"A Charade" by David Mamet

[Lizzie]

A piece of paper
Which appeared to be blank
But on which we see
Writing had faded.
"My first is of the
Possessive of those
Given to possession.
And my last, the finality
Of that proposition.
In entirety I give
That which in three worlds doth live.
Ungainly in the two;
In all, long-legged beauty,
Much as you."
Upon the paper which had come to fade
We strain to see
An ancient charade.
Can you decipher me?

from Ploughshares

---

Nope, I got nothin.' Help?

[just mercedes]

I quote M D Hudson on reviewing The Chinaman

Nope. I cannot decipher you. Don’t want to, actually. All the straining and fading and the ancient charade, not to mention the “finality of proposition that which in three worlds doth live” all strike me as pure blithering vatic nonsense. The first four lines are incredibly clumsy set up (go ahead, read them aloud), with random line breaks made worse by the first-word capitalization Mamet insists on.

I’d guess that these poems are larded with irony, of course. Whatever in the world isn’t these days? But irony comes in a mailed fist here, if it comes at all. There’s nothing remotely pleasurable here, no compelling concrete details, no convincing moments of wit. Of course in his prose Mamet is rarely funny. This is not necessarily a fault, but it does have a tendency to limit his range. We get lots and lots of dire “meaning” piled on with all the subtlety of plate tectonics.





I don't agree with him entirely. i don't think it's pure. Maybe just blithering vatic nonsense.

[cvanshelton]

I got nothing