Help | About | Suggestions | Alms | Chat [0] | Users [0] | Log In | Join
 Search:
Poem: Submit | Random | Best | Worst | Recent | Comments   

Sandia Plain (Free verse) by Dovina
Thick adobe walls naked and worn shells of lives dots on the desert of Sandia Plain Those heat-holding walls held sun through the night and night through the day to warm by in winter cool in the scorch But modern builders with smarts and studs raised wooden walls covered with hot tin roofs So people bought and thought they were cool having what better people had not mere earth but sheetrock Beside painted siding abandoned homes melt and slough to statues, and Grampa asks why the heater’s on Then a breed of practical souls rediscovered adobe’s good set mud again drying on Sandia Plain Blocks of dried earth ready for stacking in modern adobe walls protecting folks As the ancients knew in winter cold and summer heat revived on Sandia Plain

Up the ladder: The Mirror
Down the ladder: Mountain Gorillas

You must be logged in to leave comments. Vote:

Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
 GraphVotes
10  .. 00
.. 00
.. 10
.. 10
.. 10
.. 00
.. 00
.. 00
.. 00
.. 00
.. 10

Arithmetic Mean: 5.25
Weighted score: 5.029801
Overall Rank: 7345
Posted: June 21, 2005 7:15 PM PDT; Last modified: June 21, 2005 7:15 PM PDT
View voting details
Comments:
[n/a] Bankrupt_Word_Clerk @ 71.129.152.219 | 22-Jun-05/12:37 AM | Reply
are you talking about the Sandia near the Rio Grande?

What you have written makes me wonder about the author and not about the poem itself. Does that make it art? I don't know. I'm trying to figure out your motivation without knowing you. This is a lot of NOT thinking about the above words.

[n/a] Dovina @ 17.255.240.138 > Bankrupt_Word_Clerk | 22-Jun-05/10:29 AM | Reply
The Sandia Plain is a fictitious name for the desert lying west of the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico, east of the Rio Grande.
[6] deleted user @ 81.69.23.196 | 22-Jun-05/3:25 AM | Reply
A bit too detailed, almost reads like a scene from a National Geographic docu.
One 'adobe' too many, look for a synonym
[n/a] Dovina @ 17.255.240.138 > deleted user | 22-Jun-05/10:32 AM | Reply
Sun-dried mud bricks is a synonym, but too long. Yes, it's a documentory. I'd hoped it would also sound poetic, but I guess it doesn't.
[n/a] zodiac @ 212.118.19.171 > Dovina | 23-Jun-05/1:04 AM | Reply
My suggestions:

1) Punctuate.
2) Stop writing all of your sentences the same, and making them all like "Beside painted siding abandoned homes melt and slough to statues etc, etc, etc." I'm at a loss to explain exactly how simplistic and yet totally unnatural your sentence structures are, and how there are a lot better ones. You're just going to say, "But my sentences have so many words! So many subordinate clauses!"
3) Include similes. People like similes. Really, modern poetry's like 1 simile or metaphor per 2 lines.

That's about it. You're as always perfectly entitled to tell me to bug off.
[n/a] Dovina @ 69.175.32.185 > zodiac | 23-Jun-05/11:01 AM | Reply
2) But my sentences have so many words, so many subordinate clauses, so many look-alike elements, so orderly, so neat, so rational, so boring.
[n/a] zodiac @ 212.118.19.91 > Dovina | 24-Jun-05/6:42 AM | Reply
My first thought is that your sentences are basically all simple past formulations with a bunch of adjective or noun phrases added, something like the sentence "The snake, sensuous and sinuous, slipping its tongue on stones, slid silently seesawing its spine in the sage to scout out supper" is really just "The snake slid."

But I don't think that's the case, really. For one, the first sentence in this poem doesn't even meet that description. Actually, it's not even a sentence. I would take a look at verb tenses, though, for starters. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anything other than simple-past and present-participle. Sorry I can't be more help. I've been Arak today, which in addition to be a tasty licorice-flavored liquor is also the Arabic word for "sweat."
[n/a] zodiac @ 212.118.19.91 > zodiac | 24-Jun-05/7:08 AM | Reply
I mean, "I've been DRINKING Arak today". Tee-hee.

Incidentally, the liquor Arak and the country Iraq are derivations of the same root: sweat. In Arabic they're spelled almost identically.
[n/a] Dovina @ 69.175.32.185 > zodiac | 24-Jun-05/8:34 AM | Reply
My first "sentence" has no verb. It's just a series of descriptive phrases, designed to set a scene. The others are, as you say, a bunch of phrases with a verb, maybe boring, but defendabled as prose.
274 view(s)




Track and Plan your submissions ; Read some Comics ; Get Paid for your Poetry
PoemRanker Copyright © 2001 - 2024 - kaolin fire - All Rights Reserved
All poems Copyright © their respective authors
An internet tradition since June 9, 2001