06-14-2013, 09:53 PM
Thanks for the comments, billy and tectak.
I've found a gender difference in opinions about the middle section. It seems that female readers think there's too much emotional distance without it, and are more satisfied with it in, because of it's "internal" narrative.
Billy, I see what you're saying about needing more devices. I started this one in the opposite way from my two previous poems, which had fixed meter and rhyme schemes, where I had to do the literary Sudoku to fill in the pentameter and so forth, and if the line endings didn't rhyme, they weren't done.
This one started as "iambic prose", then I worked on the compression and line breaks. The punctuation choices (short sentences and em dashes) were mainly to modulate the reader's pauses for emphasis. I didn't specifically set out to rhyme anything, but it ended up with some internal and "slant" rhymes by accident. Maybe I should go back and change some things to specifically strengthen the internal rhymes.
As for the "poignancy", the last stanza is the reason I wrote it, and the narrative contains no more than what I saw and did then, and think now. Nothing was invented and added for dramatic effect, though it may be the case that the narrative hasn't yet completed the transition from prose to poetry.
I've found a gender difference in opinions about the middle section. It seems that female readers think there's too much emotional distance without it, and are more satisfied with it in, because of it's "internal" narrative.
Billy, I see what you're saying about needing more devices. I started this one in the opposite way from my two previous poems, which had fixed meter and rhyme schemes, where I had to do the literary Sudoku to fill in the pentameter and so forth, and if the line endings didn't rhyme, they weren't done.
This one started as "iambic prose", then I worked on the compression and line breaks. The punctuation choices (short sentences and em dashes) were mainly to modulate the reader's pauses for emphasis. I didn't specifically set out to rhyme anything, but it ended up with some internal and "slant" rhymes by accident. Maybe I should go back and change some things to specifically strengthen the internal rhymes.
As for the "poignancy", the last stanza is the reason I wrote it, and the narrative contains no more than what I saw and did then, and think now. Nothing was invented and added for dramatic effect, though it may be the case that the narrative hasn't yet completed the transition from prose to poetry.