Mapping Myself

[miyako73]

My body is a geography
of hills and mountains,
valley of sparse grasses
and grassless plateau.

[Alexander III]

Personaly this poem does not give me anything in the artistic and the emotional sense, it feels dry like out of a textbook.

[AuntShecky]

Take a look at "Topography" (http://www.wisdomportal.com/Romance/Olds-Topography.html) by Sharon Olds.

[miyako73]

This is just one part of a pair. Sorry I thought the two poems before this one will give you a hint. I am doing a minimalist intro and then a longer one like my Faulkner short and the hammock. The Ant's Journey is next.

[miyako73]

Personaly this poem does not give me anything in the artistic and the emotional sense, it feels dry like out of a textbook.

It can be argued that this poem is emotional. Who maps the self but an emotionally disturbed individual? Or maybe a person who is so lonely or bored that she explores her body, an abandoned landscape of flesh.

[osho]

Contrary to the rest of commentators I found this poem immensely gripping. Poetry is not prose where everything is effable, bare. In poetry there are subtexts, fine distinctions. There are shades of meaning, inexplicit. This poem is so simple but in a way I liken it to Zen thoughts which are so plain the unripe reader becomes desperate. This kind of feeling at one with the cosmos unearths the very core of reality, the reality we have dig into and feel in point of fact. The reader must be matured to understand this deep thought and the amateur cannot observe underneath the veneers. Taste is not an objective issue, and it is personal and the reader who enjoys good poetry can enjoy this too.