i have seen the end.
it is not here,
but it is the home
we've never had here.
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about the wilderness composer
- franklin m. harrison
- it can be so easy to present a version or caricature of yourself on these blog/profile things. it is also easy to present the sides of yourself that make yourself look artsy or cultured or spiritual or deep. but at the end of the day, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you line up with how you represent yourself. so...about me. i am an angry, greedy, scared, selfish, flawed sinner that has been saved by the grace of God so that through the cross of Jesus Christ i may have the hope of becoming a loving, compassionate, empathetic, and healed person that somehow God will be able to use to make a difference in this frozen world we exist in. i am a broken vessel full of broken things that God is putting back together again. whoever you are, i love you and hope that however i interact with you will bring you a glimpse of this love that Jesus has for you.
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[You asked for commentary, so here's my first installment. I'll have more for you later.] In this poem, the reader is expected to find meaning through the harmony (or dissonance) between the title and body. This is the case with many poems of any length, but in this poem it is especially pronounced. The title gives a very specific clue to the environment the poem is operating - the stage setting, if you will. The stanza below it is the dialog. In fact the dialog reads like commentary on the setting: as though the speaker has read a txt and is moved to a monologue of his/her emotional response - an immediate impression meant only for his-/herself and not a response one might give in conversation. So with that interpretation from which to work, the reader is still left very much in the dark about what the txt mssg had to say. Readers don't need to know the specifics to empathize/commiserate/etc., but the body of the poem should clue us in on the relationship being written about. Because the first line makes such a melodramatic leap from the title one might conclude the narrator has just received a txt breakup and is speaking from that moment when the world is upended and the shock is still disorienting, petrifying. The next three lines assuage the melodramatic interpretation and give sense of the narrator's unmet aspirations for the relationship, and while still uncomfortably vague, these aspirations feel honest and real. And therein lies the poem's true strength. And to maximize that strength, clarifying whether the relationship is still existent and, if so, in what condition. Also, an important ambiguity to resolve is whether the two are living together. This alone would open wide the door for the reader to enter the poem and embrace the specific emotional color the poem is trying to convey - that is, what sort of longing and loss is driving the poem. Is it the longing for a stymied relationship not yet dissolved to reawaken? Or the longing for a relationship that never amounted to much to invigorate itself? And whether either of these have ended.
ReplyDeletei want to steal your title.
ReplyDelete