The Ritual of the Eye

[miyako73]

An incomplete gestation
Spared me only an eye
That saw everything
As purple and indigo.

I woke up to the silence
Of frogs and dead crickets
In the sun's mid-morning,
but to my eye, it was dawn.

Mid-afternoon came to rest
When I sat by the window
Waiting for the sparrows
To break their wings and die.

I knew it was past eve
On the patio, in my chair,
Rocking slow and squeaking,
When I counted the fireflies.

[Hawkman]

This is almost perfect miyako, except for 4 words in the final verse. "...passed eve" doesn't work, evening is ok, although I feel you didn't say this because you were afraid of an extra rhyme. If this was the case then set aside your reservation. If it want's to rhyme, let it. You have some nice slant rhyme between the two preceeding verses, and an occasional unforced end-rhyme isn't objectionable. I have a feeling you have one too many syllables in "patio" for the line. You could replace this with terrace, We always used to call it that in my family. Patio kind of feels like a 1970's affectation to me, but then I'm getting on a bit - lol. The final modifications I'd suggest are to change 'when' to 'while' in the last line and drop 'the' before fireflies. Something you should try and remember is that an article can be omitted when you are talking about generalities. You can put one in for metrical balance, but here it's one too many beats. There are times though when you can't omit them without distorting the rhythm or the gramatical sense when talking about specifics. You just need to get a feel for when you can and when you can't.

After the minor tweaks above I don't think it could get much better.

Nice poem.

live and be well - H

[miyako73]

I think past eve is okay as in past noon. I want to use eve to convey three things: a celebration as in Christmas eve, the night before, and evening.

The essence of "the" is always important in my writing. It always has a hidden meaning. I used "the" before "fireflies" to convey that the lonely person in the rocking chair wants to believe that they are the same fireflies who come to visit him/her every night. He/she needs attachment in his/her lonesome world. Maybe he/she counts them to find out if some of them leave him/her or die.

Also, the use of "when' is more powerful than "while" in this poem. "While" gives a reader a feeling that the almost-totally-blind man/woman knows the time of the day by himself/herself. "When" gives a feeling that due to fireflies, he/she knows what time it is. Hence, "I knew it was past eve... When I counted the fireflies." It also conveys a habit or a ritual.

[Hawkman]

You may want to convey all that, but the words you chose don't. However, the modifications I suggest make it read coherently. Still, it's your poem...

[Riesa]

I like the feeling that it sets, as life goes by. pretty poem

[MorpheusSandman]

This is the best poem I've read from you yet, miyako, and I agree with Hawk that it's almost perfect, although his suggestions aren't the ones I would've chosen. That said, I think your reasoning for keeping "the" and "eve" doesn't work if only for it's possible for such words to convey so much in such a context, but I do agree with you about "when" VS "while".

One thing I noticed is the progression of the images of light, with each part of the day having its associations that actually begins with sounds (though "frogs and dead crickets" sounds better than it works logically, I think; why limit the silence to merely that? Because if you're waking up to hear silence, one wouldn't think of merely the absence of frogs, or that crickets had died... not unless they'd set up listening to them), but progresses to sparrows and fireflies.

I don't know if it was intentional, but I also like the eye/eye/eve progression. More than "Christmas" and "evening" I connected the "eve" with the motif of "eye", which is not unlike how Shakespeare would play with words via their appearance on the page. Although, I must say that the opening stanza seems a bit out of place. I realize it's there to give us the necessary background on the blindness, but the fact that the ideas of gestation/birth or the colors mentioned never repeat as a motif makes it seem more explanatory than poetic. Explaining is OK when you're telling a story in miniature, but I tend to think that in the telling it needs to connect relevantly with what comes after on more than just the informational level.

[miyako73]

Morpheus, you've confused the heck out of me. You wrote about John Cage and talked about postmodernism, yet you cling onto metering and other poetic conventions as if there are no other theoretical or experiential literary possibilities out there for some poets or writers who think some poetic rules are archaic and passe. I believe literature is performative- writing is reading too and a text is an act. So, if I like the flow when I read my work, I don't care if it goes against a rule. As long as it makes sense to me as a writer and reader and it feels good, that's fine. You cannot apply conventions on/to the non-conventional.

[PrinceMyshkin]

While I can't help supporting Hawkman re when "the" is appropriate or not, I think you make a brilliant case for using it here: counting the fireflies has a very different feel to me than counting fireflies would have done.

But what a bleak poem this is.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'm not entirely sure how to respond to your post, miyako... Yes, I'm certainly not unaware of modernism and postmodernism and the rebellion against classic forms and conceptions of poetry, but you have to understand that I look at all of that as just a reflection of temporary culture, and not some permanent state of aesthetics that somehow supersedes everything that came before it. I'm of the mind that art is not science, it does not improve or progress, it merely changes, usually in ways that reflect the cultures and individuals that produce it. Rather, I just see everything that comes along as yet another new way to create that has its own sets of tools, goals, methods, and standards, and many of these things don't radically change what came before; they may just slightly alter, or add one new element to the overall picture.

The ironic thing about modernism and postmodernism is that both are built on the past. Modernism used classic texts as allusive parallels to modern circumstances, while postmodernism decided to put all of these disparate methods, theories, genres, styles, etc. into a blender and create a kind of pastiche out of the mixture. The free-verse revolution was drawing on techniques that went back to The Bible. Perhaps this is just a long way of saying that everything new is rarely (if ever) actually completely new. And while it may be fine to abandon the old ways of doing thing, an artist should really be conscious of what it is they're abandoning and, what's more, what they're replacing it with. New doesn't mean better, it just means different.

In fact, reading this reminded me of a recent article in Poetry Mazazine by Clive James called Techniques Marginal Centrality (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/243228) about how many "radical" poets, like Eliot, actually spent time mastering classic poetry just so they could forget about it and employ the techniques learned in new ways naturally. Ignoring everything that came before by labeling it archaic and passe is just as bad as blindly accepting it and abiding by it. Rather, it's better to learn from the past and take what it haves to teach you and try to apply that to your own, unique sense of artistry. Many great 20th century poets proved that you could work in classic forms and still be modern (Yeats, Auden, Merrill, Bishop, Heaney -- just to name a few).

Poetry is still, afterall, a linguistic and formal art, and it's still subject to the standards of analysis for language and form. The thing about applying conventions to the non-conventional is the wrong way of looking at it, because I don't see, eg, this poem of yours as being particularly non-conventional. It's not exactly John Ashbery or William Burroughs. It's written in complete sentences with correct grammar and common syntax, it employs imagery that could, perhaps, be construed as symbols, it's even written in the 4-line stanza format, which is as old as English verse itself. So I'm not so sure what's so unconventional about this piece that would allow it to escape conventional criticism. You must think such conventions are much more limiting than they are if they can't apply to a piece like this.

I can tell you do put work into your pieces, but, as a piece of friendly advice, you should be more open to posters like myself and Hawk offering suggestions to better your work. If you want to reject everything we say, fine, but I say being too inflexible about one's work is as bad as being so flexible that you'll give in to every criticism. You have to find a balance. You need to realize that we're here to help and we're doing so by using our own minds, both the reactionary reader and the logical critic, that are ultimately different than yours. It's like I said to vagantes; you can intend all kinds of things in your work, but there is sometimes a chasm between what is intended and what's created. You can't rewrite all of the rules by yourself; others have to follow along, or else you just end up speaking a language that only you can understand. You have to be very lucky (or very talented, like Ashbery or Blake or a handful of others) to create your own language and have others care about trying to decipher it.

I am not trying to be discouraging or disparaging of your work when I negatively critique parts of it. It's usually just an expression of my experience, and others may be entirely different. Your work is good, but perhaps it could be better if you tried employing, eg, some more classic techniques, especially in pieces like this that aren't especially radically modern. Images, eg, have more potency when they're used as motifs, rather than just randomly thrown out there in a moment of creative intuition. Structure is also important, and it's usually nice to create a kind of ebb-and-flow in terms of how things are dramatically rendered, even in imagistic pieces. I mean, your piece does tell a story, even though it's a small one, so it is subject to the standards of drama.

[Hawkman]

What really bugs me is the missuse of "eve". The reader has absoulutely no idea what eve, is. The day/night before. Before what? is it, Lammas, all hallows, midsummer, midwinter? Eve on it's own conveys absolutely nothing, except as a proper name. The progression through the poem of time of day sets us up for evening, but using eve for evening is at best archaic, and as the poem isn't couched in archaicisms it just looks like either ignorance of English useage, or a mistake. As long as you hold on to some rather fanciful ideas about what you are doing with language, believing that because you know what you mean your reader is bound to, you will fail in any objective comunication with your audience. Forget conventions of poetry for the moment, if you are writing in English, there are certain conventions of grammar and syntax which cannot be dispensed with, for it is by adhering to those conventions that meaning is conveyed and understanding is reached.

I'm sorry if this sounds a bit brutal, but it something you just can't ignore, and then be taken seriously.

[MorpheusSandman]

if you are writing in English, there are certain conventions of grammar and syntax which cannot be dispensed with, for it is by adhering to those conventions that meaning is conveyed and understanding is reached.Well, one reason I didn't go this far in my post was because there are those that can break syntactical and grammatical rules (Ashbery, Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, et al) and get away with it, but that's usually in the context of stream-of-conscious writing and surrealism. Part of my point to miyako is that this piece clearly DOESN'T belong to that type of writing that abandons grammatical and syntactic conventions and so it can't plead for the aegis provided by those forms. No, it's very much written in plain English with a logical progression of imagery from a consistent speaker and a consistent subject, so it is very much subject to such conventional criticisms.

But, see, miyako, Hawk and I disagree here because the use of "eve" just doesn't bother me here, for whatever reason, but the idea of using sound to convey the time of day, and then making it such a SPECIFIC sound that nobody would think about when awakening DOES bother me. It just goes to show that your readers are different, they notice different things, one thing might bug one and not another or vice versa. It's your job to consider what bothers others and then, maybe, change it if you think you can do so without compromising your artistic vision.

[DocHeart]

An incomplete gestation
Spared me only an eye
That saw everything
As purple and indigo.

I woke up to the silence
Of frogs and dead crickets
In the sun's mid-morning,
but to my eye, it was dawn.

Mid-afternoon came to rest
When I sat by the window
Waiting for the sparrows
To break their wings and die.

I knew it was past eve
On the patio, in my chair,
Rocking slow and squeaking,
When I counted the fireflies.


Thank you for sharing this, Miyako. I think it is very well done indeed.

The very first line is key, I think, to understanding -- but when I think about the "incomplete gestation" I sometimes lean towards a premature baby and other times towards a poorly thought-out plan.

The first-person view you've employed throughout along with the speaker's difficulty to determine what time of day it is convey a sinking sense of solitude. I've never shared this on the fora before, but I have a disease called Meniere's; my hearing fluctuates, and occasionally there are days (or even weeks) when I'm almost deaf. During those days I am reluctant to meet friends, keep work appointments, or even answer the phone. This condition makes me relate strongly to your voice here - the voice of someone who has only one poorly functioning eye to perceive the world with. It scares me and unsettles me.

Aside from this, however, I found your use of language and imagery very strong in this one. Words are well chosen and elegantly placed.

I could ask a few questions. What is the sound of dead crickets? Why do sparrows fly into the window the speaker is sat by, breaking their wings? And, most importantly, what is this incomplete gestation that deprives the speaker of sight? But please don't answer. To quote Morpheus, mystery is what makes a Lazarus of a poem, giving us reason to come back and reread.

Kindest regards,
DH

[miyako73]

What really bugs me is the missuse of "eve". The reader has absoulutely no idea what eve, is. The day/night before. Before what? is it, Lammas, all hallows, midsummer, midwinter? Eve on it's own conveys absolutely nothing, except as a proper name. The progression through the poem of time of day sets us up for evening, but using eve for evening is at best archaic, and as the poem isn't couched in archaicisms it just looks like either ignorance of English useage, or a mistake. As long as you hold on to some rather fanciful ideas about what you are doing with language, believing that because you know what you mean your reader is bound to, you will fail in any objective comunication with your audience. Forget conventions of poetry for the moment, if you are writing in English, there are certain conventions of grammar and syntax which cannot be dispensed with, for it is by adhering to those conventions that meaning is conveyed and understanding is reached.

I'm sorry if this sounds a bit brutal, but it something you just can't ignore, and then be taken seriously.

That's not brutal at all. I don't have the illusion that perfection is achievable. I don't also consider myself as the poet the way you define it-you only take a poet seriously according to his/her syntax. I find that narrow as an assessment. Poetry to me is intent first before everything else. If people who jot down their feelings and the images they see for expression untainted with conventional stresses and strains are poets, then I am.

[MorpheusSandman]

untainted with conventional stresses and strains Why is it a "taint" to concern one's self with "conventional stresses and strains?" These things are methods of expression just like your images are. One thing the early free-versers seemed to realize that many today don't (again, read that article by Clive James) is that there actually was a lot of expressive possibilities lost in the abandonment of such traditions, and they had to find something to take its place. I don't think imagery can do it alone. It can be a major part of it, but even an imagist as pure as WC Williams had other formal considerations always in mind.

[miyako73]

Why is it a "taint" to concern one's self with "conventional stresses and strains?" These things are methods of expression just like your images are. One thing the early free-versers seemed to realize that many today don't (again, read that article by Clive James) is that there actually was a lot of expressive possibilities lost in the abandonment of such traditions, and they had to find something to take its place. I don't think imagery can do it alone. It can be a major part of it, but even an imagist as pure as WC Williams had other formal considerations always in mind.

Literary cultures of peoples with ancient histories all over the world don't have the conventions of Western or English literature. I don't think it is sound to assess Asian or African poems in English using lenses, rules, and views foreign to them. My point is to let a poem, any poem, speak for itself and about its writer and his/her world.

Frankly, I don't want to write thinking Clive James or Williams. I've chosen to write (or type) directly in this forum because, besides saving ink and trees, I get to hear different literary voices influencing my work or just giving me insights. Literature is infectious, and I want to be infected by the feelings and perceptions in their rawest forms the poets in this forum share. If I want theory and rhetoric, I'll browse my mini-library for those.

[MorpheusSandman]

miyako, you keep bringing up traditions and cultures that your writings aren't a part of, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at... you seem to be insisting that every poem automatically creates something brand new that must be addressed on its own terms, but that's absurd because everyone is influenced by the past and what they read and learn and like and whatnot. Of course other cultures have their own rules and conventions and standards, but I'd wager that they are not so radically different that they can not be understand or augmented with our own. Afterall, Pound was immensely influenced by Chinese poetry and ideograms, yet he brought much of what he learned to an English context, and we were given a new movement and new ways to think, read and critique.

I didn't link you to the Clive James piece so you would write thinking like him, but rather as just another voice discussing how even writers we think of as "breaking the mold" and "setting a new standard" did so in the context of understanding and mastering the "old" and "conventional" and modifying it for use in their own unique work. Why do you want to ignore all of the wisdom that the past has to teach you? Nobody's asking you to be slavish to it, but merely to understand it, and choose wisely what to to take and what to leave. If you remain ignorant, you have no choice in the matter. As a great quote goes (I forget who said it), what we don't know controls us infinitely more than what we do know.

[miyako73]

I don't think you are the right person who can qualify someone's piece of writing. Any form of literature is shaped or formed by its writer's experience, thought process, and worldview. For example, I consider the setting of this poem to be in Asia. There are no sparrows, crickets, frogs, and fireflies where I currently live. I expect that in reading this piece, a reader needs to be sensible to Asian norms and nuances- how silence is an indicator of time, emotion, and isolated life and how seeing is a ritual in a familiar landscape. Ritual, alone, being connected to environment is not a Western conception.

By the way, I'm not Vagantes. I always welcome a healthy exchange of ideas about literature. It's easy to end this exchange by invoking postmodernism and performativity, but I'm done with them now. If you want my theoretical leaning in assessing a poem, I am more of an anthropologist who is interested in ethnography. I consider all kinds of literature as ethnographic pieces or images written or created by their authors. In a way, I give back the lives denied by postmodernists to authors.

[Hawkman]

I expect that in reading this piece, a reader needs to be sensible to Asian norms and nuances- how silence is an indicator of time, emotion, and isolated life and how seeing is a ritual in a familiar landscape. Ritual, alone, being connected to environment is not a Western conception.



Good Lord, where on earth did you get that idea? You seem to be basing your arguments on opinion and fancy, rather than fact. Do you honestly believe that the reader is so ignorant? Do you honestly believe that the conepts you so proudly claim as an Asian perogative are in fact, not universal in the experience of mankind?

For your information England, at least, is littered with ceremonial landscapes dating back thousands of years. So is America, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, etc. etc. The exploration of moments in silence, meditation and temporal reletivity inform western religion, especially in the monastic tradition, science and art, both pictorial, musical and literary. I could name a dozen wirters, from Blake, to Bunion, Gray, Keats, Shelly, Browning, Shakespeare, Armitage, Heaney, Thomas... need I go on? who have explored these ideas.

I think you need to read more.

[miyako73]

Good Lord, where on earth did you get that idea? You seem to be basing your arguments on opinion and fancy, rather than fact. Do you honestly believe that the reader is so ignorant? Do you honestly believe that the conepts you so proudly claim as an Asian perogative are in fact, not universal in the experience of mankind?

For your information England, at least, is littered with ceremonial landscapes dating back thousands of years. So is America, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, etc. etc. The exploration of moments in silence, meditation and temporal reletivity inform western religion, especially in the monastic tradition, science and art, both pictorial, musical and literary. I could name a dozen wirters, from Blake, to Bunion, Gray, Keats, Shelly, Browning, Shakespeare, Armitage, Heaney, Thomas... need I go on? who have explored these ideas.

I think you need to read more.

Seriously, do you really think there is something universal? That's scary. Even love is not all about kisses and roses. Fangs and daggers are involved too in some intense cases.

When I said "ritual," I mean a cultural experience not a spiritual activity or ceremony. Drinking coconut wine, for example, in some Asian villages is a ritual among friends using just one shot glass. Can you find that in the West that is so concerned with hygiene and diseases? I don't think so.

Silence in the chaotic West, generally, is negative. It's about death and inhuman deprivation or injustice in the works of Western contemporary writers. Silence among Asian writers is time, environment, solitude, longing. How can you appreciate silence in the West when all you hear all day are moving cars, neighbors' loud stereos, and deafening sounds of a rushing ambulance?

Let me give you an example how reading Asian literature needs readers' understanding of cultural nuances and subtleties not elaborated or explicitly written by Asian writers. When Arundhati Roy wrote, "The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation," to most readers in the West it was about a slow night, but to non-Western readers, that line also involved superstitions about omens and uncertainty. Do you see the difference?

This just shows that only an aware, thinking reader can truly get a writer's intent. I don't wonder why Barthes, a Westerner, wanted authors dead. Among Asian writers, that's an alien concept. A feminist writer in my country once said, "My poetry is my life." How can you understand her poetry then if you know nothing about her life? "Life," by the way, does not only mean one's biography.

[Hawkman]

I don't think so.



This is your problem. You don't seem to be capable of conceiving what westerners think, understand or imagine. You have the audacity to tell us what we do, though... Like I said, you need to read more.

With the drinking thing - do you know what a communion cup is? Do you know what a friendship cup is? Basically it's the same as what you just described. If you truly knew anything about anthropology you would know that fundamentally, people are people the world over. There may be physical constraints upon custom and procedure due to available resources, but the motivation behind human nature/belief is essentially the same, whatever you call it, be it superstition, religion, or "cultural imperative."

[miyako73]

This is your problem. You don't seem to be capable of conceiving what westerners think, understand or imagine. You have the audacity to tell us what we do, though... Like I said, you need to read more.

I live in the West. Do you in the East? Loosen up your rigid reading of texts. There are other contemporary literary voices, particularly the postcolonial ones, the conventions of the classics you cling on to cannot fully understand or demystify. I need to write more about real lives and real times I come to know and experience than read and bury myself in the past, if I want to be a good writer.

[Hawkman]

Try reading some contemporary poetry in English then. I think I already mentioned Heaney. You might also consider reading something on contemporary anthropology. For you information my entire family spent some years in the East, as my father worked in Singapore, and Japan, and India, and Korea... Would you like me to list all the other countries, East & West? It might take a while.

What strikes me about your arguments in this discussion, is that where I see similarity, you only see difference. I see no point in continuing until you learn to open your mind to concepts which are outside your prejudice and immediate experience.

[miyako73]

Who should I read in Anthropology? Can you recommend one? I can. Read about ethnopoetics. Hymes and Tedlock can help you improve your reading of and listening to written and spoken texts. Don't rely on Linguistic Anthropology (LA) to support your points. Language being dynamic and flexible, as LA's fundamental thesis, is the antithesis of your rigid and alienating reading of texts.

The fact is: there are other literary voices that can only be understood and appreciated not through conventional poetic devices because they are written without using those same devices. How can you apply the elite, cultured metering of aristocratic writers to the brave, unaffected poetics of writers from the working class or of those lumpen writers? It's unthinkable because it's not possible. Leave Marx out of this. It's just an example.

[miyako73]

I'm done with this. Let's just agree to disagree. Some love porridge, others want congee. Cream and sugar may sound good with English porridge, but not with savory congee.

[MorpheusSandman]

I consider the setting of this poem to be in Asia. There are no sparrows, crickets, frogs, and fireflies where I currently live. I live in the south and there are sparrows, crickets, frogs, and fireflies all spring and summer long, but I've never woken up thinking the crickets were dead and the frogs were silent... FWIW, using silence as an indicator of time and space is not unique to Asian art at all.