Sensation of symbolism

[b]

Sauntering through a smoggy sea
scrubby sand sticks to my sweaty skin
in salt.

A raving blast of sultry wind
suffocates my dusty face
and stuffs my soaking eyes
with soil.

And I snort.

My dry tongue strangels
in a rubby mouth
and I swallow
the crumbled bits
of a cracked palate.

So I collapse.

My nose is glued
with the smelling stench
of a foul-faced earth.

I see.

What do you think of this?

[Shea]

I like the alliteration and the imagry made me crinkle up my face as I read it. (sort of embarrasing since I'm in a public library.)

[b]

Hello Shea,

If you have enough time, do you please want to give a detailed line by line interpretation of this poem?

Thanks.

[Koa]

i like the allitteration too...
...and there are a lot of words i don't know... :oops:

[b]

Hello koa,

That's a pity. If I can find a good Enlish - Italian dictionary, I will try to translate it.

I was hoping that you might give me a line to line interpretation, so I could know which assosiations you get when you read it. (They probably don't have to do anything with love - like with your poem that I read recently...)

[Koa]

don't worry about a dictionary, i know a good enough one. (www.wordreference.com, incase you're wondering)

i'll try to read it more deeper as soon as i can, but i wanr you i'm rather bad at analysing, my mind is not really capable of concentration anymore

[b]

Thanks! That was just the kind of dictionary that I was looking for.

ps. I think my Italian grammar is very bad and some of the alleratations might be lost... But I will try to make it work anyway.

[Koa]

hey guy, i'm going to look up the words myself, i just meant that you don't have to take the disturb to translate it for me... Well of course you can do it if you enjoy it, it might be good practise if you want to improve your italian

[b]

Of course I enjoy translating it. (As I explain in your post.)

[Shea]

I don't know about line by line interpretation, but to me it's just sort of fun to read. The imagry is interesting but confusing if the author (is it you?) is talking about the same physical place from stanza to stanza.

In the first stanza, you could say the person is in a place like southern California where there is smog, heat, and sand. But the second is talking about wind, when wind and smog don't coexist.

The fourth stanza definately describes thirst in a very visual way, yet I don't know what "rubby" means.

To me the last three stanzas could represent the finalities of a polluted earth. I remember, when I lived in the Ohio Valley, it was nicknamed "Cancer Valley" because of all the chemical factories there. I couldn't even wear contacts in my eyes because the pollution in the air would cause my eyes to burn whenever I had them in.

"I see." to me means in perspective of the pollution, that warnings that went unheeded now make sense.

I don't know, could I have seen the poem wrong?

[Koa]

The only thing i really can say about it is that i find it STRONG. I like the strength, of the words, of the imagery... (lol the first stanza reminded me of how much i hate sand when i go to the seaside...)

The 'i see' at the end is to me a big question mark....it's like 'what?? what do you see? some kind of awareness? (that the world sucks, perhaps? )'

Shea, your interpretation is nice...what i want to say is that i think that every personal interpretetation of a poem can work, even if the author was meaning it in a different way...but that's just my view...

[Shea]

I like to analize stories more than poems, so when I was in high school, I always listened to my classmates analysis of poem and always thought that my view of it had been wrong; that I missed something somewhere. I love to read poems though, especially one like this just for the way it sounds and moves. Please let me know if there is no 'one' way to analyze a poem.

[Koa]

I find it hard too, to analyse poems... i can feel something but i can't express it, make it rational...
Moreover, i've been shocked by a mad teacher of german who wanted an accurate written analysis of every poem we were reading at school...it was terrible, both our understanding and written ability in german were still rather low, and we ended up inventing any possible thing about the menaing of every word and trying to express it somehow
...Maybe soemtimes poetry is more enjoyable from a point of view of feeling, not of analysis...analysis is good if you actually have something to say about it, but if it's forced it's just fake... That's why i can't comment much on this poem, apart from what i've already said...it doesnt seem to work on the rational side of me, it just remains lost in a mix of thoughts.

[b]

Poems are complex expressions of emotions and personal feelings. By means of association and the metaphorical use of language, the reader can subcousciously have the same feeling that the writer had - when the expression of thought is perfect.

To analyse poetry is in fact to search for the original feeling of the writer and express it on a non-poetical, abstract kind of way. It is also to look whether the associations and metaphores that the writer uses are encouraging the transmission of the poet's feeling.

To analyse a poem rationally and critically is actually a controversial aproch to poetry in realationship to poetry itself, in which not the abstract, rational way of thinking is important, but rather the more assosiative, emotional and subcounscious kind of way.

That discussion about the controversion of poetical analysation is one of the things that I tried to encourage by means of this poem. Let me explain:

The feeling of this poem that I had when I started writing, was not very emotional and personal as usual: I wrote this poem in a 'l'art pour l'art' and 'language-philosophical context'. I try to image a certain feeling that is not about love or something, but that represented the associative way of human thinking itself.

The main feeling in this poem is about the association of human-physical uncomfortability in it's surroundings. It is an associative stream of conciousness about sand, heat and 'desert', which isn't used as a metaphore for an emotional feeling or something. But everybody who reads this and is 'into poetry enough', is waiting for the revelation of the original feeling of the poet, for which the reader thinks that the lines about sand are a metaphore. (I thought...) Since that expectation of the reader isn't answered - eventually - the reader gets a kind of uncomfortable feeling: she or he gets disoriented. That is why the lines about sand and are also expressing a kind of mental incomfortablity: that of confusion.

So this poem - on another layer of reality - describes a part of the structure of the associative aspect of human mind: the confusion that context and metaphores - nuanced interaction - can diliver.

The line "I see" - in the end - confirms that: throuhgout the poem the reader is constantly blinded and buried with assosiations that have no fysical function in the text, just like the relationship between the narrator and the sand: she or he gets blinded by it. When the poem ends, the reader and the protagonist are released from the interaction: they can see again.

ps.

Koa: nice to know that you thought about the way in which you hate the sand so much when you go to the beach; that is one of the things that I thought of when I began writing!

[Koa]

I must say it makes more sense to me now that it has been explained... i can see something more behin the strength

(and isnt sand annoying?? i hate the beach...maybe i've had too much of it as a child, when we went every summer...)