Robertg.73901's comments

Maxwell, I did preface my comments by saying I had considered what their potential consequences might be, and as I feared, they were hurtful. My own language was strident when I should have been providing constructive criticism. For that, I sincerely apologize. I am clearly mistaken about the nature of a website like this and will immediately cease contributing to it. I wish you well in all your writing endeavours. more »

Maxwell: I’ve pondered the potential consequences of writing this, but I do feel this work of yours is less a poem than a polemic, and conceptually a fairly tired one at that. It’s a strident voice all right, and not a little preachy. I’ve tried to discover what is the art or craft here, and still can’t. Consider T S Eliot’s admonition to find an objective correlative, some object or person that is emblematic and perhaps symbolic of the circumstance that is engaging your emotions. Show us Bob the addict and what his life is like. Your telling smacks too much of the pulpit, and I don’t think that’s what poetry ultimately is. Just saying, with respect, because there is a poem in here waiting to be born and likely an important one. Robert Graham more »

This is a poem where the old Joseph Conrad adage about the purpose of an art work being “above all to make you see,” readily applies here. It is a poem in five acts in which the tone and texture invite a reader (much like the addressee who is being invited in (perhaps a ‘passerbys’ (sic)) to take a guided tour of a house that has seen better days but whose owner, grandma, still offers an open-handed and open-hearted welcome.
The poetic equivalent of a hand-held camera technique guides the observer’s eye on this winding tour of the house. There are signs of decay everywhere, from the old Xmas tree and cheap piano to the dog-eared paperbacks to the old fur coat and cheap jewelry, that have the effect of turning the once vibrant house into a place of suspended animation complete with the artifacts and memories of yesteryear.
But the ‘warm’ kitchen, with the ‘warm’ meal simmering, is still the simmering heart of the house, where despite the empty rooms and tawdry jewelry, a certain grace still animates the place.
Despite some idiosyncratic punctuation and the faux pas of the final word, the poem does its nostalgic and hopeful work excellently well. Its subtleties are to be savoured much like the stew, and even without a hunk of bread and a beer, chewed slowly and thoughtfully. more »

Thank you jewoo525. Of course, one always thinks one is leaving a little trail of seeds to perhaps provide the narrator’s take on why this disintegration occurred, the motivation etc; So the word ‘chassis’ bears a lot of associative/symbolic freight, as it hints at the sexual history/tension in the parents’s lives and the attractions of its on-top solution. But then you never know, do you, whether anyone nibbles at the seeds, to speak. For me, that’s the challenge to infuse the poem with ideas and ambiguities and not take the easier sentimental way out. But I digress…… I truly appreciate your sensitive comments. Robert more »

Although the poet’s use of the vampire persona is a bit heavy-handed, the correspondence between vampires as outsiders and the real-life small town mentality suspicious of any sort of difference, is well drawn. The controlling irony of giving oneself over to being ‘one of us’ as a way out of or of moving beyond that aura of suspicion, is transmitted very well as the voice moves from the general to the particular. Unlike the vast majority of the others, there is something artful going on and the poet has ventriloquized the spooky, engaging voice well. more »