Carl,
Quote:
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I hear it as a cheer breaking into a quiet poem. You’ve further emphasized the contrast with line spaces, so I can tell it’s deliberate, and the trueness of it is all that matters.
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Are you sure? It didn’t seem to be all that mattered when you made your last comment. But here’s hoping!
“Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
Ah, yes. It’s entirely possible that my line was unwittingly influenced by this poem. Although I have to admit, the influence that I was consciously aware of was Prince’s song “The Beautiful Ones,” with its lines, “The beautiful ones, they hurt you every time,” “The beautiful ones always smash the picture, always, every time,” and “The beautiful ones, you’ll always seem to lose.”
Yves, hi! It sounds like you’re carefully hedging your reaction to my compression/release experiment. ��I appreciate the generosity of your balanced outlook.
Thanks for alerting me to the term Homeric simile--I remember having encountered these in the Odyssey and Iliad (though it was a long, long time ago). They made quite an impression, but I’d not been aware of the term.
It’s funny, but this technique of carrying on in detail with one train of thought past the expected stopping point actually started for me (in poetry) as a conscious experiment. I think this is only the second time I’ve done this, and that the first time was in the original version of my poem “Catch,” which I posted here a while back. I’ve been wondering if any readers have noticed the similarities (in approach, theme, and overall narrative arc) between these two poems:
Catch (original version)
I pulled up from a wandering stream, my mind,
a pebble—yes, a thought—and held it, palm
outstretched. I turned it round and passed my thumb
across it, searching in its folds to find
some semblance of that slurry which denied
so many of my bids to catch some slip
of solid matter from it. Dragging dip
of arms most often yielded something shy
of definition—cool and dribbling wet.
But then—this oddment, tumbled out of dreams
or sleights of hand where fluids shift to forms
as solids flux, more fluid than they seem.
A mere scintilla, sloped and strangely born—
what more could all my days of floundering bring?
It seemed at home in my uncertain hand,
this backward answer to my questioning,
this bastard child of swish and swirling sand.
Readers had the same types of complaints about the run-on sections of both poems!
Anyway, I heartily agree with you that it’s great to experiment with writing in ways that are the opposite of one’s natural inclinations or experience. Super-compression has never come that naturally to me, so I have, in fact, done a few experiments with it lately.
Jim, it looks like you meant to post this comment on Carl’s thread!