Talk about mixed feelings, Frederick. I'm both pleased and
regretful to have written a poem that so much could be said
about.
Thanks.
Hal
"Calvin Coolidge didn't say much and
when he did he didn't say much."
--Will Rogers
Halvard Johnson
================
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On Feb 22, 2008, at 9:36 AM, Frederick Pollack wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Halvard Johnson" <[log in to unmask]
> >
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 2:21 PM
> Subject: Sonnet: Your Lips Soft as Lard
>
>
>> Sonnet: Your Lips Soft as Lard
>>
>> Apricot ears pinned to your oblate head, hair
>> balled in a bun at the nape of your neck. Eyes
>> like dungeons, lids at half-mast. Oh, stop now.
>>
>> That last was too much, too redolent of swampy
>> waters near the shore of the sea, birds stopping
>> to feed in that migratory way that they have.
>>
>> Blinded by recalitrant moon emerging from pen-
>> umbral maroonity. What next (or what nest) then
>> my luv, my lubricatory evasion, my turtlefox?
>>
>> Intelligent satellites wanting to know, b4
>> more toxic spray comes wafting our way.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Hal
>>
>
> Some of your Sonnets pass me by. Not only the allusions but the
> conceptual framework of the allusions shift so rapidly that the
> poems seem musclebound; I can find no way into them. Not so here.
> The key, I thinik, is "Eyes / like dungeons." That technique of
> showing the attractiveness of the beloved (and the intensity of
> one's love) by *negative comparisons goes back to the Renaissance
> ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" etc.). Here that love
> seems almost desperate; speaker is trapped in it, in her, as if in a
> dungeon. The "framework shift" comes with using "half-mast" rather
> than, say, a portcullis or steel door, as "dungeon" seems to
> require. "Mast" suggests "waters," as the speaker hmself says; his
> self-consciousness about what he is doing (and feeling) is signalled
> by "Oh, stop now. // That last was too much." Both the love-object
> and the speaker's emotion are transposed into nature - which never
> seems quite to leave the "dungeon": the waters are "swampy," the
> moon "recalcitrant." The self-consciousness of "Oh, stop now" leads
> to a flip, dismissive tone ("that migratory way they have" -- note:
> I would drop the second "that" in that line -- and "maroonity").
> But the use of this tone points up the self-consciousness rather
> than dispels it; applying it to otherwise beautiful nature-scenes
> parallels what the first stanza does to the image of the beloved.
> Lines 8 and 9 apply the tone directly to her. She is speaker's
> "luv," not love; his "lubricatory evasion" - is she the evasion or
> is the evasion his, and which of them is "lubricated? A "turtlefox"
> seems both a slow and harmless, and a cunning or even menacing,
> creature. The last stanza transposes this love/self-consciousness
> conflict above watery nature to a yet vaster "dungeon": outer
> space. And the flip, dismissive tone culminates in "b4" - text-
> messaging shorthand, rather than actual language. Both speaker and
> the beloved are "intelligent satellites wanting to know." Both -
> and language, and nature - are menaced by "toxic spray," which the
> "waters" have become. The poem does what I like poems to do: see the
> personal and interpersonal realm as part of a larger reality and
> larger conflicts.
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