zodiac8 Feb 2004

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.