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Review #4559304
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Review by edgework
Rated: | (3.5)
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You describe this as nonsense, and acknowledge you spent no more than five minutes on it. So, given that your expectations for the poem would seem to be fairly low, I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble to dig beneath the surface, since you haven’t made much of an effort to place much meaning there in the first place.

But that’s the thing about language in general and poetry in particular. Assuming the writer has a facility with words, which you do, even if they’re written with little more intent than producing gibberish, they are still little quarks of thought that can link up into chains of longer thoughts until, unbidden, ideas can come bubbling up from the primordial muck.

It’s the age-old question: which comes first, the idea or the words to describe it? The prose writer would say the idea comes first, then the words, which are always in service to it. The poet might see it differently. Poetry is, first and foremost, about words. Ideas are almost irrelevant. No poem finds a place in the canon because it espouses a correct political dogma. Language is everything, to the extent that even language such as we find here, guided by rules most would find alien and which you yourself would be hard pressed to articulate, can give birth to, if not meaning, at least to something of substance. Such is the relationship between thought, and the linguistic structures that make it possible.

I’d suggest paying more attention to your scansion. While there aren’t really any flabby prose rhythms, neither have you attempted to exploit your language for its potential musicality. Crafting your images into strong metrical feet makes it inevitable that your lines flow easily one to the next.

Language unburdened by the need to convey meaning can be exhilarating to both read, and to write. But since it is language itself that is front and center, make it worth the effort.
   *CheckG* You responded to this review 07/23/2020 @ 5:06am EDT
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