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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-04/12:36 AM
Now that you are actually talking about voices/whatever, here goes: In the poems of yours I've read recently, I don't get the impression you're creating some narrating character. Call me blind, but I HAVE spent the last seven years (ie, longer than you've been out of middle school) talking about narrating voices, so I guess I ought to know as well as anyone. Regardless, a neat trick to say something which could be read as self-righteousness is to obviously place a character in the poem to say it. That's all.

This doesn't have anything to do with "any views that I do not personally hold", or whatever. Actually, it's better for views you DO personally hold, but are for some reason or another unsupportable, self-righteous, or open to attack. With views you don't personally hold it's safer, since people will be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and recognise crazy or ill-informed views as crazy and ill-informed. If you wrote a poem that went, for example,

Walking through Colour Town,

Down streets smelling of Chinamen,
Down streets smelling of Mexicans,
Down streets smelling of Blacks,
Down streets smelling of Jews,

I feel an unbearable ache
And wonder

Which street is yours?

- people will probably not really think you're a racist, but rather that you're making fun of racists. Am I wrong?

Sure you can put whatever the hell kind of view you want in the first person and make it a character narrating - or claim it is later - but it's a lot harder, and you don't need harder now. If that WERE the tack you wanted to take, I'd say you'd need to work to distance your persona - Dovina's - from the narrator's. An easy way to do that is to insert some doubt or flaw in the narrator's persona that the reader is unlikely to attribute to you, Dovina - because they'll think it's too honest even for Confessional Poetry (or whatever) or because it actually casts some doubt on your - Dovina's - real assertions. I mean like here:

http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=85208

or here

http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=83918

Anyway, it's just a suggestion. Considering that the moral certainty/whatever I've seen or imagined seeing in your poems recently is a terribly unhealthy thing for a real young lady to have, I hope you'll at least try it. Here are some decent examples:

http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=98137
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=85647
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=113633




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