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got you an edit...
On Desiring The Recreation Of The Freedom Of A Shotgun - 1994
Pins and needles scatter light
from crevices of sunshine crawling
through brown sacks of dust.
How many times can thirty
days be cast aside - regrets in a dresser
collected - secrets in a cigar box
tied off?
Pins and needles wage a fight
between daily injections of self destruction
and too many keychain tokens of life.
All Apologies.
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I see this is your token poem. People will have to get specific, and it's easier to be general. But just to be general, it's easily a poem in the land of song lyric poems. Easy in the '90s mood. All I can say is that the last stanza seems very loose, loose in the sense of this critique. Death and a gun and needles. The canon of the early '90s. A deeply loose vogue. That's the way the poem makes me.
It reminds me, too, of the kind of thing Jim Carroll would write.
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Hi xlaterus.
while you have some good imagery, i really like the first stanza as an opening. in 94 clinton banned assault weapons but i don't think it included shotguns so it can't be that. now i'm stumped. the poem is good enough to save and edit. the grammar seems good and it's cliche free, that alone make it worth editing. the last stanza feels a bit [lot] preachy and is more show than tell. for me as the reader i'd like to be able to connect with it more though that could be my problem and not yours.
(03-15-2019, 11:26 AM)Xlateralus Wrote: On Desiring The Recreation Of The Freedom Of A Shotgun - 1994
Pins and needles scatter light
from crevices of sunshine crawling
through brown sacks of dust.
How many times can thirty
days be cast aside - secrets in a dresser
collected - regrets in a cigar box
unkept? i thought they were kept in a cigar box?
Pins and needles wage a fight
justified by love of self destruction -
stayed by the righteousness of life? this stanza doesn't add a lot to the poem
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Pins and needles scatter light
from crevices of sunshine crawling
through brown sacks of dust.
I think this is incoherent imagery. Sunshine is a crevice, then it is crawling through sacks, what the pins and needles have to do with it is anyone's guess.
How many times can thirty
days be cast aside - secrets in a dresser
collected - regrets in a cigar box
unkept?
This makes sense but it just hangs there without any context or further explanation.
Pins and needles wage a fight
justified by love of self destruction -
stayed by the righteousness of life?
As others have said words like 'love' 'self-destruction' and 'righteousness' are broad abstracts, you need to define them via detail.
I don't mind a poem that leaves room for the reader's imagination, that sets up puzzling imagery, but this is going too far.
I encourage you to keep writing. There's something interesting here but I am not sure what it is.
cheers
Ross
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On Desiring The Recreation Of The Freedom Of A Shotgun - 1994
Pins and needles scatter light
from crevices of sunshine crawling
through brown sacks of dust.
How many times can thirty
days be cast aside - regrets in a dresser
collected - secrets in a cigar box
tied off?
Pins and needles wage a fight
between daily injections of self destruction
and too many keychain tokens of life.
All Apologies.
Posts: 1,817
Threads: 301
Joined: Dec 2016
Xlateralus,
I can make no sense of the title or tell what connection it has to the poem.
"Pins and needles scatter light from crevices of sunshine crawling through brown sacks of dust."
How do "pins and needles" scatter light. "Pins and needles" usually is a phrase that is generally used in connection to the awakening of numbness.
What are (is) "crevices of sunshine"?
For me this sentence conveys nothing. Maybe it is missing some context?
The next two stanzas seem a repeat, in terms of generating meaning, of the first.
Sorry, I really don't know what to do with this.
best,
dale
How long after picking up the brush, the first masterpiece?
The goal is not to obfuscate that which is clear, but make clear that which isn't.
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hmm, i see the difficulty. i was hoping the last line of the poem would make the references through and the title a little clearer. All Apologies is a very popular Nirvana song, and Cobian blew his brains out in 1994 and they found heroin his cigar box, the the needles are obvious and you get sobriety pins on keychains from NA...
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Maybe changing the title to H would be an improvement
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I didn't want this poem to be about Kurt Cobain. I kept intentionally swaying away from him. My reference to Jim Carroll was to his 8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain. I was really into Nirvana, and people in my school made fun of me, and tried to beat me up for listening to that retarded music. Then, Kurt Cobain killed himself. And Nirvana became supercool. It became the cool kid music. I said, Fuck that shit.
So I thought you were too cool to actually have this poem be about Kurt Cobain.
Pins and Needles brings up a Ramones song they did a cover of.
Sunshine, the artwork on the inner panels of the In Utero album make me think of sunshine. A Light.
That pink, and candles.
Songs like Dumb, and other songs, I can connect with Nirvana, a mind blown out, with that lite pink light on the album artwork and in the video Heart Shaped Box.
Your poem is going for these connections effects rather than poem connections.
Otherwise, the poem you wrote doesn't offer all that on its own. I get a lot out of it. Stuff I added to it from that vague strange light I bulbed out of the vibe and cover art of Nirvana's In Utero.
But I've been told I have a deranged mind.
And feeling. Not thought alone.
