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Ending (Free verse) by Dovina

Gravel road still bends its way, old peach trees by its side, dying now, those whips I planted, for want of pruning, lack of care. Silver maples around our house still shade an overgrown yard. But square depression marks the place where basement was, burned house above, our songs, our bed, pushed over limestone ledge where once I sat and thought. An overhanging rock my roof, Flynn,s Creek my vision’s treat, now buried with all those thoughts beneath my house’s bones. It all held promise at his leaving. Always it would come again, Before I came and saw the end With peach trees along the road. I picked a wormy half-sized fruit Bit and tasted a bitter reward.

zodiac 4-Nov-04/12:17 AM
How do you know the "you" in my comments was really you - Dovina - and not a purely rhetorical "you", maybe even a character I've created named "you", to whom, in the interest of indirectness and otherwise poetickal abstractness I direct all my comments?

That aside (and probably utterly untrue and irrelevant - who knows?) the points of my earlier comment were that:

1) you answered richa's comment that your poems tend to make unsupportable assertions by making a bunch of unsupportable assertions and saying "so there";

2) a useful trick for making unsupportable assertions in a poem is to place a character in the poem who makes the assertions;

3) your poems are self-righteous and doubt-free.

The last bit, I'll admit now, was a little over the top. I'm sorry. But, seriously, I was thinking about the last poem of yours I'd read, "A Better God", and just kind of connecting it with a vague idea I've gotten about you from earlier poems. I might have better said, "You might consider being careful to make sure your poems don't sound self-righteous. The feeling I get from your poems of a rather childish and naive certainty, for me inseparable from the sense I get of you, Dovina, whether or not it's some elaborately constructed narrative voice, is actually painful to me." Better?

Anyways, your response was a general, unsupportable and laughably wrong attack on my person, having practically nothing to do with my comment. After reading it, I checked the last half-dozen times I'd made useful and practical suggestions on your poems, and saw you'd regularly ignored the point of my comments and just said something irrelevant or insulting. So I guess my saying, "As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment" isn't so far off the mark.

PS-You just think it's "childishly thought out" because I said "fucking" - twice.

Anyhoo my characterization of you didn't have anything to do with your narratorial voice or whatever the rest of your comment's on about. Good catch!!!




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