Thursday, September 23, 2010

brenda hillman's prosody class

Taking a class on received forms.  I'm not producing killer stuff, but it's worth getting some feed back.

iambic pentameter

anapestic & iambic ballads

ghazal


petrarchan sonnet

1 comment:

  1. Well, I'm not going to lie to you - it's not your best, but I'm willing to bet that it's the constraints of the style that may account for that. The subject of the poem, expressed through word choice and syntax, is dealt with more gingerly than your other works... your style, and to your credit it is beginning to become very recognizable, is marked by a provocative mixture of the visceral and the intellectual - like stickey, gooey inner workings of a closet introvert. These qualities are a bit muted in this poem, and this may be because thoughtfully prepared line breaks may be clashing with rhyme scheme.

    But brass tacks time - I think the sonnet suffers from a standpoint issue. The speaker is sort of a third person story teller, which mutes a personal attachment to the problem presented. This is further troubled by the shift of focal point from the wayward bangkok lover to the sf lover towards the end of the poem. Who does the reader follow? Which are they meant to understand? Sympathize? With whom and for what?

    I think the poem would be served by simplifying and deepening. It's interesting that the subject of the poem begins with the bangkok lover... perhaps explore this subject's experience and motivation... develop him as a character, so that we may understand more of this, and in turn, more of the lover left behind.

    That all being said, I think it's a fine poem, Robert. One thing I would impart to you that was to me imparted by my last acting teacher -- she said that, in the process of substituting images to find playable objectives on stage, it was necessary and valuable to use images and memories that conjure up very personalized responses. But, and here's the caveat, it is inadvisable to attempt to transform that which we have yet to fully process and cope with into art. We need to master it before it can yield art. Just a thought.

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