03-12-2015, 06:19 AM
I watch the ghosts in the evening haze
along the pasture fence.
We built that fence fifty years ago,
my back wet from driving pick and shovel,
placing the posts exactly where Grandfather pointed.
My aching fingers like broken sticks
from stretching barbed wire in perfect lines
on posts flawlessly spaced.
He towered above me.
"Build it well," he said,
"and it will last longer than we will."
A breeze swirls the ghosts and haze away
from the glistening taut wire.
Well, my well-meant suggestion would be that your poem suffers from something almost all early creative writing does: it's like a private language - as if one part of you were writing to another part of you. It is a series of evocative images that no doubt have meaning to you but are enigmatic to an outsider. It doesn't attempt to communicate either an idea or an argument - as old school poetry always did. In the 20th century of course some poets appeared to abandon some of these things: but if you look at, say T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland - the most famous early example of truly 'modern' poetry - while apparently abandoning the communication of ideas, or making of arguments, or droning on about plants and lakes and things, he produces extraordinary psychological effects that are similar to dreams. Or watching David Lynch films.
I hope you find this helpful.
Most readers, if they are honest, expect a reward for expending the effort of reading something; to be entertained.
along the pasture fence.
We built that fence fifty years ago,
my back wet from driving pick and shovel,
placing the posts exactly where Grandfather pointed.
My aching fingers like broken sticks
from stretching barbed wire in perfect lines
on posts flawlessly spaced.
He towered above me.
"Build it well," he said,
"and it will last longer than we will."
A breeze swirls the ghosts and haze away
from the glistening taut wire.
Well, my well-meant suggestion would be that your poem suffers from something almost all early creative writing does: it's like a private language - as if one part of you were writing to another part of you. It is a series of evocative images that no doubt have meaning to you but are enigmatic to an outsider. It doesn't attempt to communicate either an idea or an argument - as old school poetry always did. In the 20th century of course some poets appeared to abandon some of these things: but if you look at, say T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland - the most famous early example of truly 'modern' poetry - while apparently abandoning the communication of ideas, or making of arguments, or droning on about plants and lakes and things, he produces extraordinary psychological effects that are similar to dreams. Or watching David Lynch films.
I hope you find this helpful.
Most readers, if they are honest, expect a reward for expending the effort of reading something; to be entertained.