Don't you like how the subject's reversal of fortune is encapsulated by that "stink of cedar" even if it is overstated a bit in the actual line. It is a chemo-induced trip gone horribly wrong or at least a disembodied ego jaded by too much of a bad thing. This absurdist-dirty-realist take on KK functions as pastiche too. Where nothing is holy but greed and power.Įndlessly seeking to reach the end Of the vanished, addictive dream. In a litter of sepia needles I find my knife My empty wallet, the pricked plastic baggie. To inject myself with the heroism These fatherless streets have never known. My blood already burning to taste it again, The measureless cavern of the toilet bowl. I like the final line left at sea in a final gesture of fenestration, here, open-endedness, orchestrated by utterance stopped abruptly, interrupted deliberately, rather than concluded. The argument of the poem might then be seen as a formal device, of idea invested in form and therefore as a fitting complement to Coleridge's formal music. This is a good source for revising this piece by revisiting those line-endings to come up with more athletic alternatives. And again his lifeblood flowsĪ trick of this poem is the surprise it packs in enjambment and as a reading response I want those line endings to work harder and to keep up the conjuring trick of each line-ending packing a surly surprise. No sound – away from the echoing dome, awayīut again he sleeps. He gorges on his garden's failing pleasures.Īt times, he awakens to see no light, to hear He walks below the wooden vault, marking a celestial roadĪs his forest fills with the cackles of monkeysĪnd a whisper of rain. Humming silently through his veins, echoingĪ pleasure dome? Angels hover nowhere but in Kubla Khan by David Jalajel A sunless sea. The tone is wise-ass and stubbornly refuses to accept the premise of the work by constantly holding it at bay with a creative equivalent of deferred interrogation of the terms of engagement. This may be a fallout of reader/relation theory where the writer makes it clear that the illusion is a construct and even so intends to dupe the reader into compliance. Having said that, there is a discursive spirit to the whole enterprise of this particular poem and therefore it pays homage to a large body of current poetry where the writer makes it clear that s/he has a mission and they accept it with reservations before launching the craft of the thing. A lot of poems are afflicted with this warm up, lacklustre, self-referential opening when the poem might be better served by lopping off that warm-up for the more riveting full-throttled spirit of the thing. Sector 2 begins with a preamble that is a false start and really makes its debut in stanza 2 which plunges into the spiritual well of the original. The notion of taking poetry out of the drawing room and into the political arena must surely be good for an art that tends towards a passive and privatised complacency at a time when moral and political engagement really can make a difference in our lives. I wish the writer spent less time rehearsing his dismay about the prospect of responding adequately in seven days and devoted his energy to answering the call of the reader, that is, of someone who has known this poem for years and who now has an opportunity to say something about its contradictory and arbitrary stance of incomplete completion.īut I welcome the feisty in poetry. My answer to that is to say that an act of completion is really a reader's interpretive act, especially someone who reads as a writer, where the act of reading remakes the poem in the reader's image. The argument of the poem raises the question most of us suspect must be right and that is, Can KK be finished by anyone given the unfinished genesis of most poems? This poet throws up his hands in dismay at the time limit imposed on his otherwise timeless creative impulses and concedes that the genius of the original deserves to be left unfinished. So with the adding of a reading followed by my writing beside other words, I walk away from another river and reflect upon a vision I cannot see. Less than a week - no time to finish what I began five days before I imagine I imagine my reluctance to submit after a dream I remember being somewhere in an army I was and inside a party room of odd numbers, which next day became a chemist.Ī poem is time enough to leave unfinished, fragmented as it was or even as it could be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |