I Am In/Stead

[Deor Ana Log]

There's something deeply self-aggrandizing about this piece that I find just as deeply off-putting. First, the format: one of the first critiques I received in this site is that most modern English poetry is aligned left, not centered, only that critique is not quite true. Most English poetry in general is aligned left, from the earliest editions of Chaucer to Shakespeare's sonnets to Louise Gluck, and for a site like this, aligning left certainly makes a piece easier to critique line by line. When a poem is centered, it usually means three things: it's a concrete poem, which is certainly not the case here (if the goal was to imitate the shape of a tree, then it's a terribly stubby looking plant that's here presented); the author is inexperienced (albeit I've seen the author post pieces formatted elsewise); or the author thinks too highly of the work.

Then there's the choice of a first word. Not only is the very first word of the entire piece "I", but every line bar the penultimate begins with "I", while the penultimate is a question beginning with an interrogative that refers back to the self anyway.

Then there's the question of what that "I" is supposed to refer to. A quick search through both my memories and Google shows me that the more noteworthy "I" poems tend to refer that "I" to someone else, whether God in the Psalms, Humanity in Whitman, America in Langston Hughes, or at the very least Carl Solomon in Howl. This piece doesn't seem to go beyond the speaker---the best it does is refer to common aesthetic-psychological images of "the art, act, ache", "sea", "tree", so common that for this sort of poem we don't really see them as distinct objects anymore.

Then, somewhere in the middle of the piece, the mixed metaphors employing trite references pile on to such a degree that I'm simply lost, that I stop caring to connect everything to everything else. "silent rooster's screech" might be an interesting enough oxymoron, "soil my soul" may be some kind of wordplay on "garden wreath", but then "I wail simulating silent tears soaking sealocked tree", "I state syllables nulling sentence's scream", "grasping life-sized lead" (is it lead the metal or lead the rope?). It's simultaneously too much and nothing at all.

And, circling back to formatting, the slashes. The slashes! I suppose they're supposed to highlight a sense of dichotomy, of division between the Shadow and the Self, but very often---too often, really---they're just....there. "I....dread being/led" "I am little/lovely labor"

Yeah. Both too much and nothing at all. A very frustrating read.

Good idea Notch! I've reformated it to look like a tree!