Blue Bird Revised Edit 1

[Isis]

I'm not looking at previous versions or comments since this has its own thread, so I assume you want people to approach it with fresh eyes. Let me know if I should look back. My comments below are in blue.

What is the bluebird as a sign?
The beaky flag imparts
a hidden man in poetry’s lore,
and calls about men's, "hearts." So this stanza seems to be pointing to the bluebird as a secret symbol in poetry, or a touchstone in the history of poetry. I'm confused by the comma at the end of the sentence. I'd remove it. It seems like a comma splice to me.

I wonder about the double lines between a few of the stanzas. I'm talking about stanza breaks like this one, between the first and second stanzas. Was this the pinky getting too comfy on the "return" key (something that happens to me often when I'm writing late at night), or are these extra spaces meant to mark out separate sections of the poem, like a more subtle version of numbering different parts or putting dashes/page breaks in? Should I pause extra here?



In ink it strikes a double stress,
And signs an animal.
It’s taken as a captured man
No longer seminal. I like the explorations of the word as it appears on the page, the discussion of ink and stress and signs. I gather that the rest of the stanza is about alternate meanings or interpretations of the word "bluebird" but it's not something I'm familiar with. I asked google and got nothing that seemed obviously connected to "captured man". Is there a reference to another work of art here that I'm missing? A pun? It's been a long day, help a sister out.

A bluebird sang inside of me.
It warbled when a worm
Was swallowed by my bloating corpse,
and ached with every burn I really liked this stanza because it twisted the expected image, and because it was something I could clearly imagine. And because the slant rhyme really serves the poem, like a Dickinson rhyme. I expected some pretty and bright image after "a bluebird sang inside of me", but the speaker is dead. This intrigued me and kept me reading.

I Sped toward bone necrosis. I'm reading "bone necrosis" as an image of death, not yet specific
In bottle necked pastimes, I assume "bottle necked pastimes" is drinking … is there a double meaning here?
I lurched my birdlike collar high
And threw away my prime. This sentence gets a little bit murkier. I'm torn between "birdlike collar" as a shirt collar or a collarbone. Either way I get the sense of the speaker regretting wasted youth, maybe, but because I feel like I have to stretch to get the image I get thrown out of the atmosphere of the poem.

My smokeless song went riding pale
Unbridled on a swine. Interesting images that end up feeling really surreal to me, and disconnected from the rest of the poem. Is this a further meditation on drunkenness and youthful folly? Is this a dream or something that's actually happening?
I gamboled in a drunken dell,
And quaffed with rotten rinds. Of all the images of drunkenness in the poem, I think this is the most wild and musical and descriptive. A large middle section of the poem focuses on how the speaker was drunk and wild, and some of this material ends up feeling redundant or extraneous to me, probably because it is laced with references or metaphor that I'm not getting. Basically, I think that a lot of the narrative/images about the speaker being drunk can be condensed, and these two lines are pretty great and worth keeping. Maybe this is all that needs to be said on the subject.


What I could not load to “do it,”
I chased by rolling dice.
The rain was all that reigned, and I
Supposed I’d wetly strive.

I sought to whet my passion.
I Enflamed my liver,
And chased a circling Paradox,
dulling thought with liquor. Why the capitalized words in the middle of the sentence here? I can see a reason for capitalizing Paradox, because that makes it like an abstraction embodied - an approach used by poets of previous centuries, I think. But why Enflamed? Why capitalize a verb?

My curses reeked of father stuff,
And sought to murder signs,
Of trilling birds that fly to whirs
Of buzzing power lines.

And so I see my brother now Is the speaker saying this from his drinking days, or from the grave? When is "now" in this poem?
Who rolls across cement
Pretending he’s an invalid
To beg another cent.

Embracing with a distant word,
I coax a cracking voice.
From out a fragile door he begs,
and fades as vacant noise. I'm interested in the shift to the brother's story, but I feel like it's touched upon and not fully explored. I'm curious about how this relates to the other stuff going on in the poem - the bluebird in the speaker, the memories and regrets he has about life.

Away from him I see a duct,
A woman charged with life.
Unclipped and free the bluebird flies,
To feel itself deprived. Lots of ideas in this stanza, and I had a hard time tying them together. On "A duct" - the woman is a duct? Or are these two separate sights, separate ideas? I'm glad that the poem has returned to its touchstone image and premise, but I'm not sure how we got back here or why, or what makes the bluebird deprived, and if this is connected to the stuff about the speaker's brother in any way.

But in a lonely ache that seeks
To drink the world up
We can learn to read the singing
That’s cheeping from a cup. I also really liked this stanza: replacing drinks that dull a lonely ache with a symbol of life. I guess that could be read as sentimental, at least the way I wrote it, but not the way it's written in the poem. It's kind of strange and funny but still possible to interpret.

Because a word is prone to morph,
We can rename bluebirds.
reattribute what’s said as sweet,
to something that’s more blurred.

Overall, I see the bluebird as a symbol of something bigger that has helped the speaker figure out his life and death. There's narrative in there about drinking to excess and experiencing poverty, but I'm not sure how the bluebird turns this around at the end, which it seems to. I'm not familiar with the references mentioned in your explanation post, and nothing in the poem suggested that I should start looking things up. How hidden do you want the references to be? Sometimes it can work to have them there only for those "in the know", so that only people coming at the poem with certain knowledge will get everything you've put into the poem. This can risk alienating readers if the images or ideas don't also work well on their own when the reader doesn't understand the reference. I felt at a number of points in the poem like there was something, or many somethings, going on that I didn't understand. But it was hard for me to tell if it was a reference or just dense language that wasn't "clicking" for whatever reason.