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Daily Notes on Poetry
16 November 2004. I've been responding to Dan Schneider's criticism of a poem I workshopped here 12 June, "Criticism's Origin," but it's getting late, so I'm just going to post my poem and a revision of it that I came up with today:
Criticism's Origins
Back when Poem was mostly feathers,
Criticism inter-branched darkly under him.
Piffling roundly absent to resin
shortly after Poem tightened into vocality,
Criticism mastered himself calibrated
along the loam and ensign
of his iron.
Alwaysed thereafter in the reddest invisibilities
of Poem's vocation, he spryed diagrams
of concord splamorously beyond
the crinch of the minders
raucously misadvertising their inability
to increase down to from
or or,
as taste.
Poem followed the diagrams eleven-twelfths unknowingly,
struggling them into re-knowings
not even the loudest art-as-handmaid-of-autocracy
could studge anyone nimbled at all
from divining,
induteously.
Criticism's Origins
Back when Poem was mostly feathers,
Criticism inter-branched darkly under him,
piffling inaudibly.
Shortly after Poem finally tightened into vocality,
Criticism mastered himself calibrated
along the loam and ensign
of his iron.
Alwaysed thereafter in the leanest ether
of Poem's vocation, he spryed his underbrain
with diagrams of concord splamorously beyond
the crinch of the minders
raucously misadvertising their inability
to increase down to from
or or,
as taste.
Poem followed the diagrams eleven-twelfths unknowingly,
struggling them into re-knowings
not even the loudest minders
could studge anyone nimbled at all
from divining,
induteously.
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I dropped, "Piffling roundly absent to resin," except its first word, because it now made no sense to me, except for its first word. Yes, everything else in the poem made sense to me--or enough sense. Another change was to "in the reddest invisibilities," for that seemed to me a paradox for the sake of paradox; I also didn't want to over-use "red," which I think is in more than a few of my other poems. My new wording, "in the leanest ether," feels right to me, but who knows whether I'll keep it or not.
I at first added "advocate of" to "art-as-handmaid-of-autocracy" because I felt it was grammatically necessary, but then I noticed that I was first smiting one kind of critic, the "minders," then a second kind, these advocates. Better for focus that I keep the villains of the piece the minders--although I love that "art-as-handmaid-of-autocracy" locution. I can use it somewhere else, though, I'm sure. The other change I made, the addition of "his underbrain," also seemed grammatically necessary--however little strict grammar means in more than one other spot in the poem.
I think my poem may be almost finished now, so thank Schneider for getting me back into it.
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