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Inbetween Lovers/Blueprint (Glosa) by Ranger

(quatrain taken from 'Blueprint' by god'swife; "Dream wife" from 'Penny Loafer Blues' by ALChemy) Tonight I hate your hands and their craft I cannot sleep as you do Pressed against the cool walls Of sudden and strange houses I should not secretly confess like this Love with the lips, you always insisted But then again, you prefer emotions to be audible And I, ever the silent I Have invisible wings wrapped about you all the time Remarkable pain killer to take with every draught That bears you up, away into the arms of some foreign sun When early gold returns new lore will be spun Although I'm prepared to accept it may seem like I laugh Tonight I hate your hands and their craft Your kiss, I'd guess, is as fleeting as your scarlet dress I have no such flamenco flame to scorch me as I rest I sleep alone. Does it make me seem strong in Solitude? Mine is a scarf to cloak this voice but leave the body longing How many times I have bargained, drunk with God To take this lust - I'll plead again tomorrow Take my heart, take my rib Bring me the dream wife I've glimpsed in print But don't think of me at night when you have much to prove I cannot sleep as you do Many evenings die, spent waiting for your Knight Oblivious to the irony; a tall shadow splits in directional light Ghostly spectrum - I admit my favourite shade is jealous Of those skeletons of your offering whom you took inside Too physical to hide Too visible to avoid recall Then you tell me I'm the only one who protects you through every storm And you reduce me just a little more With each new figure summoned to burn, to blaze, to fall Pressed against the cool walls In awe of the enchantment you engender Days fold, stretch, decrease and end remembered As tallied photographs of wasted air which does not thrill I wish I was that Knight of myth, of sword, of skill For he would be a blinding tempest wrapped in silver swirl Whereas I am just the heir within this shirt and trouser hold Who will watch the current make your banner wave And if love is unknown, then I ought not say How I hate that the mystery you espouse is Of sudden and strange houses

ecargo 20-Apr-06/6:54 AM
If by "ordinary" language you mean simple language--well, to an extent, you're already doing that. And it's WHY you've improved so much in my opinion. Even this poem--yes, there are places where you 'commit acts of poetry' (a capital crime), but much of it is pretty simply stated. Most of the best lines are, anyway: "How many times I have bargained, drunk with God
To take this lust - I'll plead again tomorrow."

Here's what Louise Gluck, the former Poet Laureate in the U.S., said on the topic of ordinary--well, simple--language.

"The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like "incarnadine." This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors – from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind. Not surprisingly, the sort of sentence I was drawn to, which reflected these tastes and native habit of mind, was paradox, which has the added advantage of nicely rescuing the dogmatic nature from a too moralizing rhetoric."

[From Louise Glück, "Education of the Poet," Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1994) 4-5.]

Gluck's not the final word on the topic, obviously--she's talking about her own experience, and certainly there's room for variation and experimentation. But there's something to be said for creating magic from common cloth. The trick to it is making simple, ordinary language seem fresh and your own, and using all the other poetic techniques--meter and the way the words play together--to make it something special. That's something not too many people can pull off, IMO--but it's worth striving for, I think.




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