Round
#3
(03-31-2015, 02:51 PM)bogpan Wrote:  A person is round

(there is no word for mud)
“God is round”
(whitewash my eyes, the poor ones)

it piles up
a layer after
a layer

whiteness 

and it gets clean
WARNING: The comments below are worse and more pretentious than Wikipedia. 

I'll engage in ad hoc semantics for my review because I'm a resident wanker here.

There is no meaning here for me. I could create meaning from a phrase "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," but then it's all in my head. I believe your poem engages readers in a similar practice, but this poem has less coherence than that phrase. So, while the sentence above is grammatically correct and meaningless, your poem is both grammatically incorrect and possibly still meaningless. In my opinion, abstractions (such as whiteness) have a greater chance of being meaningless because they can refer to so many things, or something like that. In addition, "it" in line 5 appears to have a sort of dangler effect and, consequently, I don't know what "it" refers to. So you continue on, after "it", with a series of spacial movements  with no discernible referent. What is being layered and piled? It should also be noted that if mud is in parenthesis that seems to suggest it cannot be the subject being piled. The quotation marks are also confusing. You could look up uses for quotation marks if you don't know them. I don't know. Like I implied before,  I'm blowing it out my hole here. . 

Here's how this would read without line breaks:

A person is round (there is no room for mud) "God is round" (whitewash my eyes, the poor ones) it piles up a layer after a layer whiteness and it gets clean. 

This presentation of your poem is absurd, but I think it shows the lack of cohesion which can be gained from a prosaic sentence structure that breaks up lexical units into grammatical sentences. However, even if this occurred, it's still hard to convey meaning. I suppose you could make an argument for the use of ambiguity in certain situations. However, I can't really think of an established poem that doesn't have any meaning.  Poetry is a highly coded language that builds off of previous works that are also ambiguous, and it's occasional need to be mellifluous also contributes to the fact that the whole ordeal can be very recondite. You can compound these supposed tenets I've put forth with the fact that poetry and poets may even oscillate between art for arts sake and a grand (sometimes divine or political) purpose for writing in a sometimes existential crisis for meaning. 

Now, there are some ways to use line breaks, though I am quite a dullard in this regard. Some ways might be to indicate a paragraph type delineation, to use enjambment, to generally redirect or surprise the reader, to use a regulated form, to modify the general rhythm, or to accentuate a word (such as "whiteness" which you seem to be doing). 

(I'm sure my grammar was bad in this comment.)
Thanks for posting.
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Messages In This Thread
Round - by bogpan - 03-31-2015, 02:51 PM
RE: Round - by first_high_of_the_day - 04-01-2015, 12:08 AM
RE: Round - by Brownlie - 04-01-2015, 03:07 AM
RE: Round - by Erthona - 04-01-2015, 05:08 AM
RE: Round - by RooktoKing - 04-01-2015, 01:36 PM
RE: Round - by LorettaYoung - 04-10-2015, 11:29 AM
RE: Round - by Bearsy22 - 04-11-2015, 12:50 AM
RE: Round - by Lloyd E Dixon - 04-11-2015, 04:07 PM



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