zodiac5 Feb 2004

I'm glad you sent me to this one. I remember seeing it a while ago and being tickled. You've got that ee cummings knack for random assocation (even between weird adjectives and their nouns) in your early posts that I can't approximate. I get the sense it was beaten out of you by months of Rancoring, but I wish you had kept some of it, even if hidden, and it should be a little more hidden.

Still, that quality is poetic (ie, what's going on OUT THERE) and a bag of chips. An image like "god-red little footsies" would be welcome in a more structured poem. That's the kind of association that's pulp-making.

The start, too, with "Then" is very strong. The change to 'we' in the second, um, sentence is off-putting, along with 'go go go amber glint' which I can't make refer to anything satisfying for me.

"TV commercial Faulkner doom"? I hope you know now to use concepts like that in a meaningful and more-or-less grammatically correct way.

And then it devolves into similar stream-of-consciousness Joycean crap for a while. I've known one person who liked to read Joyce and I suspect she was lying.

Then it comes back. After 'ok, laugh' I'm with you again. In manuscript I see the s-of-c lines broken up a little more and italicized. You could pull them off that way. Maybe it should all be broken up more. At least into stanzas. I'm big on stanzas.

Crystalline has 2 ls, then 1. Then it just needs to say about 3 more things than it does. At least, to be pulpwood-style. I'm fine with things that just paint a scene, like this. But the good ones that seem to do that, when you break them open, you find more inside. There's some of that here but a little short of enough. Is that it? Very Beat and cummings, which is its downfall. Hide that a little better and you're ace.