Can you not even understand that
i might feel so?
Or stretch your taught imagination,
and conceive, my angry nature,
and believe that I might think this?
You cannot- you will not
even try- but choose to take
offence and pass me by.
Grow angry at the words
and blaze a thought
onto those good, but twisted,
plain emotions you
were taught.
Feeling me but asymmetric weed
you haul me to the compost
and make fire-feed
Author notes
Another piece for Emergences. This is more in the line of a personal statement than an observation though.
This is very very rough so any and all criticisim is welcome, I feel like it has some possibilities but unsure.
Comments
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This definitely feels like a first draft. First: never let a first draft cause you to question the potential that a poem has, always leave that kind of questioning for the second and subsequent drafts.
"Grow angry at the words
and stake a thought
on good, but twisted,
plain emotions you
were taught."
This passage is particularly awkward. Perhaps you could play around with ways to communicate the same idea without using passive voice
. Rewarded 8
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Also...
Sorry! Forgot to mention this... You might want to read 'The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmanm'.
It is an record of a discussion at a psychoanalysis/holocaust conference which has some interesting resonances with this poem. To take a quote from the text:
"I clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical and at the same time the only possible operative attitude. Blindness has to be understood here as the purest mode of looking, of the gaze, of the only way to not turn away from a reality which is literally blinding...." -
I always think it a good sign when a poem takes a couple of reads to really understand it (as long as you do eventually understand). This poem has that quality: Seeming obscurity but eventually clarity.
A great title. It is such an aggressive sound isn't it?! Vetch. A scrambling herbaceous plant that somehow makes one think of being sick.
A well tuned ending. The full rhyme between weed and feed has such a sense of completion and finality, of dismissal rather than an attempt to understand, which of course, is what the poem is about.
Improvements?! Part of me wants to know a little more about the obscure 'so' that the speaker thinks and feels, but then part of the skill of the poem is that it makes the reader complicit with the 'you' that is being addressed by the very act of refusing to tell, just as the 'you' is refusing to understand/imagine.
I would, however, be tempted to emphasize this relationship a little more by including a few more personal pronouns:
'Or stretch your taught imagination
and conceive my angry nature'
It makes the whole thing a little more confrontational - you will notice I skipped the parenthesis, I think the fact that the addressee is has little/no imagination is implied by the beautiful image of it being taught (I am thinking of a pun on TAUT (stretched tight) and TORT (wrong-doing)). By going on to explain that image in the parenthesis I think you dull it slightly.
I'm not sure I understand the 'good but twisted plain emotions you were taught'... could you explain?!
Big fan of the subtle rhymes that don't fall at the end of lines, a technique I use a lot myself, 'conceive' and 'believe' a fine example. Also like your use of line breaks:
You cannot - you will not
even try...
It is very skillful - the implication that the addressee simply 'cannot/will not' is undermined by their own lack of effort, this is made much stronger by the delay in this revelation created by the line break.
Watch the capital letters at the beginning of lines after fullstops/question marks!
Nice work!
Liam. Rewarded 8
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Hey,
thanks so much for the critique, exactly what I needed for this poem. Lots of good practical suggestions (all of which you may notice I took)
I'm so glad someone got the taught/taut pun, I couldn't decide which to use because I meant both but dicided since I'd used stretched the implication of the unused 'taut' was there.
In any case you asked about the 'good but plain emotions' line.
I was trying to convey the thought (though I felt I did it awkwardly) that the very basic set of emotions and patterns of thought learned and held to by the object of the poem are not bad or wrong in and of themselves. Thusly stressing that the "wrongness" is in this persons inability to empathize, 'think out of the box', or go past the essentials.
I hope that makes it clearer, if not, or if you have questions about anything else let me know. And by all means, if you have any ideas as to how that thought might be conveyed more clearly, tell me.
Again, thanks for the critique.
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