03-13-2014, 09:35 PM
I'll start with what I like about this poem.
It has a marvelous sense of hurried feeling, of panic to say and do the right thing, of embarrassment at asking, of past and present colliding. The pacing, and the word placement is excellent. As is the absurd incongruity, the smashing together of imagery...
"sitting before the computer stands", "handles gnawing", "inhaled and quiet like a candle" etc
At first this line, "the radio puts down its saxophone for the news", had me reaching for the punctuationhammer, because given what goes before it is too breathless, but the enjambments give the pause for air, and... well there is just something so comedically perfect about the saxophone.
I would have prefer 'sanitized' to 'sterilized' - but that could just be my castration complex kicking in again - or more seriously, the handbook is there to offer procedures and platitudes to clean matters up - though I suppose depending on the handbook it is also a guidebook on dis-empowerment of the individual and Kafkaesque entrapment - so they both work. And there is that sense of firing blanks - so maybe I'm wrong - and it's your poem - I am just nick picking for sake of trying to find something I don't like.... the title?.... meh, now I am nit-picking....
It has a marvelous sense of hurried feeling, of panic to say and do the right thing, of embarrassment at asking, of past and present colliding. The pacing, and the word placement is excellent. As is the absurd incongruity, the smashing together of imagery...
"sitting before the computer stands", "handles gnawing", "inhaled and quiet like a candle" etc
At first this line, "the radio puts down its saxophone for the news", had me reaching for the punctuationhammer, because given what goes before it is too breathless, but the enjambments give the pause for air, and... well there is just something so comedically perfect about the saxophone.
I would have prefer 'sanitized' to 'sterilized' - but that could just be my castration complex kicking in again - or more seriously, the handbook is there to offer procedures and platitudes to clean matters up - though I suppose depending on the handbook it is also a guidebook on dis-empowerment of the individual and Kafkaesque entrapment - so they both work. And there is that sense of firing blanks - so maybe I'm wrong - and it's your poem - I am just nick picking for sake of trying to find something I don't like.... the title?.... meh, now I am nit-picking....