23 March 2006

Excerpts from 20

This is a sequence poem i am working on.
Here are a few pieces of it i am fond of.

2)

take out
aaaaaaaa edit analyzed words structures
fireworks
aaaaaaaa reminders in faded yellow pages
stuck
aaaaaaaa floor ward & memory bound
by heater

3)

set phone on vibrate
or
create constraints of living:
eat only non-meat
shower daily
brush teeth more
or not

4)

mandatory bathroom stops
after drinking tea
one cup in the morning
one cup afternoon
two cups for study
rinse repeat

8)

can you do this in one sitting
or
do you need to get up to go to the bathroom

11)

hobbies include
biting fingernails till
hands hurt
&
roaming with empty stomach
(dinosaur steps)
only to find
nothing to eat

12)

save work frequently aaaaa (automated response)
but
never look back aaaaaaaaa (habitual tendency)
at
yesterdays remembrances a (memory lies)
of
real vanilla smiles

13)

In a panic attack yesterday Kutztown University student Christopher Tiefel grabbed a red emergency phone and screamed "Help me Batman!"
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2 comments:

ehammelshaver said...

man, 11 is the best! i loooove the dinosaur image! very vivid snippits of life. good contrasts.

25/3/06 12:51 PM
Stephen Imperato said...

i like the parenthetical stanza, #12. it reads right to left in full lines, but it reads top to bottom on columns also. another page out of erin mouré's book, i think. i studied a lot of poerty like that last semester and its really nice to see what can be created by positioning your words just so. yours is very polished though. each phrase feels self-contained and what's in parentheses illuminates the same themes of the preceding phrase. its polished and easily understood. but when using a form like that with the columns its fun and effective to be a little nonsensical in your phrase pairings. instead of having the phrase in parentheses describe and illuminate the other one, try opposing images inside and outside of the parentheses and see what their comparison brings about.
or maybe you could ger rid of the words inbetween. the but, of, at words dont really need to be there. they just make the thoughts ring more like a sentence.
its a form that you might want to duplicate in your sequence here. it can have a lot of milage in it if you use it in different ways and this one is a great place to start.
i love the line "real vanilla smiles".
and "help me batman" is a good one too, but i question the choice to use that element of autobiography. you, as a person, are not explicitly present elsewhere in this poem. other stanzas are about you and the things that you do and feel, but you're never named or given an identity outright. i wonder if its a good idea to identify yourself, or anyone for that matter, so late in the poem as stanza 13. autobiography in fiction it one thing. it needs to be masked by a neutral and believeable literary voice. but autobiography in poetry is something im not used to dealing with and it seems impossible to mask it if you refer to yourself by name. i love the humor of the stanza and i love how it reads like a newspaper blurb, but try leaving the name out.

26/3/06 3:18 PM

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