27 March 2006

ADVANCED composition.

this is a poem that i wrote which will appear in Kutztowns literary&arts magazine (once Shooflys rival) ESSENCE.

it is called ADVANCED composition.


transportable identity conducting middle-management disciplined bells timing response in regimented pieces to fill puzzles skillfully echoed in hollowed molded systems purpose (propaganda) make believe chocolate land constructed on microfilms UNPACKED projected flowers elapsed growing docile, nurtured, under halogen suns—edible--malleable steel skeletons pinned together in frozen January air to digibits binary
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa 01001111010010011
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instant access opinionated blog spot lily pad melting Monet under acrylic bridges search engined reading counting 74 lily pads (making sense?) crane lifted twenty-foot-two-ton-comfort-zoned-commercial-cinder-blocked white painted square with smart classroomed (moveable Mahoney) desks inscribed graffited--Bob Marley the original Rasta-- cut both and off limits questioned brevity interviewed five year foreman recursively explaining the sinkhole sucking tons of concrete sucking ideas into ambiguous blackholed roommates unresponsive will the middle ground no man land entrenched All Quiet on the Western Front barbed wire blocking butterflight bells ring men run to basement bomb shelters (students in unpanicked lines leave the building as if life was a) drilled hole under Gaza Strips arms dealers rich with $32000 homes painted teal sipping tea frustrating failures in class spaces high school castes information deliver barriers broken understanding fired emailed seamless efficient transmitted extracted from tiny pictures of autonomous machines.
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3 comments:

Stephen Imperato said...

prose poetry can be fun to work with because it allows you to think in sentences rather than phrases. the reader can go through the piece until he hits punctuation, or he can slow things down to a crawl and pore over every word and its implications. but sometimes, in non-professional prose poetry, what winds up coming out is just a block of words impossible to dig into. i remember characterizing my reading of a classmate's prose poem as "like dissecting a brick." you've made efforts to avoid that brick-like solidification here with the zeroes and ones in between paragraphs, but the paragraphs themselves are very dense and very busy. the lines dont read like sentences. this may just as well be in shorter lines and set up like a conventional poem, it might even help the illustration. but having it set up in this form with paragraphs gives it a pace that you can attain in no alternative way. it begs to be speed-read. even the speedbump in between the stanzas has a way of speeding it up. the repetition of the zeroes and ones lends itself to a quick scan, but when read out loud, you have to just speed through them because they arent actually words and they feel like they should just be abbreviated in the mind. when reading it to oneself, the zeroes and ones dont even warrant a thorough reading through, just the acknowledgement of their presence. this piece demands speed, and the cost of that speed is the meaning of your words. it's a challenge to read it slowly and appreciate the words when the form is so peppy and energetic. the punctuation, in some places, works as a speed regulator, but for the most part, it feels like a playground slide just wiped down with wax paper--slick and speedy. gravity pulls my eyes naturally down to the end of this piece and the few bumps along the way dont slow me down, they just redirect my freefall. think of the way that you used parentheses here. do they interrupt the flow of the piece or do they add to the momentum? think if your use of numbers. do they fit in with the rest of the verbiage? think of your punctuation. do you use commas and periods as you would in a sentence or are you just more selective in your employment of them?
there is so much to say about this piece. but the more i look at it, its flaws become its strengths and its strengths become its mistakes.

28/3/06 12:00 AM
silverline said...

haha
it is a real mess that is punctuated more heavily in drafts with great spaces between wordings that is auto undone when posted to the blog. i feel that they at least clue the reader into the pace of it, but mostly it is a brick, a flying brick that is.

28/3/06 6:41 PM
Stephen Imperato said...

the brick comment wasn't really meant to apply to your piece in particular. it was just to illustrate the common pitfalls of prose poetry. my first experiments with prose poetry last semester always wound up looking like a brick with no flow or pacing. either that or it just looked like misdirected prose. you're onto something with the pacing of this one, but the words are so intricate and complex that the pace forced my eye through it without really getting all of it. it's a piece with good residual value though. re-reading it and trying to pick it apart has its rewards, so see what you can do to capitalize on its speed without compromising its first-time-through readability.

28/3/06 6:58 PM

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