Madge - version dos

[milo]

Thanks for your comments Milo. Some I will use, some I will address here.


Hot! Oil seeps out of the asphalt road; you don't need 'asphalt' with oil. The double on 'hot oil' is nice

As roads can be composed of many substances, such as concrete, gravel, and dirt, as well as asphalt, I think it is necessary to state that the road is asphalt to avoid confusion. This is a very specific image I want to get across, I do not want it to be ambiguous. However, I was never satisfied (and I am still not satisfied) with this line, and have rewritten it a number of times
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for me, if I read Hot oil along with road, I know it's asphalt. There may be some who can't figure it out, but they're probably not going to get anything else in here either, now are they?

sticky sound is enough, I read this ten times and never figured out why you introduced 'fat people sex' here. Such a big image on such an irrelevant detail. And the rest of the poem is free from fat people or sex(?)

What can I say, it is a metaphor, or as Tom would have it an adjectival metaphor Seriously, a lot of this is to show you the mind of the speaker.

I like it for the metaphor, so I was hoping it would be more relevant. If I was you, I would save it for a different poem, one with some later speculation of sex in it or other tawdriness. Here it is wasted and a bit of a red herring besides.

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'straw blond' feels overly familiar, maybe because of the cliche "hair like straw" but I think overprocessed blond is probably enough.

This is an allusion to strawberry blonde hair...a double entendre that represents the past and the present.

I would be surprised if anyone gets strawberry blonde, I got that stiff, straw-like, overprocessed blond from it.

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It is occurring to me that you just like to over-modify the fuck out of everything. For me, it makes everything weaker.

Sometimes, perhaps, just to irritate the reader...sometimes just to have fun!

it can be fun but I hope you reconsider some of it at least during the editing process

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Her name must be something like Madge is enough, we know it is the narrator thinking

I'll consider.
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She has probably done a year
or two in the prison they call jail.
A jail without any of the
Mayberry RFD homey qualities
where the town drunk sleeps it off,
then lets himself out in the morning.

What is the point of all of the speculation about what kind of jail it was that she may have spent time in? Especially the description of the jail she /didn't/ stay in(?) This seems way too tangential.

You are a bottom line kind of guy, aren't you. Unfortunately, I tend to use the tangential to try and get behind the readers defenses. However, I do think this is a very clumsy section. I am not fond of it, and it needs reworking.

I think in poetry I am mostly not a bottom line kind of guy as I am way more interested in the journey (sonics, devices, fresh language) than I am in the destination (meaning). I am a big fan of being as concise as possible during the editing process and I think you might want to consider if all of this speculation is additive or distractive. just me rambling again.

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She's obviously on the way to work,
wearing the ubiquitous medium-dark
brown knit knee length dress that serves
as the standard uniform

this is so much modification on 1 noun, I have to think you could pick better nouns and verbs or at least infer some of this stuff metaphorically.

I could have inserted, "because she is wearing..." but it seemed unnecessarily wordy.
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for servitors in such places
as the occupational cleaning industry
and chain cafeterias where they
monotonously repeat their zombie phrases
“hep ya”, “moe tea”, and “cum’gin”.

"cum'gin' is amusing because it makes me think of 'cum gin' but I doubt that is the intent

hep ya”, “moe tea”, and “cum’gin help you, more tea, come again. However, any bawdy interpretation are gladly accepted.
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Through the visual heat distortion
swirling up from earth as convection oven

this sentence just doesn't parse properly grammatically. I can figure out what you are trying to say, but every pass, the grammar here is annoying.

agreed, it is an awkward usage, although I like the idea of imaging the earth as a convection oven, and this is why it creates heat waves that create mirages, but I have been unforgivably clumsy with it here.
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I can see her smoking a cigarette,
and I wonder how someone like her
can afford to smoke, when a pack cost
the equivalent two hours of work.
Well, I guess you find a way
when it is a matter of life and death!



It ends very prosey. Actually, the whole thing is quite prosey without the line breaks and the line breaks aren't anything to write home about (her, with (you actually broke on with?),way, they, places, medium-dark, and work).

Yeah, line breaks need work... Well it is prose-poetry
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Thanks again for the comments Milo.

Ya'll cumbak now, hea?

of course. Once again, good luck with the edits.