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3 June 2004. Today's excuse for a lazy entry is that I spent over two hours in a dentist's chair this morning. Plus, Florida summer is definitely here. So, I'm just going to quote four poems of mine from my 1995 chapbook (dbpq press), Of Poem, which contains 19 of my solitextual poems, all of them about my alter ego, "Poem." I'd been thinking about my Poem poems because of Mary Veazey's selection of them at her Sticks site, and two days ago wrote about them here. In spite of some of the derogatory remarks, and seemingly derogatory remarks, I made about the poems at Mary's site, I have to say that I quite like them all, and I'm quite capable of not liking poems of mine--of hating them, in fact.
Anyway, out of curiosity, I took a look at Of Poem yesterday. I discovered that I still liked most of them, but had trouble liking the four below:
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Civic Virtue
The sky stayed in the nylon
Back door's
The winded mud.
Poem, lying
Poem lowers himself into
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| Each of these has a phrase or something else I like, and they all express genuine moods of mine. Actually, as I was typing the last of the four for this entry, I fell for it, again. I think it one of my very best. Here's my chief problem with it and the others: they seem too similar to each other, and to others like them, that are better (in my opinion), like these from Of Poem: |
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Venice Afternoon, 1969
From the park bench Poem watches
Poem lay in the ditch
One melt still vanillaed narrowly
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All about the same size, all in about the same mood about similar subject matter, all using the same tricks of the trade. I think the first three use them less well than the others. Frankly, I can't understand the first two--that is, I don't feel I could paraphrase them in the detail I feel I could paraphrase the others. (Note: I could not, nor would I want to, achieve any kind of certain, thorough paraphrase of any of them; I believe a poem should be sufficiently paraphrasable, however, a subject I'll go into some other time.) The third, I think, repeats a too-common theme of mine in these poems: sexual desire, but doesn't do enough with it. And I use almost the same image later, in a much better poem that's at Sticks. Consequently, I believe I'll junk "In Santa Monica," and cannibalize "Civic Virtue" and "A Woman's Red Chores" for use in other poems, or maybe one poem, perhaps about Poem, revisiting his past somewhat as Yeats does in "The Circus Animals' Desertion." Stay tuned.
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