Unpredictable

[wasellajam]

Unpredictable

Like hand-dyed threads drawn tight across a loom
a parent winds the sturdy warp stretched wide
but taut, a shed built strong but leaving room

for life to wield the shuttle children ride.
The final vision cannot be discerned
as colors side by side are amplified

as weft threads slide then deftly are returned;
an artisan allows the work to speak
a language of its own that's only learned

by following the steady fall and peak.
The siblings give no thought to what's unseen,
all consequences cloaked in life's mystique.

They'll hold each other close as they careen
through life, no distance in the years between.

Any and all crit welcome.

This is a really well-crafted poem. It feels like a tightly woven basket. I guess that's apt!  I enjoy the music and rhythm and the clear thematic focus. It's a poem that knows what it wants to say. 

I have two main questions. The first is about content - I worry that the insights offered here are all pretty abstracted. OK prosaic reading: speaker reflects on the unpredictable nature of life and "growing up," using the loom as an extended metaphor for the relationship between parent and child. The parent would like to arrange life perfectly for their offspring but recognizes that this is impossible; a parent can arrange the characters and even provide the setting but it's ultimately up to the children, and circumstance/fate, to decide how the story ends. This is true but also bordering on being a truism. I think making some part(s) of the discourse more particular and vividly local could help resolve this worry. Like, do we have to JUST talk about "how things are" in general? What about how things are for this particular speaker, their particular children? 

OK, content aside, some thoughts on form. Again this is already strong use of rhymed verse. Mostly I don't feel the syntax is being made subservient to the rhyme scheme, so the few places this does happen prick out: 

a shed built strong but leaving room for life to wield the shuttle children ride.  As mildly verbose sentences go, you could do a lot worse, but still, for me this is the first place where the language feels a little awkward. It took a few tries to really parse this, and even then the syntax is kind of a mouthful. 

discerned - this is one of those words that almost always feels out of place to me. I just don't think most people have "discerned" as such in their working vernacular; it calls a lot of attention to itself as a "poemy" word used primarily to anticipate the rhyme with "returned." 


as weft threads slide then deftly are returned - by far the weakest line in the poem. This is the only place I feel the speaker fully loses command of the language. It's very difficult to say aloud, it's grammatically a bit of a chore, and it has this high-falutin' tone that I really resist instinctively. 

an artisan... the steady fall and peak - for me this is too much and starts to feel pedantic, even a little smarmy. Which I think is always going to be a central concern for this subject/occasion. 

I confess I don't really understand the ending. "No distance in the years between"? Sorry, I may be dense but I can't figure out what that's meant to mean. And "life's mystique" again is too on-the-nose for me. In general I think poetry resists these kinds of easy packagings of big ideas into abstract nouns. Leave that to the prose artist, I say! I think it's our job to replace such language with inventive gestures that point to the same idea more precisely, in a new way. 

Overall, I think you could call this poem finished as is and it would have an audience. But I think there's a second poem waiting in the wings that is considerably more ambitious and "professional." As the poem progresses, I find myself progressively less convinced by its form, as the language seems to become pretty beholden to rhyme by the end, with the unfortunate result that we begin to veer into the territory of the familiar and expected, the almost-glib summative impulse. There's clearly rhetorical heat in this occasion and I would love to see what happens if we're more exigent about bringing that heat to the surface with novel language-making. 

Thanks for sharing your work <3

Hi! Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to craft your excellent critique. I was ready for "life as a weaving" is too boring to bother with so being offered ways to improve this is encouraging. It will be fun to see if I can lift this into a keeper, I really appreciate you giving me specifics to work with and a picture of where it fails as a whole.

I hope you're enjoying the site, lovely to have you here.