----- Original Message -----
From: "sharon brogan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 12:37 PM
Subject: another snap -- July 11, 02008
> Quite young, I broke my arm.
> Old now, still the scar remains,
> a pale and silent remnant, like
> small white stitches from wrist
> past elbow. They used a saw
> to remove the cast.
>
> It screamed. Your leaving
> was like an invisible limb ripped
> from my body, torn flesh, no neat
> scalpel wound. I held myself
> together. I healed. All that's left
> is the suggestion of a scar, a pallid
>
> emptiness. I wake in the night
> to write this, in the breeze
> of the ceiling fan. It's a dark night,
> a slight moon. Chill approaches
> the record low for this hot month
> by human reckoning. I have
>
> softened, comfort is my pleasure
> now, passion a fading mark
> in memory, sensuality its remnant.
> Deep mattresses; the sweetness
> of strawberries on tart lemon cake;
> the full scent of grass, just mowed,
>
> lying down on its own fresh self;
> the soft underwater feel of a tree-
> shaded room. Even the smoke from
> mountain fires, the taste of ashes
> in my mouth. Even that pleases me,
> reminds me that I live.
>
>
> [This poem is for Timothy Kittleson, on his birthday. It's not *about*
> Tim,
> but it's *for* him.]
>
> --
>
What poetry is supposed to do, I think, is to create an experience (whether
based on the poet's own experience or entirely imagined) and allow the
reader to have it. What a wide prevalent kind of narcissistic verse does
instead is to say: Look at me having this experience. Pity my suffering!
Admire my bearing up! Be in awe of my sensitivity, my sensuality, how much
I have spiritually gleaned from the event! The "I" interposes itself
between the reader and his or her possible imaginative experience. The
"you" who is often addressed in this kind of poem provides another buffer
between poet and reader. Whoever that "you" is, h/s isn't someone the
reader knows; the poet is saying, in effect, I'm not talking to you, reader,
but to that "you." The only experience this kind of mainstream poem leaves
the reader is that of observing the "I" (and the "you"); and however
interesting they might otherwise be, they all tend, like poems of this sort,
to look alike. Further: imagery here is auxiliary to abstraction; the poem
seems to think that abstractions are what "really" communicate. "comfort,"
"passion," "sensuality." If the cast, and the saw removing it, had been
allowed to speak for themselves, as images should, the reader could have
derived a "you," a failed relationship, a complex mood from them. --- This
judgment will probably seem terribly harsh, judgmental, intellectualized,
etc., but hey, it's how I feel. If I'd said "What poetry is supposed to do
is to create ..." I might have been accused of trying to impose a
dead-white-male law. As it stands, what I've said is "just my opinion" ...
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