I read it three times. or four times. it was brilliant, brilliance but I couldn't quite understand. still can't "It was less a nerve and no part skin" - please oh please explain.
Hey lil! Well, I'll do what I can. Here is my original draft. That 11/13 refers to Nov 13, 2013, btw. It surprises me it is so close to the poem because I had remembered editing it a lot. I know for a fact that the part I have had the most trouble with is the ending and in fact I still don't feel the ending to this poem is very strong. I think the beginning is very strong and that causes people to move past the weakness of the end. So, I was reading and writing a lot of surrealist poetry at the time. Sometimes I would read poems and be like "This doesn't MEAN anything!" and get frustrated. I thought it would be fun to try to write poems about nothing and see if I could do a good job. Of course, it's hard to write poems about nothing. If you revisit this poem I think there are some clues that give you an idea what it's about. The subject:
I confess:
Then we go back to the hummingbirds which again is the sound of humming and the vibration - just think of their fast little wings. Like I said, the ending has been the hardest part. The idea when I wrote it was kind of that it was unescapable, you could try to give this way, but you still kept it when you did. I wouldn't say this poem is about the feeling of being infatuated or in love. Now the TRUE CONFESSION TIME, what inspired me/what this started as was really a poem describing the heat and extreme humidity of summer, which I love. "wasn't a bone" - goes to "dry as a bone" - humidity is wet. The poem is really trying to describe a time, a temporal feeling, I guess, more than an emotion or a physical place. That time is the dead dog heat of summer (which I love). I moved away from writing pieces like this but on rereading it and its sister pieces (which never did get picked up anywhere, but are equally as extraordinary in their words - not to be modest haha) and also seeing the reaction (people have really liked this, and I actually get why - that's a fuckin' killer first line if I do say so myself) I feel like I should pick them up and try again. My writing tends to be surreal and imagistic no matter what I'm writing about so I don't feel like I've ever moved away from writing with this sort of bent to it, just should consider moving back to this approach to content. But you don't get lines like "Once there was that wasn't a bone" often, mang.
So the object isn't a living thing and has never been. These are all organic components of living things. As for what it IS: - isn't a bone
- is [even] less a nerve
- (and) no part skin
So lots of vibration here, lots of energy. To be specific "in the night it hummed against the skyline" isn't directly about power cords, but that's the kind of thing I was thinking of. To be honest I think that most of the descriptions of the object are pretty consistent and I think that's why this poem "works" even though it's about something completely non-defined. When I edited it I knew there was an idea/image I was working towards. - twinging
- tingling
- electric
- hums
- louder than a bee
I tend to make people symbols in my poems. It makes for more interesting poems and images. I made someone who I simply adore into a fish, a very long time ago, and he's always been a fish. (I have written many, many poems about fishes. - here is one ). "Still and often" is a reference to another poem I wrote about him around the same time which isn't directly a fish poem - it actually is more about light - but tied together those two phrases just kind of reference another part of my poetic life and here stand in as a reference to that emotion, to I guess crushing on someone, the feeling of infatuation (here's your mood music: "This is it like fishes" & "still & often"
thx. very helpful! of course i shudda known that you were getting at something surrealist and shudda followed the map provided. i tend to be pretty old-school (read: lazy) in my preference for narrative and/or a recognizable speaker... but then, how could one live in the world, so often without narrative. The drag show last night made me sad for the dancers who, on the surface, seemed to be having fun.