Hey Mark,
I'm trying to get back in the swing of things here. I read the poem and the comments to this point. Music came across to me due to the phrase: swaying in sync
Though I would say that the phrase also gave double duty to simply pointing out the crowd mind and could have easily translated into a charismatic speaker (e.g., political, religious, etc) swaying a crowd. The in sync part especially pointed to music. So, no I don't think your work is muddled. I found it pretty clear as this is mild I won't do a line-by-line walk through but again it seemed clear to me.
We have this speaker here being a source of adulation to the crowd (chlorophyll to vegetables--which doesn't say much about either A) the crowd's intelligence, or B) the speaker's view of them.
A few comments below:
I'm trying to get back in the swing of things here. I read the poem and the comments to this point. Music came across to me due to the phrase: swaying in sync
Though I would say that the phrase also gave double duty to simply pointing out the crowd mind and could have easily translated into a charismatic speaker (e.g., political, religious, etc) swaying a crowd. The in sync part especially pointed to music. So, no I don't think your work is muddled. I found it pretty clear as this is mild I won't do a line-by-line walk through but again it seemed clear to me.
We have this speaker here being a source of adulation to the crowd (chlorophyll to vegetables--which doesn't say much about either A) the crowd's intelligence, or B) the speaker's view of them.
A few comments below:
(11-25-2011, 12:11 AM)Mark Wrote: I am a liar
a dry lizard on chlorophyll
lost in a crowd of vegetables
swaying in sync
Mark. I think the first strophe is your strongest. It does the most for you with the least words. I know that we always try to put some structure in our free verse here it's two strophes of four lines. I would encourage you to consider your line lengths your lines seem like they want to be shorter and the poem might be helped by letting that occur.
(I am a liar
a dry lizard
on chlorophyll...etc)
Lost in a crowd strikes me as somewhat cliche you may want to consider a substitute. The first line though, the imagery, and the content seems very strong here.
tone tuned to
laudatory laughter
for an eponymous tome
of pure fiction
I'm not as thrilled with S2. I would rather see the first two lines tie into the imagery more (something that built on the vegetables I guess). The last two lines work for me. My only other call out and this might just be a style preference on my part is the line break on to. I do recognize that sometimes a preposition break works, in this case it doesn't feel strong enough to me (again maybe just me). I am a fan of the sound of tone tuned though.
Oh well, just a few thoughts. I hope some of them will be helpful.
Best,
Todd
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson