Poetry / We watch you tick

My first reaction was … no, that wouldn’t make sense. Then I read through the whole piece and realized it really did make a lot of sense. I think I’ll play with that a little, rework some of the lines a bit. Thank you very much for the suggestion.

I do know what you mean about wanting to go out with a bang, most of the time I do too. Lately though I have been on a soft ending kick that I just haven’t been able to shake.  

What do you think of the line “Has me traversing spaces previously unknown�. It feels awkward to me, and I haven’t had any inspiration on how to smooth it out. Yet no one has mentioned it in the reviews.

Here’s the problem I see with the word “traversing.” It’s a word for traveling on foot, usually along a mountainside, in a very irregular pattern of steps, but a tattoo is a march, very regular. It also can refer to something like crossing a bridge, which fits what you have developed better, but I know it mainly as a mountaineering term. Either way, the regularity of the march, its insistent discreteness of steps, works against what I think you are trying to do. I would like “tattoo” all by itself, anyway, as all tattoos are rhythmic, so long as you are talking about marching music, which you seem to be. So maybe a different word where you have “rhythmic” now would set up “traversing.” Some word that suggests a hypnotic quality, adding a sense of fluid continuity, to the tattoo: “hypnotic,” “mesmeric,” “entrancing,” or perhaps, and this is a stretch I know, “tranquil.” That sets up a nice alliteration with “traversing” too. A “tranquil tattoo” would suggest that kind of unhurried sense tempo that the greatest orchestral conductors have, no matter whether it be allegro or adagio, or something like the way Miles Davis paced his bands, beginning with “The Complete Birth of the Cool.”

As to the bang ending question. I understand the idea of the soft ending. The crucial thing to pull it off is to have the reader/audience so in your grip that they are still aware that you have not yet let go of them until the very end. It’s a kind of attenuation of a continued bang that takes a long time to finish, rather than a switch away from the bang itself. I know this is a very abstract way to talk about how the emotional and attentional dynamics of a poem work, but I think it’s right: there are no true soft endings, only the exquisitely quiet end of an extended bang. Otherwise you are simply losing your grip on your audience/reader’s attention. My philosophy, anyway. It might be typified by a movement from a bold climax to an exqusitely controlled understatement. A good example is that new poem of Jen’s about her father. Go over to LJ and take a look at it.

Thank you, actually that’s a typo I’m going to fix right now.

So you like the “And it won’t be funny…” line? I have had a lot of people who thought that line was one that need some work.

Thank you for your review, it is very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Thank you, it’s a work in progress, like everything else. ;)

What parts did you have trouble understanding? It may help me with the next revision.