I don’t have time for this poem.
Slot in other words for poem: person, moment.
What does that show?
Now leave out the slot. What is the essential aspect? Is it the object of the subject? Why the restlessness? Where is one speculatively rushing to? What is one doing to oneself by such dismissal of irrelevant or “done” data?
Sometimes certain poems are not at our wavelength. No amount of time on it of our willful, wailful, insistent volition would bring us up, down, sped or slowed to its amplitude.
A different hour or decade and boom, we can go at its speed, or thin-slice it with passion or impartiality. At some points, a poem just doesn’t.
We are at too much of a gap, or too much of an overlap to hear. Too same-same, too different and we feel there is no news or we are being messed with by a meaning being deliberately banal or deliberately difficult.
What’s that really about, the flip away from?
What underlies that closure snap, the frustration when a poem doesn’t fit the brain?
Is it the impatience to get the next hit of excitement, therefore a habit of passivity of being entertained as we like, when we like. A kind of being spoiled? Something that doesn’t click should be welcome to keep the brain nimble, rather than resented for not accommodating us the readers by reinforcing our envelop nor pushing it. The vanity of our envelop wants to be recognized. Selfish self wants a payoff on its own terms.
To step out of the envelop and make a departure, a jog to a different reference point, a rupture from it being about our narration and extend ourselves into getting into the headspace of another, disorienting as it is, to be imagine the backformations and transformations that would lead to the poem before, the reasons for this communication being salient to another and another’s groups.
That might be more useful and edifying than reading more variations on the same orchestra. More tiring. More isolating. Potentially unrewarding, but there might just be a payoff.
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Sometimes trouble hides and won’t say where.
The subconscious usually doesn’t quit on it.
Some day something shows. I keep notes in a
dusty directory. The keys to check back with
later. It slowly digests. It can reveal other
things. Keys and quiet. (my guess).
It could be a gateway.
everything is a gateway. if one doesn’t want to go in a direction, that can be good cause to not. or good cause to go that way against your resistance to figure out the thing and the self.
when a poem really makes me glaze over, especially if it esteemed, I somtimes go to the trouble to write a rebuttal to it in the same style and form, and in that way I can see the structure and devices and intentions of the original in the close reading of disassembling it.
I want to avoid reading only what I can clearly hear, although relish finding that rarity. Knowing what is outside my hearing range allows me to not be enclosed by stifling self-affirming world views.
Oops…I slipped over to ‘about writing one.’
Sorry..the commitment must have seemed
too much. I do glaze regularly, to be honest..
sometimes on the lost, but often on the
predictable.
The best ones have one one foot in what
I know and the other stepping out into
a strange place. A dock to swim from.
Rebuttals can lead cool places.
I worry about the connection and let
them age like cheese. Touchy crowds.
Rae Armantrout’s rebuttal to Duran Duran
in the April “Poetry” is a gas. Razor wit.
yes, not retort or arguing with person, a poetic rebuttal as in response in echoed form, like mirror speech. distortions of style and personality come in but the engagement is to try to get into that person’s shoes.
read the Duran Duran but I don’t have the point of reference of the band to bounce it off of.
It was sort of a feminist deconstruction of Duran
Duran, not blunt and polemic, but a psych:
got into the song writer’s shoes. When I first
heard the tune (Rio) I winced. A great find.
The superset I suppose you could call ‘riffing’.