poemranker ::Sandia Plain by Dovina

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Free verse № 127644

Sandia Plain

by Dovina

Member since 2004 · Posted 21 Jun 2005 · 9 comments

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

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9 comments

[n/a] Bankrupt_Word_Clerk 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 › 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 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 › 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 › 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 › 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 › 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 › 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 › 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.