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Taller Girl

Member since 2003 · Posted 9 Mar 2003 · Edited 7 Feb 2004 · 13 comments

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.

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3 votes so far. Yours would make 4.3 votes so far

13 comments

[n/a] ==Doylum 9-Mar-03/3:18 PM Reply

Obvious juvenile comment about last line in first verse and 6th line second verse. Superlatives and exclmation marks!!!!11111 oh and some 11111's
Are you a gerrrrman?
Obvious comment about last line!!!!
Yippeee

[n/a] lastobelus › ==Doylum 9-Mar-03/3:36 PM Reply

yeah line 9 + 15 bug me, but I'm an amateur 'n' amateurs don't edit

dunno what you mean about the last line, please clarify!

I ain't no german. Just live there.

[7] Shardik 9-Mar-03/4:12 PM Reply

The end was not as strong as i imagined, but it started and arced quite well. 7.

[n/a] lastobelus › Shardik 9-Mar-03/4:51 PM Reply

all my poems fizzle. I blame it on Attention Deficit Disorder.

[9] daniella 11-Mar-03/10:28 PM Reply

i too am a sucker for illiterations, and you are there!

[n/a] Tibbs 20-Mar-03/12:05 PM Reply

this would be my edit:

taller girl whirled her skirt
in segregated circles
drawing boundaries all around her with it,
while her hair lashed out in little black laraits
and, her long arms aloft,
that skirt floated up towards them,
wooshing out and drawing her space unusually wide,
as she was unusually tall
as if she could eclipse herself in it

one drum and one guitar
and then another
and under
her circling hair, her face comes,
cover comes under that silken black
and once more coming ?round
with her hair flying up
I saw furled brows and closed, black-lined eyes
and a mouth turned down in studied oblivion;
but another coming around
had an opened eye and red upturned lips
under the flying glimpse of hair,
so that I saw that she saw
that I saw her,

and then she whirled away
into the center
until I saw only the fringe of her hair
flying over the heads of all the others,
and my moment, crushed
under her stamping boots

[n/a] lastobelus › Tibbs 7-Feb-04/7:03 PM Reply

Whimsy is, by its very nature, uncrushable.

[7] zodiac 8-Feb-04/10:05 AM Reply

.aff.e.cta.tion. It. ta.kesa.way fro..........m good/lines%like "her skirt in segregated circles" and 'turtling' down. 7 until you improve.

[n/a] lastobelus › zodiac 8-Feb-04/10:33 AM Reply

shit, I made it worse???? oops.

but teacher, the periods have a purpose! I'm drumming! It's not affectation if it's for a reason, is it? Ok, I confess, I'm reading him again.

Should I ditch almost all the cummingsesqueness but leave S.2. L.2 as it stands? can I get away with keeping S1L6 too? The rest I can concede as affectation, including the brackets, and happily toss.

[7] zodiac › lastobelus 8-Feb-04/11:00 AM Reply

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.

[7] zodiac › zodiac 8-Feb-04/11:09 AM Reply

One more quibble: segregating circles would be more accurate; but I almost like segregated better, whether it makes sense or not. Something to think about, at any rate.

[n/a] lastobelus › zodiac 15-Feb-04/4:58 PM Reply

I will attack this again some time in the next few weeks. Maybe I'll even post it on eratosphere, if I'm feeling masochistic.

Reading again I see some very elementary problems. I musta been on crack when I edited & reposted this.

[n/a] deleted user 9-Feb-04/1:15 PM Reply

I don't believe in segregation. I couldn't finish it.