Friday, April 24, 2009

Legging it

Just a quick one. I've read some more of Milk and Honey and I want to talk about just one poem, because that is all I read today and I tried to break it down, figure out 'what it was about'.

On first reading I had no idea, except for these small clues:
  1. The title Faith and Rage - questioning faith?
  2. The subsection headings of Chaosmos (1,2,3) and Tourbillion (1,23) - Chaosmos from what I can gather (can't find it in the dictionary) is something to do with Chaos and Cosmos, not sure how or why, but it seems to fit roughly in with Faith and Rage thing. And tourbillion is a vortex/swirl or spiralling firework. So kind of annoying that I had to look those up, but they are cool words.
  3. The ending suddenly drops out of collage and into some very short lines that have a bit more syntactical drive (similar to the poem I quoted yesterday - must be a technique of hers to 'end' a poem)
    I like sitting in the park
    when everything
    holds its breath
    at the moment
    it gets dark
    when
    the Stranger lights
    a match
    and
    says
    Welcome...
  4. She mention babies, birth related things, female genitals etc. I think there is a clue there. Flicking through the rest of the book, those kinds of subjects pop up a bit, so maybe a bit of preoccupation there for the whole book?
So I guess I weren't too successful in figurin' out what it was about, but I certainly enjoyed it. Some of the disjunction was too much for me. Collage! Too much jumping about with no images, links, threads, I think I prefer a Tourbillion - spiralling, out of control, perhaps with a bit of Chaosmos, but at least still moving in a certain direction. Didn't Pound create some kind of thing called a vortex? I think that might have been something different to what I'm talking about. Anyway, overall it was good but perplexing.

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