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Taller Girl (Free verse) by lastobelus

Taller Girl whirled her skirt in segregated circles, drawing boundaries around her with it with her hair twirled out in black circles and her arms flung out that skirt coming up.up. towards them, wooshing out and drawing her space unusually wide as she was unusually tall as if she would somehow.turtle.down in it. 1.one drum and a guitar and then another and under.guitar.drum.thunder. her circling hair, her face comes cover comes turning under that silk flung black.Once.coming around and the hair flying up (I saw) turtled brows and closed blacklined eyes, mouth turned down in (studied) Oblivion.but the other.drum.come- ing around had an opened eye, (the) red lips turning up under the flying glimpse of hair so I saw that she saw that I saw her.drum. Then went whirling away into the center .drum.thump.un.til I saw only the tips of her hair flying over the heads of.all.the.(drum).others and heard her stamping boots.

zodiac 8-Feb-04/11:00 AM
It just didn't represent drumming to me. I wouldn't know what to do reading this aloud, and on the page it just looks like page-trickery. What about another representation? Would that fly? Like "up! up! towards them..." or "under-guitar-drum-thunder". Dashes always do it for me, obviously. And line breaks. The suggestion to split some of the lines into beats has some merit to it. Or - WAIT! Maybe write some lines out like bars of music with big spaces for measures or something! Crazy? Maybe just crazy enough to work!

Again, these are just suggestions, but I'm a freak for taking punctuation the way Webster intended it and can't help reading periods as sentence ends.

Another idea: more drum imagery. Use the words beat, backbeat, something onomatopoetic (which always makes people look for the rhythmical structures elsewhere.) Nentwined, I think, does a decently good job with that here (www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=78791). Is there room in the poem for a drummer? That can clue people in - again, readers are overwilling to look for that stuff if they have a clue it's in there. I think I might've gotten the rhythm to this (which on a second reading was definitely there) if I'd had more clues and less distraction from those periods. There's a really strong natural beat here, enough (almost) to suggest itself.




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