I remember the poem when you workshopped it. I think it’s really strong. I like that that it seems grounded in a real personal history and it gives a rich perspective of the world seen by a blind man. The play on words that indicate nullity in its many guises is illuminating -- nothing, no-thing, absence, black, chalk, silence, lack, mute hushed, blind blank.
I am a little less enthusiastic about the commentary by Elijah Blumov.
I’d rather he extemporised instead of reading out a scholarly written essay (ie talked to rather than at his audience). The detailed analysis of scansion was way too much for me.
“In the fifth stanza we begin with a feminine tetrameter line in this mostly pentameter poem….all blind things cleave to absence… conceivably the absence of the final foot here could be read as mimetic of the absence described in the poem. In the next line… a second foot anapestic substitution directly followed by a third foot trochaic substitution causes the rhythmic momentum to stumble and [something I couldn’t hear] the very heavy final iamb may acquire a spondaic quality. In the third line [… ] we have not only another tetrameter line but one which contains a third foot anapestic substitution and ends with a tertius pion (??) otherwise known as feminine anapest.”
I wish I could say I had learned something from that. I can't imagine that the niceties of scansion were something that you thought deeply about in your composition Cameron. But that may just be a failure of my own limited imagination. In which case, sorry to strut my stupidity.
Last edited by Joe Crocker; 11-08-2024 at 05:39 PM.
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