creation of conflict, of disruption, so the plan disappears. But, you know, generally, "shimmering" is (again) a positive connotation: you don't generally say something like "glittering, shimmering death!" without giving some explanation to the inherent irony. So, you have another conflict: the positive word "shimmering" with the negative event of the plan sponteously disappearing.

———————————————————- [FN] Curiously, if you at all take the "space" setting into any kind of sci-fi familiarity, saying the plan was "shimmering" brings things to a very different place than where this poem wants to go. And if, in a narrative, the plan was suddenly "shimmering" — that's where most everyone would indeed go. ———————————————————-

So then the third sentence:

There's no such thing as a few minutes alone.

It has me entirely flummoxed. I just do not see how it in any way builds with either the "jettison" or the "plan" ideas. It's a floating mass of "whaaaa??!" in the middle of the poem, something the reader is going to gloss over, not knowing how to deal wth it, and being given no hints to either side.

Finally:

There's no such thing as making up your mind when everything is determined: the rate of our turning, our distance from the sun.

A very poor choice of examples, since they are physical quantities: not something you make up your mind about. The distance between my reading glasses and the screen of the laptop I'm working on is a measurable distance (even if a varying one): there is no "making up your mind" inherent to it. Same with "the rate of turning," or, moreso, "distance from the sun." If Olstein was trying to establish some kind of deterministic universe for the space of this poem, she needed to do it fully, not with a fly-by sentence. It is too big an idea, and an idea that needs to pervade the text. The scene has to be created and the action described with determinism running through it all. She needed to orient it in actual events of choosing, not the measurements that result from the choosing. Instead, we have a weak line, that doesn't really flow out of or into anything with any degree of strength.

Besides, I thought the plan disappeared. Doesn't that mean that there is, now, choice whether to jettison or not? If the plan disappeared, then nothing is, anymore, "determined." And if it is supposed to be determined, why did the plan disappear? If Olstein was intending to create a sense of determinism, shouldn't the plan not be floating, but be solid and unmoveable? shouldn't it do the exact opposite of disappear?

Now, some will argue that the point of this part of the poem is the conflict between the determinism of a plan and the false determinism of a plan no longer present but still identified as "the plan." And, yes, I see those energies too. Except the same conflicts still apply: the idea is not the idea, the idea that governs the whole of the poem (or, at least, the whole of this middle section). Instead, there are three ideas: that the plan determines everything without cease; that the plan disappears and no longer applies; and that the plan has disappeared because it never really was a truly deterministic plan, but the people maintain the plan on their own (except that, they don't really, not according to the text). The words as given have not been told which one, so the poem as a whole suffers in its wobbliness and ambiguities (in the bad sense). Not being careful enough with the words has created an ideational mish-mash.

Which was the point of this demonstration. Hopefully you see it now yourself.

 
•

So: what's left? There is still the question of how the middle part goes with the bookends. I don't honestly know. In fact, to speak of the poem as a whole, I would say it was the middle part that fails the poem, and the whole of it should be cut. It doesn't leave much left from the book ends, so what's left would have to be developed. But there is definitely something there to be developed. Moving from "must jettison" to a glove burning across the sky is an interesting movement indeed.

"For the Next Task, I Turn From the Bench" by Matthew Nienow -- Poetry Daily, 6/5/2013

from Southwest Review (98.2)
poem found here
 

First line:
with one hundred bronze clench nails
 

exploring "write what you know," the info dump, and other bits

— reformatted, with some editing 8/2/2014
 

There's things I like about this poem; some things I don't like. I do like that it does not pause to overtly state what is going on — the building of a small boat — but only gives you sufficient clues: specifically, "clench nail," and "strakes." You will see a phrase in fiction writing circles, especially imaginative fiction: the "info dump." An info dump is a moment where the action of a narrative comes to a stop so that the writer can give the reader information on elements of what is going on. You see this very frequently in science fiction, in TV and film as much as in books, and you can understand why, when much of the reality in the text is fictional. You can't, for example, continually use the phrase "dilithium crystals" without at some point clueing the reader in on what it means. More often than not, the writers try to conceal the dump through dialogue. And, far too often, it results in a moment where the characters are suddenly in the shadow of a stupid cloud: "So, you gonna use that hammer, Jim?" "Yeah, Jack. I'm going to use it to force nails into wood." "Cool." Usually, it's about that dumb, once you think about it, and once you start paying attention. And just because it is two starship engineers talking about the plastofisten microcomodumaker doesn't mean they are not speaking, in context, the blatantly obvious to each other. (Once you start watching for them, it becomes quite funny to see the info dumps: all the actors are forced to stand still in an absurd game of Red Light/Green Light waiting for the explanatory exposition to end.)

Which is why, in fiction, an info dump is a bad thing.[FN] And so also in poetry. And yet it happens all the time: a full stop in the poem to tell the reader what is going on. Had "For the Next Task" stopped to tell the reader it was a boat, it would have been an info dump. And unnecessay, as the center of action here is quite clear. All you need is a little dictionary work.

—————————————- [FN] Curiously, it is usually the fact that info dumps are unnecessary to the poem. Great writing recognizes the reader should almost never need an info dump: they usually can get the information they need in context. If they can't (and need to), that's a problem. Indeed, you will find most of the time info dumps are far less about the text than they are about one of two things: (1) the writer hand feeding readers too lazy to make the effort (which is a bad thing); and (2) a writer showing off their own imagination/knowledge (which is also a bad thing, when the text comes to a stop for it to happen). —————————————-

As I've said before: you are allowed to demand effort on the part of the reader. More importantly, you are expected to demand effort on the part of the reader. Because if you poem takes no effort to read, there really is nothing to be gained in the reading, is there? (And "effort," here, does not mean only looking things up: it means actively reading.)

Another like: I really like the phrase "wide mouth mason." (Though, it probably should be "wide-mouth" or "wide-mouthed.")

But now, some of what I don't like. And it may seem I am being a bit overly nit-picky at points; but, to be honest, a great poem could take it.

I don't like that the poem is written as a single sentence broken up only by commas. It is such a long sentence it rather loses control of itself. It ends very far away from where it begins, grammatically speaking. Unfortunately, to be honest, I'm having a very difficult time putting into typed words the wobblies I see, so let me just set out the sentence like this:

For the next task,     I turn from the bench         with one hundred bronze clench nails in a wide mouth mason,         the bucking iron's finger gap smooth upon my hand,         the ball-peen longing for its sway,             to meet each nail's head gently,             to send the slender tooth into its bread,             whereupon the head is backed by weighted hand,                 that the tapered spike may be driven in reverse,                     the soft-tapping slow dance of the working bend,                 that the golden nail may re-enter the wood from which it came,                 & holdfast two strakes together,                     that the many may share a single name.

Hopefully you can hear how by about the appearance of "soft-tapping" the sentence has begun to lose control of itelf. Some of the problem lies in that there is very little parallelism in the lists. Throw upon that the not always tight syntax and semantics (I'm not saying non-standard, I'm saying wobbly), and you have a rather unwieldy thing. Stepping outside of the specific issues, my question is: if you are writing poetry, why not use lines to help the reader manage that sentence? (Or different punctuation?) For me, this poem hides an unwieldy sentence in its arbitrary line breaks, and, by making it hard to read smoothly because of the line breaks, it makes it easier to hide its unwieldiness. Which is so often the case with contemporary free verse: the poet thinks they are writing lines, but they are not paying attention to how the lines work with (or against) the flow of words, and not always at all paying attention to that flow of words. So you end up with a lot of clumsiness created (and then hidden) by the free verse inattentiveness.

A lot of my other issues with this poem lie in its wording. Perhaps some of them are more influenced by taste than by poetics, but it might be worth pointing them out just to talk about them, to let you weigh them for yourself within your own poetic ear. There's a lot to be gained in trying things out.

I don't much like the title. "For the Next Task" sounds too much like "For My Next Trick," and carries a similar nuance. Neither fit the tone of the poem. Perhaps, simply, "Next"? (Or anything at all? Is it important to the poem that it is "next"?)

I very much don't like the missing commas in such as the first line: "with one hundred bronze clench nails" which should be "with one hundred, bronze clench nails." That seems like a little thing, but stringing out adjectives like that only creates difficulties in the reading (unless, you are very carefully crafting), especially when the poem is a long sentence.

I don't like the misuse of words and the resulting clashes in ideation like when "to send the slender tooth into its bread" is followed up on the next line with "that tapered spike." "Bread" is going for gentle, "spike" is rather quite the opposite. This one isn't taste: it's poor form. You have to be careful of this in your writing. When you create a clash between two ideas, the reader has only three paths: ignore one, ignore the other, ignore them both. Your ideation should build up, not be a series of independent moments. When it's the latter, that's when you are in threat of clashes like this one. And you can't generate depth when your words are at odds.

Another spot of this is the word "reverse." When you clench a nail, you are not driving it back, in "reverse" direction. You're more bending it over. The phrase "driving it in reverse" very much more sounds like you're hammering the nail back through so that you can pull it out. Another is that the nail begins as "bronze" and ends as "golden." You can't use a metallic color to describe a metal that is already identified as another metal. Just can't. The colors are too tied to the names of the metal.

Is "re-enter the wood from which it came" redundant?

I don't like the ampersand in the third to last line, but I've discussed that just a couple posts ago (here).

I like "sway," in that there is the idea that a hammer has sway over a nail. But it doesn't work in this context, because "swaying" is very much something a hammer should not be doing. If you are wielding a hammer and it is swaying, you're doing it wrong. (Or you need to stop because you are tired.)

Which leads us, first to "strakes," which I think is being misused here; and then, finally, to "ball-peen" and "write what you know." (Note that I am going to be making hypotheticals about the author in this bit.)

Here's the problem: a ball-been hammer is used in metalworking. You don't use a ball-peen to drive in nails: it's not made to do that, and if you do use it you're increasing the chance of screwing things up by quite a bit.

That said, we bring in "write what you know," one of the many workshopisms you hear in creative writing discussion, one of the many I have come to dislike. And why do I dislike it? Because it's bumper-sticker creative writing, and, bumper-sticker anything is almost always misused, ill-used, bad-habit-forming, badly-conceived, or otherwise detrimental to developing sophistication. Bizarrely, "write what you know" has somehow become a restrictive dicta of workshop mentality. "To write successfully, you must write from out of who you are. You must write what you know." Which means that if the origin of this little poem was listening to a friend of a friend talk about small ship-building, or reading a scene in a novel, or some such, and Nienow knew nothing about small ship-building when he got the idea, then he should not have written the poem, because he would not be writing "what he knew."

Which is, on its face, nonsense. Rather, what "write what you know" should tell you is that if you want to write about something outside your wheelhouse, then learn about it first. If you don't learn about it, you write superficially, and your text ends up superficial and shallow (if not flat out silly). Depth comes out of knowledge. It doesn't equal knowledge, but it definitely comes out of it.

Now, I, myself, take this to extremes, perhaps; but it works very well for me. For example, say I have decided to write a Keats-like, formally stanzaed poem about Hansel and Gretel. If it is the first time I had tried to write a Keats-like, formallly stanzaed poem, I would definitily (1) read, many times, some of Keats's own poetry of the nature, and study what he does with stanzas. I would also very likely (2) see if I can find a book that talks about Keats's use of stanzas: after all, the easiest way to learn about something is to ask someone who knows about that something.

Finally, (3) I will hunt down everything I can about Hansel and Gretel, including versions of the tale, other poems about the tale, and even the libretto of Englebert Humperdinck's opera. I want to see what other people have done. I want to see variations. I also want to see how they did it so I can learn from those people who have walked this path before.

Another peculiar thing that shows up in writing circles, though not so overtly: the idea that if I am writing about X, I am supposed to do it wholly on my own. Looking at what other people did is cheating. Which is complete and utter nonsense. If I am going to write a scene of, say, a ship leaving a dry-dock, I am, yes, going to research the practical aspects of it. But I am also going to see if I can find other people who have written about the same thing, so I can learn from them . . . . and do it better than they did.

Now, like I said, I tend to do far more research than I need, but I really enjoy researching. But, in truth, the number of times I have discovered some little gem of knowledge that just makes the work is more than enough to justify the effort. You can't be a good writer without knowing: both about your subject, about writing about your subject, and about the form in which you are writing.

But I digress.

So. "Ball-peen" here is a mistake, and a big one, because we are supposed to be accepting that the person in this poem knows what they are doing.

But let's flip it about. Let's suppose that the origin of this poem is someone Nienow knows personally — or, even, is about Nienow himself — and they do in fact use a ball-peen hammer.

It doesn't change anything. The claim "but that is really what they do" is justification for nothing in a text that is not reportage. You still have to "write what you know": which is to say, in this instance, learn enough about the subject so you know when elements in the real-life source are idiosyncratic — or, even, wrongly done. So then you can be writing to what the reader is going to read, not to what "is really real." And you can avoid what unavoidably comes off as an error. You still have to know that a ball-peen hammer is meant to be used with metalworking, not for driving nails. And you should know that a reader that knows anything about hammers is going to know that: using "ball-peen" in your poem is going to look wrong, look like a mistake on the writer's part, and decrease greatly the reader's faith in the writer's abilities.

So maybe not "write what you know"? Maybe instead know what you write.

 
•

One final note: what I absolutely hate about this poem: the word my (and the "I" in the title). It is an absolutely unnecessary element to the poem. And the presence of it actually changes the ideation of the poem in a detrimental way. The primary energies of the poem — even the extended sentence nature of it — points the reader to the last phrase: "that the many may share a single name" (and to the "holdfast" that sets up that phrase). By adding the first person to the poem, the poem becomes no longer about that final phrase, but about the person building the ship. Why? Because there is no reason for the first person to be in the poem in the first place. So when the first person shows up (primarily through the "my") it demands and gathers a huge share of the energies that should be being channeled to that summing phrase. With the "my" the poem is now divided in its purposes and aims, and loses for it.

I would argue this point is not one of taste, but one of poetics and semantics; and that the poem would be far better if rewritten without that first person.

"Here Be Monsters" by Katherine Coles -- Verse Daily, 5/3/2013

from The Earth Is Not Flat
poem found here

 

First lines:
We could fall off one
Edge or another. Water

 

playing with wording and ideation

— reformatted 9/30/15

I am glad this one showed up because I was in the mood for something like this. Let's just explore wording: both to query the wording given, and to play around with alternatives.

Now, addressing the poem as a whole I should say I don't think it works. I don't think the two primary ideas are successfully brought together into organic unity: those ideas being the opening idea of a kind of mythical, mappa mundi-type edge of the world, and that of "As soon as we arrive at any point / We're headed out the other side." (On their face they are about opposite to each other.) And even on the smaller scale, thought by thought, the poem doesn't meld. "unknown/ But fully imagined" never gels with "headed out to the other side": there is nothing between mediating the two ideas. Ideationally, I find the poem wholly out of control.

For example, in the first lines the poem says "we could." It is establishing a situation. It is scene-setting. And yet, can you follow the poem through to "at any point / We're headed out the other side" without conveniently forgetting that set scene? The poem begins by asserting the idea of "there is no beyond," but ends with the conclusion of there is always a beyond. Why begin, so assertively, with an "edge of the world" idea if you are going to move to its exact opposite: a world that never ends? The one does not inform the other the way it is presented.

My guess is really the intent was only to bring in the idea of the terra incognita, of "beyond here, we don't know," and the "edge of the world" slipped in. But even with the terra incognita idea it rather falls to the floor, mostly unrealized, by two-thirds through the poem. Which is too bad, because the idea of turning endless same-ness into a land of imagined monsters is an interesting idea.

And how does "Where surface will not hold / We must shatter" fit into anything that precedes it? What is so important in a surface that will not hold? I am guessing that what is being aimed at is where the unknown will not hold then the unknown must be shattered: except that still really has no union with the rest of the poem, especially a poem that seems to try to turn the unknown into an endless sameness: in such a realm there is nothing to shatter.

I might make more jots to that end here and there; but, I really want to play a little with words, so:

We could fall off one / Edge or another: Note that there is a difference between "one edge or another" and "one edge or the other": the latter only has two edges, which means the former has multiple edges. I am not sure how that idea of multiple edges fits in the poem. And then water "roils . . . as if it would throw itself over": if that means "over the edge" -- which, in context, it does seem to so -- then you have only one edge. She how clashes in ideas are being established?

Now, the idea comes to me "throw itself over" could be meant to mean something in the sense of "flipping itself over" -- which might be a little easier to make fit in context in that it is simply increasing the energies of "roil." But, the whole of those energies have no use in the rest of the poem. Especially, when, at the end, the poem is describing a sea of ice, and endless sameness. No roiling there. In fact, it's (again) the opposite: it is a world that is trying "to hold."

and glacier / Meets sea by pushing into / Erosion's demand and response.: I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean, or even where that is trying to go. How did we get from a roiling sea to glaciatic erosion? I can come up with erosion's demand: which would be "erosion." But what is erosion's response?

Fissure / Could swallow a body whole / Then close on itself, sucking its tongue: See the failure to meld? We've moved from the edge of the world, to the sea (which could maybe be at the end of the world but is not described as such, and with "as if" pretty much pulls wholly away therefrom), to a glacier (very much not the edge of the world), and then to a fissure: which is off the sea, on land (so obviouslly we were not at the edge of the world, and is described as a whole, not just an edge, so there's both sides, and it's no longer the end of the world but merely a crack. And the sea's no where to be found.

But, let's play:

Fissures -- they'll swallow a body whole.

That sounds like a "got milk" commercial.

A fissure will swallow you whole, Suck you down and close tight. Fissures like to swallow you And suck upon your passing taste.

Eh. You know, I have a hard time doing something with "close in on itself" because it seems only to repeat "swallow." (After all, the difference between falling into something and being swallowed by something is the latter carries the sense of that something closing upon you.) And I have no idea what to do with "sucking it's tongue." I guess that's better than "with a num-num-num," but that's about it.

Feel / The earth's end old maps . . . . : This is my favorite part. There are fun words and ideas to play with here, but the execution is not that great. In part, it's contextual. For one thing, "earth" is not capitalized, so it's the end of the land -- which is a problem since we started off at sea. Now, knowing how sloppy Verse Daily is, it could very well be it was supposed to be "Earth." But even then, "tooth and claw" puts us back on land.

Now, perhaps someone by now is saying "it's on a boat approaching the land": which is probably what is meant. Except that that idea is not continuous in the poem. That idea is an "oooohhhh, I get what you were trying to do" idea. But, still, to the words:

[. . .] Feel The earth's end old maps Elaborate with what's unknown But fully imagined, voracious Tooth and claw White to the bone.

I see nothing gained in "feel." (Everything it has to offer already exists in that the lines are written and meant to be read.)

The Earth's end. Old maps elaborate with What's unknown and fully imagined --        The voracious,        The tooth, the claw, and white bones. Old maps elaborate at the Earth's end With the imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

("white, white" because it's snow-world; and if we move the "end" down, the lines are smoother)

Old maps elaborate at the Earth's End with the imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

(let's complete the tercet:)

Old maps elaborate at the Earth's End with the weirdly imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

(Yes, obviously it's not free verse anymore. But (1) you can have metered verse in the middle of free verse (if you don't know that, you need to seriously expand your reading); (2) why pass up on something aurally lovely when the opportunity arises?; and (3) it's far more interesting than prose-with-line breaks. Just answer me: how is it that all these poets out there are writing lines of poetry, yet so very few of them are writing lines? Yes, this poem uses line breaks a touch as grammar; but that's it. And that's not very much. Especially when you consider all that was missed out on.)

Just beyond the horizon . . . .: Another mess. The words just before are solid objects (tooth, claw, bone), so when the poem says "right over / There" the ideation is that of look at a thing right over there. (Well, duh.) Yet, immediately after, the entire idea shifts from the thing that is over there to "trouble trying to picture." Put it in a sentence:

Just beyond the horizon, right over there, is the trouble trying to picture our progress straight and flat.

See how the sentence changes what it's about half way through? how "over there is the trouble" is a thing that is over there, but "the trouble trying" is an abstract concept of difficulty that occurs in a person's head? and how, because of it, the sentence -- and the lines in the poem -- makes no sense whatsoever?

Just beyond the horizon, right over there, is what causes the trouble with our trying to picture our progress straight and flat.

That makes much more sense. It still doesn't flow out of what preceded it, though. The sentence before was about the idea of a very tangible if very unknown world before them. Now, all of a sudden, the entire poem jumps tracks and tries to be about that it is difficult to picture "progress straight and flat." What at all does that have to do with "tooth and claw"? Not good. Not good at all. And, then, "is what causes the trouble with our trying to picture" is not exactly elevated language. So instead we have in our poem something more "poetic" that doesn't make much sense. No wonder the poem's a mess.

I also want to point out the issue with the missing comma after "There." The poem as a whole tries to establish a grammar where line ends can suffice as a comma (as with "At the wave's top[,] / The body hangs weightless"). Which is wholly legitimate. But you have to nail it: both in adhering to it, and in creating the energies at the line breaks that reinforce the usage. (On rereading, the reader should be naturally hearing those line breaks-as-commas.) Unfortunately, there are a couple places in this poem where the grammar weakens the system, as with the missing comma here. And the one missing in "It runs out[,] the body after all." And there is a general weakness in that the poem gives off the quality that the line breaks were mostly arbitrary, anyway, so let's continue.

"Right over there" sucks, so I'm killing it:

Not before the horizon, or at the horizon, But beyond it -- There lies the trouble Of picturing progress straight and flat.

Let's bring in an idea from the end of the poem:

Up to the horizon, difficulty        In the ice that strives to hold. Beyond, trouble        In picturing progress straight and flat.

Hopefully you see here yet another ideational clash: if, at the end of the poem, there's ice before them that they are breaking through, how is it difficult to imagine flat beyond the horizon? I could continue, but I think you get the point. The far-too-looseness of the poem's ideas gives even discussing it the risk of falling into absurdity. And the 'moral' at the last third of the poem does little help to resolve any of it. "As soon as we arrive at any point / We're headed out the other side." How is that not a simple description of movement? It's rather like a Dummies verson of one of Zeno's koans: "as soon as you get there, you're leaving." (The opposite of "wherever you go, there you are"?)

And, really, that is my point here. That you are able to not be tricked by the assumption "this is a published, therefore it is good," and are able to see for yourself what is going on in the poem. Which is, here, a lot of chaos. Because, believe me, when, say, Eliot published The Waste Land, he very much was hoping you would see for yoursel, and experience for yourself his efforts.

Anyway, really, I mostly wanted to play with the "Earth's edge" lines. They're the best bit this lump of strings has to offer.