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Unread 04-26-2022, 02:16 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Jim, thank you so much for posting.

I love how it speaks to me directly - the Sphere as an island, a space we all inhabit. And within that I love the ‘obscure board of Fiction, where prose languishes in an echo chamber’. That sentence is superb writing, I think.

I love how your geographer’s description of a digital space allows the geographer agency - agency in saving poems, or not, from drowning. I like the narrator’s description of themselves, too, particularly the ‘rabbit holes’ and how this works with the image - reading the poem with the image brings an entirely new dimension to the poem.

For me, the image is ambiguous - it is aesthetically lovely, but it is also ‘The Tempest’ like - rich and strange - half-real, half not. The video works with the poem to both suggest the Eratosphere as a magical, transformed place, but also as a submerged, half-dead space. The video adds another dimension again - it shares a kind of geological dreamscape, a striving to reinvent the more mundane world.

The poem beneath the prose-poem (the form reminds me of a haibun, - the longer descriptive passage and the short imagistic poem) is beautiful - and it works with the short imagistic poem to describe the picture but also point out, very concisely, how the image and art is a wonderful metaphor for humanity.

Formative points (I will always have formative points, it is in my nature) for me would be to detach the prose poem from the specific place of the ‘Sphere and consider, instead, making it more general a title - an imaginary planet or place.

I’d also consider centre-indenting the prose poem parts, perhaps so they squarely fill the lines and echo that sense of contrast with the imagistic poem.

And, honestly, I’d contact the artist and start a collaborative conversation, at the very least see if you can use the image you've chosen to send off as an ekphrastic piece, as the dimensions of art, video documentary, prose poem and imagistic poem are exciting, and completely rich and strange. Kudos.

Sarah-Jane
(Forget to say 'wow' that you dived to see it too, but that's a very non-poetic aside!)
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