RiverNotch's Capsule Reviews! Part Two
Not Enough
In terms of polish and emotion, it's there. There's not enough of a picture as to what exactly is going on, but the piece seems wary enough to drop some markers of how the speaker's mind is working at the moment: "This indescribable feeling of wanting to monopolize you." That said, it's not quite enough, and there's enough only-platonic media in the world that the piece becomes forgettable. If, in this case, the lack of specificity is not a detriment to getting the point across, it is a detriment to making the piece worth more than its vulgar point.
Animal Babies
The piece would lack in polish, if the whole was written in sentences; instead, even the transition from commas to periods feels deliberate. As for a point, my main issue is that this doesn't have any close-enough relationship whatsoever with its stated themes of grief and redemption: if the fusion of childbirth, carnivory, and carnal activity was supposed to be a metaphor for something, what that something is is totally obscured.
Of course, my concern with these reviews is less about relating pieces to the official themes, and more about taking them on for what they themselves are trying to say. Like I said, I don't know if this piece is trying to say something, but it definitely shows me something, both with the objects the words convey and the sounds they deliver. And I suspect that with this pretty picture, I might be able to find a message -- later.
Internal Inferno
The Shakespearean sonnet is really composed of three things: rhyme scheme, meter, and argument. In terms of rhyme, no problems here -- the one imperfect rhyme is no sin in these modern-modern times, and the one deviation from the scheme feels intentional (cruel justice literally corrupting the sonnet). In terms of meter and argument, however...
Iambic pentameter (IP) is tied to the Shakespearean sonnet mostly because Shakey popularized it, and he was writing in a time when that rhythm was in vogue. I'm not sure if its proponents way back when had any conscious justification for it, but now people claim it keeps things clean, it follows regular patterns of speech, or even it mimics the rhythms of the heart -- anyway, I'm not here to justify tradition. The problem is that your piece doesn't do away with it entirely: lines 1 and 3, for example, are reasonably IP, while lines 2 and 4 are made up mostly of anapests.
But meter requires only polish; argument requires revision. The first quatrain compares revenge to a flame; the second states that this flame cannot be smothered by seeking "righteous, cruel justice"; the third states that it can be doused with a "cold ablution"; and the couplet makes a jump by saying that forgiveness is what can snuff out the fire, ie that forgiveness is that cold ablution?
Well, it is a jump, but something like John Donne's "The Baite" pursues its metaphor with few recollections of what it all literally means until the end, where what seems like a jump is actually just the author leaving the mental connections to the reader, turning the piece into something of a pleasurable puzzle. The real problem with your argumentation is that, no, it does not pursue the original metaphor very well -- how can justice smother a flame, anyway?
There's also the imagery chosen being comparatively trite (revenge as "a fire, burning in my heart / reaching a fever pitch and it's bringing me out the dark", if you catch my drift), some bits of wisdom being questionable (no alternatives to "righteous, cruel justice" are present in the poem, suggesting that forgiveness offers no justice), and the more consistent bits of the metaphor being underdeveloped ("the wash, though tough, is something better": how is it tough to pour water over a flame, especially when compared to....well, whatever stanza two has for an image), but their solutions will come once the mixed metaphor is resolved.
Awakening
ego te absolvo = I absolve you
The image we start with is interesting. I don't know what salt and peony petals are supposed to symbolize, but the altar and the confessional are engaging. At this point, the lack of punctuation damns it: I feel like punctuation could really clarify how the reader should hear the speaker.
The next stanza is more inconsistent. "tar-black loathing" is not an object, especially when compared to "altar", "booth", or "petals"; it's definitely not something to "retch". The line that follows more refers to the "tar", so I'd imagine just removing "black", "loathing", and even "my" would do. And then, the last lines of the stanza -- isn't Halimeda an alga?
The third stanza is even worse. "Halite incandescent beneath the lights" -- so salt that's light beneath other lights? that's a very useless image. "Or refract through the isometrics" -- isometrics? As in the exercise? Or the type of perspective? How can an exercise or a geometric type of perspective "refract"...someone?
And the fourth and fifth stanzas...well, they say something, but they're no longer connected to the parts that were both consistent and interesting.
It's all a bit of a mess. A mess to work with, but still a mess. My reading is that the speaker is discovering herself -- sexually, perhaps, in trying to escape religious constraints (the last lines of the third stanza really read like sex) -- or, although because of the general absence of a "you" (the you of the fourth stanza is never developed; the speaker asking if that you understands he is forgiven doesn't really count, as that says more about the speaker than about the addressed) this reading is rather remote, perhaps the speaker is forgiving someone of some sexual-romantic hiccup. The reading can't be strong, however, until the poem can organize itself.
"Empty Letters"
A pity this one didn't receive a title. Most untitled poems are either fragments, or never intended to be published, and I'd count this special event as a form of publishing. This is another piece that doesn't really need punctuation -- even when everything is in sentences, the piece is so short that it never adopts that additional thought pattern. Nor does it need much in the way of imagery: instead, the speaker has a distinct-enough voice, or the whole hinges on a subtle cleverness. That said, there's not much to get out of this piece.
For this batch of reviews, I seemed to talk a lot about rhythm. Unlike my previous note on specificity, as far as I know this one isn't as codified in English poetry; for this one, I'm synthesizing studies on English prosody and Japanese haiku. As for my sources in general, it's really hard to point to anything specific. My favorite bit of criticism is by Northrop Frye, in particular his Anatomy of Criticism; he's basically my source for genre, and possibly the true origin of this pet theory on rhythm.
Anyway, English poetry generally has three kinds of rhythm: a rhythm of images, a rhythm of thoughts, and a rhythm of sounds. The last is the most obvious, yet modern (online) novices seem to fail at it the most, or even forsake it altogether. That is a little disappointing, since sonics are part of the reason why free verse was invented in the first place: free verse was either a response to the regularity of most earlier verse, or an attempt at inventing a new type of meter altogether. In fact, by understanding the subtleties of prosody, in other words the means by which rhyme and meter can convey meaning, one will get a far better understanding of why, say, Walt Whitman always sounds bigger than himself, or why Louise Gluck's bare-bones style has punch.
The first can perhaps be compared to the cinematic idea of montage, where a series of images may develop entirely new meanings by the very sequence in which they appear. This is a little dependent on the second, though, since the manner by which thoughts flow out of the text also determines which images are emphasized.
The rhythm of thought may be developed by sound, with some thoughts requiring certain meters, and vice versa; think, for instance, why Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" in blank verse instead of as a ballad. For free verse, however, the rhythm of thought is mainly developed by three devices: the line, the stanza, and, yes, punctuation.
There are many things to consider when working with lines. Usually, the most emphasized word in a line is the last one, followed by the first. This, in turn, makes line length something to watch out for: the longer the line, the fewer things stick out. This then determines just how much tension there is in a piece: a series of short lines, for instance, makes the piece read somewhat fragmented, while a series of long lines can make it really boring. Then there is the choice of breaking up ideas and images: a broken idea or image can be startling, such as when the idea is somehow oxymoronic, or it can greatly weaken the idea by not allowing it to exist as a whole in the reader's mind.
Stanzas, I think, feel more natural, in part because there's less to consider when planning them out, in part because they have a clear prose equivalent. The thing to remember with the stanza, I'd say, is the same thing to remember with the paragraph: each stanza has to be united by some main idea.
Punctuation is the most devilish. Like in prose, punctuation can easily alter the meaning of a sentence: think "Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog" versus "Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking, her family, and her dog". When it comes to closely reading a poem, however, even when the punctuation has the same function, it can mean something, with em dashes providing space where semicolons couldn't, for example. Punctuation can also emphasize words and develop tension in the same manner as the line, with all kinds of punctuation providing pause: take, for example, just how breathless Molly Bloom sounds in the barely-punctuated soliloquy that ends Ulysses.
There are, of course, other details to think about when developing a rhythm of thoughts -- word choice, for example, with rarer words providing greater pause -- and I barely touched all things auditory, but the point is all of these little details are important, especially when compared to the more flexible genre of prose. Poetry, I think, is something to be read carefully, with meaning coming from every direction; and even if the point of most poetry is to express a strong feeling, a mastery of all these little details could only make that feeling stronger, or last longer, or express more useful things than just that one feeling that, however new to the writer, is probably nothing new to the audience.
