[W T Clark]

.
.
.
Left, which means "alone". Alone, because
what kind of person could have possibly lived
with me in language or the mask-blank wash
of God that was my habitat: my language?

If an Eve had existed would she have crept
around her drowned garden? could she have raked
bedraggled birds from their nests, as I must, to drop
a word's noose around each neck: could she have named them?

& if she was tempted: if she'd refused
that cruelty, what penalties would have been arranged?
Maybe I would have wept to hear her banished
from my kingdom to wander with the strange

tribes of the still-sighted — those few that God
in His all-knowingness had left to cross
& recross the flood in makeshift craft like words
of flesh still clinging to their skeletal corpse —

& stand with them & stare with her new sight
over the washed world to the darkness where
I laboured in the kingdom of the blind
that shall inherit the Earth that shall not have her.
.
.
.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

I balk at some but am still processing with enjoyment. The questioning of language is everything and that has its dangers.

Analytic Philosophy I struggle with at times.

Your line from God to habitat to language somewhat echoes Chomsky.

Jan

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, W T—
I’m doing battle with your poem. Throw me a bone if I have some of it right.
It starts with a mash-up of the two floods: Noah’s in the Bible and Deucalion/Pyrrha’s in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The speaker seems to be Homer, whose blindness is compensated for by his poetic ability to use language, but who is unable to communicate with the sighted, who use language for utilitarian purposes, but never really understand the truth expressed by Homer’s poetic language.
What I’m having the most trouble with is understanding how Eve connects to this.

[O Eales]

I seem to keep coming back to the thought that the symbol of Eve points to some element absent from the Western canon begun in the Homeric epics, perhaps a feminine element. The unexpected juxtaposing of Homer and Eve draws one in deeper.

[Carl Copeland]

You seem to treat language as an impediment to sight and a separation from nature—a fascinating theme, though a rewrite of Genesis, where things were named as they were created. Your new Eve is tempted, not to partake of knowledge, but arguably the reverse, to resist language, and is banished from a pre-linguistic Eden. (S2 is my favorite, btw.) Language seems, logically, to have been wiped out in the Flood, though it’s curiously identified with the “wash of God.” I don’t know what to make of the “strange tribes” who retain their sight but are carried over the Flood by “craft like words of flesh” (the Word made flesh?). Ultimately, they stand with Eve above the world and in the light, while the Blind Poet labors in linguistic darkness below.

As usual, I’m sure there’s much I’ve failed to grasp, but I suspect the poem also deliberately resists a clear interpretation, as it does a clear meter and a clear rhyme scheme. I struggle with it, and it struggles with itself.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I'll be back, but have to say quickly right now that this is magnificent, Cameron.
Your writing seems to be getting clearer & clearer without sacrificing any of its hermetic qualities.
The mysteries grow more & more lucid.

Nemo

[John Riley]

Much has been written about waking up from religion. Using the experience of blindness as descriptive of the waking as a physical actuality works more thoroughly. It plays on the simple reality there is more than one type of blindness clearly and forcefully. The metaphor of blindness is throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Often it's either as destructive self-will or as a punishment and you incorporate both.

Cursed Eve naming all the things god cursed only because she wanted knowledge is pretty brilliant. "Bedraggled birds" might be a bit much but it does the job. Ending with what are the "still-sighted" but also blind on the remnants of the Flood makes for good imagery. The Eve metaphor is fairly well stretched by then and, although it is a sentence, "she" did not immediately bring Eve to my mind. Maybe it's a benefit to spending a second going back to the top?

I may be wrong with my reading. If so forgive me. The sounds work well. The alliteration isn't too obvious except for the "bedraggled birds." The double "shall" in the last line is great.

It's another good one. I hope the series is developing faster than what's been posted. I'd like to read all of them in a series.

[Rick Mullin]

This one doesn't put me off at all. Any opacity draws me in, and there is a subjective/objective narrative concept that holds it all together as long as one enjoys the mystery already noted.

I guess I've acclimated to the series such that new entries afford easier entree. But I definitely think you accomplish more with this poem than the ones I've read so far.

And to the extent that I've been put off by anything in the series (I think I've noted these), I haven't been kicked out--despite any attempts. The conceit is really interesting. Here, it's compelling.

RM

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

It has been a long time since I have read and re-read and enjoyed a poem such as this Cameron. It is as though you sat down with Eliot and stood up with Derrida. The habitat as language, the word as a noose, the word as scraps of flesh, here is the other kingdom but not a dead land. What prayer can form when words and their frame is suspect. I still balk at some but look forward to a greater understanding.

I appreciate the craftsmanship and the deep thought that has gone into shaping this. It is a controlled coruscation that has transcended what previously seemed to me gratuitous opacity in your work.

The indictment of the blind inheriting the earth is such a fitting end.

A gush admittedly but totally deserved

Jan

[Carl Copeland]

Perhaps Cameron will pardon my use of his poem to illustrate a broader question: I experimented on myself and determined that I wouldn’t have suspected any meter or rhyme here at all if it weren’t for the lineation. That doesn’t make it less poetical, and many here consider such closeted formalism a virtue, but it lacks the sensuality I crave in a formal poem. It must give pleasure to receptors more sensitive than my own. Thoughts? Feelings?