Estill Pollock
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Posts: 6
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In "Words in an Antique Dictionary", and indeed in the other pieces following, there is the impression of poetry emerging - the presence of poetry - though as yet still only in part realized. Poetry at its core is a craft of distillation and refinement, and requires from both poet and reader a particular, if at times, grudging, responsibility to language.
In the opening line, we note the cliche 'sheer facade', to be followed by a confusion as to whether or not the reference is to persons arranged alphabetically in vast rooms, or to persons in rooms that are themselves arranged alphabetically. Someone needs to decide.
In the closing words of this stanza, ‘places of origin’, has about it the whiff of the Customs Officer – how about ‘home’, it having greater resonance?
In the opening line of the next stanza, it is ironic to note that when the word ‘home(y)’ is in fact employed, it is linked as another cliché to ‘touch’. Further, is this a catalogue poem? A feast of fricatives froths famously in F….
In the next poem, "Plunge", neither adverbial ice reference defines the quality of displacement inferred in the lines here. The month? Degrees Celsius?
Water cannot be considered an ‘impartial agent’ in this case, as reference has been made to it two lines earlier as both rotten and virginal. N.B. There is no long vowel in the word plunge.
In the third stanza, it is unclear in what way the action of ‘plunging’ repeatedly into one’s lover might be understood to be considerate. My own acquaintance with French nationals might be more accurately described as troubled, but I was young and impressionable, and she was tres beautiful.
In the final passage we find a 'quivering springboard of fortune' -Warning! Warning! Purple Patch: approach with caution!
In the last piece, "Snowy Afternoon", it cannot be determined in the stanzas that follow that after an encounter with a person ‘licensed’ to interpret personal idiosyncrasies from skull shapes, one might in some way have been ‘cured’ of haunting-by-dandruff (snowy/dandruff - geddit?).
There is a deal of slippery penile imagery that would better serve the reader, as it meets the matter of poetry more directly than this homage to the ‘calamus prairies of Kansas Territory’. The linking of trout to salmon from the second to third stanza could be built on more effectively if the writer was less prone to O, as the latter tendency does not appear to be meant slyly, and is too self-regarding as a passage to pass as a postmodern reference
The reference to 'essence of clear-cut National forest' completely baffled me.
How so ‘clear cut’? If as by definition non-complex, the ungainly complexity of the stanza catches its heel on the first hurdle.
If as a tangential reference to loggers felling trees, that a forest is national or otherwise probably matters little, unless we are to infer from it homoerotic undertones of big loggers and stiff trees as incentives in a new government training scheme.
These are workshop poems, this not to belittle the function of poetry workshops or indeed the poems here. But as readers taking the time to open a journal and to allow ourselves to become part of the process of poetry, there is a rightful expectation of poetry as a blade's edge, rather than the flat.
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