11-09-2026, 06:50 PM
I like it sometimes. Overall my experience of the poem is that it is too crafty by half. There's a sense of the young pianist putting trills all over Brahms or whatever. Like I'm with the speaker most of the time but sometimes, like with the creak (release) or the juliuuuus, tbh the whole conceit begins to wear on me by the end. I am just not a huge fan in principle I think, of the poem-as-cryptic-crossword aesthetic, which is not to say that's what this amounts to but that's the energy I get. I would love to see this speaker be less coy and impish about it all and just level with me from the jump. They seem to have a lot to say.