En Passant in 7/8

[AshleighWood]

My first attempt in the open air so I'm really interested in feedback!


En Passant in 7/8

We danced,
An orbital elliptic,
Asymptotically feral,
Yet in time,
The heart meters,
An inconsolable joy.

[Genuinebloke]

Beautiful balance in this piece. So much said with so few words!

Asymptotically feral - just rolls off the tongue, a pleasure to say it out loud.
Yet in time, - a simple phrase with multiple meaning which forms a really strong bridge from beginning to end.
An inconsolable joy - beautiful phrase again, and one that you can only appreciate once you have experienced that such a thing really does exist.

Wonderful work. thanks for sharing :-)

[shemthepenman]

hello,

i can't resist a chess reference... and one coupled with a time signature... i had to read this one.

My first attempt in the open air so I'm really interested in feedback!


En Passant in 7/8 - i like the title.

We danced,
An orbital elliptic, - you seem to be using two adjective without a noun. or, are you using 'elliptic' as a noun. but i don't know why. wouldn't 'elliptic orbit' be better? 
Asymptotically feral, - yeah, see, i do not get that, either as a line or in conjunction with the previous lines. these two words do not seem to go together at all.
Yet in time, - apart from the fact that i have completely lost it by this point, i really think you should look at punctuating this a little more accurately - it might help :/ 
The heart meters, - er... meters as a verb?
An inconsolable joy. - mmm...

sorry, i had to stop. i just cannot penetrate this one. there feels like an idea here concerning music and chess, but, to me, it seems like a bit of a word association game, rather than a poem - a word jumble, at best. i am sorry, again, that i couldn't give more feedback, but i cannot seem to make a lick of sense of this poem.

[hlaibo]

My first attempt in the open air so I'm really interested in feedback!


En Passant in 7/8

We danced,
An orbital elliptic,
Asymptotically feral,
Yet in time,
The heart meters,
An inconsolable joy.

You painted a lovely picture with such few words! What I really enjoyed was how you were able to tie elements of shape, time, and motion into an emotional consequence. 

"Asymptotically" was an interesting choice, and I think I understand why you used it as the mathematical connotations of a curved line play well with the orbital shape earlier. Something about it trips me up on first read, but it gets better the second and third time through.

Great job overall!

[AshleighWood]

Beautiful balance in this piece. So much said with so few words!

Asymptotically feral - just rolls off the tongue, a pleasure to say it out loud.
Yet in time, - a simple phrase with multiple meaning which forms a really strong bridge from beginning to end.
An inconsolable joy - beautiful phrase again, and one that you can only appreciate once you have experienced that such a thing really does exist.

Wonderful work. thanks for sharing :-)

Thanks. "Yet in time" was a sort of happy accident as I was fumbling around for how to connect some of the concepts and I threw it in there before even seeing the deeper layers!

---

hello,

i can't resist a chess reference... and one coupled with a time signature... i had to read this one.

My first attempt in the open air so I'm really interested in feedback!


En Passant in 7/8 - i like the title.

We danced,
An orbital elliptic, - you seem to be using two adjective without a noun. or, are you using 'elliptic' as a noun. but i don't know why. wouldn't 'elliptic orbit' be better? 
Asymptotically feral, - yeah, see, i do not get that, either as a line or in conjunction with the previous lines. these two words do not seem to go together at all.
Yet in time, - apart from the fact that i have completely lost it by this point, i really think you should look at punctuating this a little more accurately - it might help :/ 
The heart meters, - er... meters as a verb?
An inconsolable joy. - mmm...

sorry, i had to stop. i just cannot penetrate this one. there feels like an idea here concerning music and chess, but, to me, it seems like a bit of a word association game, rather than a poem - a word jumble, at best. i am sorry, again, that i couldn't give more feedback, but i cannot seem to make a lick of sense of this poem.

Thanks - I really like this feedback. My approach is to smash words and concepts together (imagine particles crashing into one another in the large hadron collider) to see what emerges. Once this happens it then makes sense to me and I have no idea if it connects with others. It is very helpful to hear in what ways it doesn't connect!

The "asymptotically feral" line is the collision of the mathematical formalism of dance, music, chess, life, etc with the wild, raw, free expression that also lurks within of all of these things. The rhythm of life is a metered heartbeat - steady and regular and yet, at the same time, it is animal, wild, and free.

The chess part in the title was an afterthought really but I liked the formalism of the move. Like a step in a line dance, the two combatants move past each other and then one moves to the side while the other departs. The pieces are literally pawns, trapped in the formalism of the "dance". Yet within each is surely the "lust to expand"!

---

My first attempt in the open air so I'm really interested in feedback!


En Passant in 7/8

We danced,
An orbital elliptic,
Asymptotically feral,
Yet in time,
The heart meters,
An inconsolable joy.

You painted a lovely picture with such few words! What I really enjoyed was how you were able to tie elements of shape, time, and motion into an emotional consequence. 

"Asymptotically" was an interesting choice, and I think I understand why you used it as the mathematical connotations of a curved line play well with the orbital shape earlier. Something about it trips me up on first read, but it gets better the second and third time through.

Great job overall!

Thanks. I wasn't sure if "asymptotically" could work but it was just too temping to try it out. I love the idea of getting ever and ever closer to an animalistic core but never making it. I'm thinking of the Tango, sweeping in and out with the passion getting ever closer to the surface but never making it through!

[billy]

i sort of get the title and the reason for it, i get the first two lines and see their relationship to the title the 3rd line eludes me enough to feel like i lost track of the poem. the last two lines work though an inconsolable joy sounds too abstract and in need of more definition.  the yet in time line sort of defines the poem for me, when it right, it's right and knowing that makes one happy. the 2nd line is my fave and gives me an image of a moon going round a planet going round a star; metaphorically speaking. i don't think you need the caps or the  commas. question: is 7|8 7 beats to the bar?

My first attempt in the open air so I'm really interested in feedback!


En Passant in 7/8

We danced,
An orbital elliptic,
Asymptotically feral,
Yet in time,
The heart meters,
An inconsolable joy.

[phil194]

I like it; it was short and sweet. I think the first two lines go together beautifully, but I have no idea what the third line is trying to convey - unequally wild? That just might be a bad gap in my vocabulary. Also, I find inconsolable an odd adjective concerning joy. Maybe I am missing what you were trying to say, but un-comforted joy seems redundant. But I think this is a great for a beginning - it definitely has a neat feel to it overall.

[QDeathstar]

Hmm.

I get the jist of the poem, which is good. But there are several questionable word choices, I think.

I do not get the chess reference, or the 7/8 reference, other that perhaps there are 8 pawns, but have no sense of its significance, and it makes even less sense taken with the third line, since it talks about being animalistic, whereas I see chess as being the exact opposite.


Also, inconsolable joy seems like an odd word choice, since I think inconsolable has a negative connotation and joy has a positive connotation

[AshleighWood]

Thanks to all for the great comments and feedback. I've been reflecting on what I was trying to achieve with the poem. 

I was trying to create a dynamic tension in the words, leaving this for the reader to resolve in their own mind (hence the contradictory elements). In a weird way I'm quite influenced by cryptic crossword puzzles and I love the idea of gradually unlocking layers of meaning inside a phrase.

Maybe trying to do this in poem form is a bit crazy buy, hey, that's just another meta-puzzle for me to solve!

The feedback helped me see some aspects that are getting in the way: 

- the title didn't frame the rest of the puzzle and so just created more confusion
- some of the lines didn't connect enough to give readers a reason to care about looking for the layers

I'll return to my particle collider to construct my next experiment!

[QDeathstar]

the difference between crossword puzzles and this poem, is that the crossword puzzles give enough clues....

it's your poem, own it.