“I couldn’t finish it. I’m sorry.
The author enjoyed playing with the line breaks like so:
At their hems that seem to map out coastlines left far
Behind the new songs are the old absurd hopes
I don’t understand, really, how one is meant to read this. “Coastlines left far behind”? “Far behind the new songs are the old absurd hopes”? Both of those phrases work for me, but using the “far” and “Behind” twice and with a line break between the two words, this just doesn’t make for a pleasurable reading experience for me.
I’m not rewriting the poem here because I think there’s a better way or anything, but just to illustrate my confusion reading through
I know it’s nit-picky, but this is something the author did A LOT.
With their nose in a posy & then came the stuttered
Explanation was required if one seemed to be admiring
If I may make a running analogy.
Once I saw a high school kid run a 400-meter dash in 48 seconds and change. This is pretty damn fast. The current Olympic record for women’s 400-meter dash is in the 47’s, if that can provide some context.
It was a sight. It’s been at least ten years, and I still remember what the kid looked like. His maroon uniform and big hair.
There’s something to enjoy in watching a runner who is struggling, crawling forward after the bear jumps on his back, as we say. After the rhino jumps on the bear’s back. After the sperm whale jumps on the rhino, who jumped…you get it. There’s a pride there, and a strength there too.
There’s also something similar, yet sort of different in watching someone who runs in a way that you’ll never run. Who, by running a lap around the track, makes you sure that this is what the human body was meant to do. The ease of it, the simplicity.
In poems, I prefer watching the elite athlete. By that I don’t mean that this or that poet is “better.” That’s a distinction I’m very uninterested in outside of the track analogy. In track, the time is faster or it isn’t. In art, an objective better or worse is impossible to find, or at least a question that doesn’t interest me in the least.
What I mean by the elite athlete is the person who makes the poem feel effortless. Almost teases me because I think, “I could write that.” Of course, once you really start to examine it, once you clock it in and do the math, you figure out just how much work went into it and how woefully far away it is.
And though in movies and in life and even in running I like the dogs, the Rocky Balboa’s of the world who show every footfall on their faces, that effort, that pain in reading, that step-by-step progress is just not my thing as a reader of poetry.”