PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

There's much for me to: There's much for me to contemplate here. I want to come back and say more at a later moment. But, for now, let me just say how much I loved the phrase "shadowless answer". That really stuck to my bones. Now I'm trying to unravel all that is in your last two lines. :)

We can move so fast, that: We can move so fast, that human interaction can be just a blur. A smudge on the glass of our day. One that we can mechanically and without hesitation wipe away, lacking proper pause. I'm still in a long process of personal discovery: is more lonely to walk in a crowd of strangers, or through a quiet woodland? I can only say that, following long stays in a place that could pass for wilderness, upon my temporary returns to city life I've been far more exceptional at not rubbing away the smudge. Perhaps, at doing that "discreet dance". I've unlearned a habit.   I really enjoyed this write, and especially appreciate how it has offered to aid my self reflection.  

This poem took me back to a: This poem took me back to a very pleasant time in my adolescence, when my then best friend and I engaged in a contest (for the bragging rights, nothing more) of writing long short stories for extra credit in our English class; same teacher, differemt hours.  His story ran to eight pages, and was called "Return Of The Nazi's In The Year 2001," and featured a suspended animation machine not just for one, but for thousands.  However, he did not have the good sense to dispose of them as you did in your seventh line, and his "long" short story was left clumsily open-ended and without closure of any kind.  I have not thought about that episode for a long time, but your poem revived the memory.  That "contest" was my first foray into the shallows of what I hoped would become a lengthy literary experience (although I was then concerned only with prose, not with verse); and, voila!, here I am today with a devotion to verse and a huge dislike of prose.  Thanks for prompting my memories, and I am very glad that, in the world of your story, WWIII was averted.

Escape: Waning? Hmmm...you have a point. .  

Death: The loved die. The livng remember. Old graveyards - no one remembered. Sad. ~S~        

I thank you humbly for your: I thank you humbly for your great compliment.  I will tell you of something I suspected in high school---where the reading selections were quite rigidly fixed---and then found confirmation in college, where more latitude was provided.  A great poem will inspire and elicit a good, detailed, and thoughtful response.  A poem that is not to the reader's liking, or is not congenial, receives only a cursory response.  When I took the epic course in January 1978 (there's that month again), I wrote very cursory and flat essays about The Iliad and The Hobbit; but I wrote very detailed, even verbose, responses to The Aeneid and Paradise Lost.  I think that part of the comment process is to share, not only with the poet but with other readers, why and how the poem works.  Your poems, for example, which contain a whole Cosmology which, like the Universe, seems to be ever expanding into further insights, elicits---even demands (in the best way)---an elaborate response.  Your poems remind me of a play, The Satin Slipper, by the Poet and Ambassador, Paul Claudel.  That play is so artistically elaborate, and so beautifully complex, that it requires a performance time of approximately twelve hours:  and it contains all kinds of theological cosmology, vast horizons and vista, and yet the most exquisitely emotional conversations between pairs of characters.  Consequently, the scholarly and critical response to it is much larger, and even more controversial, than to his much shorter other plays.  Or, to use another metaphor, in the spring of 1979, I first saw the rings of Saturn through the observatory telescope on campus at my college.  The telescope provided a closeness, and such detail, that it seemed like it was right overhead.  That was almost forty-two years ago, and I am still excited by the experience; the profundity of the view just overwhelmed me and I am still being overwelmed.  That is what this poem, and your entire collection, is like.  The centerpiece poems---and different readers will choose different centerpieces---bring all the others together in the splendid grandeur of a constellation.  Generations from now, you work is going to be delighting, challenging, and guiding scholars and grad students alike; and they will debate and discuss your place in the literary canon.  Let's face it:  I know I am not going to live long enough to see that, but I already have had the vision of it (not in a mystic way, but just plain common sense), and these comments allow me to participate in that process by anticipation.  In some ways, and I say this gladly, your Poetry is the vindication of all the reading I have done since 1975---when I first began to wonder, what is it like to watch a classical Poetry form itself, and gather itself together, before my very eyes?  What is it like to watch a star coalesce out of the swirls and bright colors of a nebula?  So it is with reading your Poetry.