05-23-2015, 02:17 PM
The white space was never intended, but I guess it does work. When I first posted this, I was like, "what the heck? why are you being all like this to me, word editor! get back to your place".
It is a bit of a stiff generalization, and the novelty of the poem does go out once its lack of concreteness becomes apparent. I was romanticizing old age, or at least what old age looks like to someone young (and hey, I'm one of those peeps who are young! WOOO) -- how love ends up decaying, becoming a shady cycle of life and death, of old age and youth. Well, something like that. It might be that element of youth -- to me, the poem reads in a detached way, just as if the speaker were not part of the subject's group, and, as noted, I'm not one of those old men -- that makes the poem read as if the speaker doesn't entirely know what he's saying, though I think that's less a telling deficiency on my part, and more a telling deficiency on the speaker's character. But in general, I may just be reading too much into it -- just as you trying to glean more from the poem than its vague sense of archetypalness (archetypicality? archetypici-ah, whatever) might be trying to get fiber from a piece of meat. Or what I'm saying, even that vague idea of a decaying wheel, really isn't quite there yet -- I dunno.
If you have a suggestion as to what I can pare down or possibly add to make that point clearer, you're very welcome. I'm thinking that maybe I should just wait a good ten, twenty years though -- then I'll get back to the subject, and see if what I've gotten on it is any better. But again, I don't really know.
It is a bit of a stiff generalization, and the novelty of the poem does go out once its lack of concreteness becomes apparent. I was romanticizing old age, or at least what old age looks like to someone young (and hey, I'm one of those peeps who are young! WOOO) -- how love ends up decaying, becoming a shady cycle of life and death, of old age and youth. Well, something like that. It might be that element of youth -- to me, the poem reads in a detached way, just as if the speaker were not part of the subject's group, and, as noted, I'm not one of those old men -- that makes the poem read as if the speaker doesn't entirely know what he's saying, though I think that's less a telling deficiency on my part, and more a telling deficiency on the speaker's character. But in general, I may just be reading too much into it -- just as you trying to glean more from the poem than its vague sense of archetypalness (archetypicality? archetypici-ah, whatever) might be trying to get fiber from a piece of meat. Or what I'm saying, even that vague idea of a decaying wheel, really isn't quite there yet -- I dunno.
If you have a suggestion as to what I can pare down or possibly add to make that point clearer, you're very welcome. I'm thinking that maybe I should just wait a good ten, twenty years though -- then I'll get back to the subject, and see if what I've gotten on it is any better. But again, I don't really know.