(7 hours ago)Stan Wrote: A Dark Room Facing East
A skylight lets flashes through,
the fan shuttering a thin shaft
on 35 mm sheets.
Scorched chair legs
smear faint ash shadows
to the rod-base, which smelts
a pitch gash from the covers.
In the heat, blades gather
under their wings
what shows in cracks:
The man’s face made up
of the strain he was mothering.
Pretty good imagist sketch IMO. Good use of verbs and nouns to motivate interest: "shuttering a thin shaft," "smear faint ash shadows," "smelts a pitch gash," "blades gather under their wings"
The language is consistently trying to do something novel and provocative, which is appreciated.
As usual I will make what is now my common complaint about static syntax, in particular the "poemy declarative." Plural nouns verb direct objects with modifiers. Even if taken as a deliberate choice, I'm not fully satisfied with this structural monotony. It distracts me from the poem's content.
I think maybe I don't know enough about developing photos, but I have a bit more trouble than I'd like making the compelling gestures and turns of phrase cohere into intelligible narrative. I would not complain about that either, except that the ending gesture makes me feel the poem wants me to leave having received an intelligible narrative, maybe even something like a parable. And I'm not getting that signal so clearly through the static, so in terms of sensibility, I feel let down.
It's also possible the poem is not yet ambitious enough in its treatment of this subject and occasion. It does feel largely mimetic to me until the abrupt leap to Something More Significant at the end.
