zodiac
replying on Written while Kayaking by Sasha
22 Aug 2005, 11:24 PM
Here are some words that, used today, will not necessarily elevate your poetry:
halberd, doublet, aroint, Moor (meaning 'Negro'), copatain hat, dolt (meaning 'a small dutch coin').
Yes, but have you ever noticed that I'm an atheist and I can spell untenable correctly, while, whatever you believe, you can't? Weird, huh?
Oh, this conversation. You want to not have fun? Enter the word 'belief' or 'faith' in the comment search-o-matic above. I'm not trying to dis. Most of the crap there is mine.
re: "Nor"
Don't you really mean, "They know so very little [about] how a woman feels with wounded knee or poison word, [or about] an earthly hand below her rib"? I mean, you've basically just broken the list of things angels know little about into two sentences. Which is fine enough except the first item in the list starts with 'how', the second starts with 'about', and there's nothing immediately connecting them. It seems just as well to say, "They know so very little how a woman feels with wounded knee or poison word, or/nor an earthly hand below her rib." I don't see what the hand being real has to do with anything. Nor the "about this feeling" line.
Flipping through the Bible, I find angels saying "Go back to your mistress and submit to her" (Gn16:9), "Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here or you will be swept away when the city is punished" (Gn19:15), and "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God." (Lk1:19). If these are platitudes, they're news to me.
re: the last stanza
Even if you meant the last verse as a metaphor for a man (and isn't the whole poem a metaphor for a man????), it still means you've set up this great description of the nature of angels and then without explanation just changed it and made an angel/man do something totally against what we've understood as its nature. Without explanation or anything. And isn't the whole poem a metaphor for a man? Yes, it has to be. You can't write a whole poem about angels, make the angel in the last stanza a man, and not make us think about how the things you've said previously about angels relate to the metaphor-man. So, you've either got "Angels can't ever feel except this one just happened to feel once" or "Men can't ever feel except this one just happened to feel once" or both. Doesn't that strike you as a kind of silly (if, yes, sloppily gratifying) thing to say?
SOLUTIONS: Of course I'm not suggesting you make the woman sleep with an angel any more than the poem suggests she sleeps with an angel (metaphor or not). But you somehow HAVE to make the man/angel not really change its nature. YOU HAVE TO. The easiest answer is the man/angel DOESN'T really feel anything. Hey, that would be kind of like the reality of angels/men, too! Wouldn't that be cool?
Belief in anything is a paradox, and we all do it. Athiests have it the hardest because of their strong, and often untennable, belief. If we were not emotional and walked only by logic, would we still have beliefs? I think we would still believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, for example, and would build our logic of such beliefs. My beliefs, too, are open to continual reconsideration.
Well, it's like this. She gets herself all pumped up and proud like, a kind of PoemRank arogance, but in her real life, and well, she puffes herself up so much, it can't poissibly work out that way in the throws oif life, so she realizes her mistake, admits it, and then figures the whole thing is ironic and very sad.
I clicked on your name and read some of your work...very very good...I am sincerely sorry for my last comment...if I could withdraw the 5 I gave you, I would, and I would submit a 8...keep up the great work...:) Bethy
Immense.
no
Good description. A few unnecessary words, I think. For example, "My senses being woven into cocoons" could be "senses woven into cocoons"