Sunday Night Dinner
We are made fools of lastest news
of Global Warming. Last week's newspaper cruses and divides
Our table once again with meaningless election results.
Our mouths rap with nonsense, and
hating nonsense, or sense, like last week's collection call
about our Macy’s dining room furniture bill.
Yet, tender moments we share as
Our tiny child holds his head steady
Like the Sears Tower-wait-the Sears Tower
is just a memory like Paul Harvey’s Rest of the Story.
Windex bottles of Meth attempt
to clean our latest familiar transgressions of
trusting one another. but even drugs force us
to evaluate our methods of communication
as archaic and unreliable.
Chris-
ReplyDeleteThe strongest aspect of this draft lies in its almost--what I would call--"inert" tonal register. Particularly effective are lines about "last week's collection call" for "our Macy's dining room furniture bill." Or "Windex bottles" attempting "to clean our latest familiar transgressions of trusting one another." This language really emphasizes the commonplace, again almost mundane tone. Additionally, the deployment of words like "evaluate" "meaningless election results," certainly work toward this as well. It's detached, passive, like the language in a newspaper article. Have you read much John Ashbery? Darin is presenting one of his tomorrow night, but I highly suggest reading more of his work. He too often deploys this sort of passive, generalized language to powerful, surrealist results. "Soonest Mended"(am. anthology, p. 275) is a great display of this tendency in his work.
This draft suggests that "archaic" systems communication--i.e media(tv, newspapers, telephones, radio, even dinner table chit-chat) are "archaic and unreliable." The employment of that passive language really works towards this effect. Yet, the second stanza seems to indicate that in this world saturated with "empty language," the only "true language" or is thus, a silent one--the connection between a parent and their young child--but even that moment is certainly fleeting.
Some possible ideas to keep in mind for revisions:
* the passive, "inert" tone adds a dimension the surface level reading, do you think employing even more of that language could help solidify that tonal register?
*additionally, the second stanza is certainly an epochal moment in the draft-- can this be constructed in a way that becomes even more essential to the draft? In other words, I see the draft begging for more in this second stanza.
* there's a few moments where I feel that, due to some syntactical fishiness, meaning seems unnecessarily allusive. (ex. "our mouths rap with nonsense, hating nonsense, or sense" ; or "Like the Sears Tower--wait--the Sears Tower is just a memory.) Additionally, the line "windex bottles of meth" seems an odd thing to introduce--if you're referring to a "drug problem,"I think it needs some clarity.
Overall, this draft seems to have serious potential.
I'm with Brian on the tone, especially in the first stanza; there's a ton of expansion opportunities there, I think. We've got global warming, meaningless election results, the Macy's furniture in the face of how pointless everything is; it's just a pedestal for the droning nothing in the newspaper. Good stuff, great stuff paired with the flat tone.
ReplyDeleteTrying to capture the post.. everything condition's extremely fun, but in revision, might there be ways to intensify the images? I'm reminded of this Texas-sized collection of plastic in the Pacific Ocean I heard about. I really enjoy the debris floating around in the poem.
And. The Windex bottles of Meth. There's not much support tonally or thematically to bear a meth problem. Pharmaceuticals, though, might capture the image I see in the draft.
I also agree, and think it might be interesting to add some specifics to this piece, which would also help with expanding. Could you perhaps bring in specific headlines rather than providing a general catalog of politics, global warming, etc? A few titles that could fit with the tonal register Brian speaks of could create an even more provocative sense of the draft as a whole. Also, you could create a kind of dialog between the family members themselves to create a more specific sense of their relationship and the "white noise" of the family's conversation. A way to approach the draft might be to expand on images of mundane attributes to the average family and perhaps twist it in uncanny ways through the conversation you provide here. In what ways does the conversation make a statement about the family as a whole? How do the poignant images come into play and how could both images act as a juggle between what the members of the family mean to each other?
ReplyDeleteI'm with Randie on the headlines idea. When I was first reading this draft I couldn't help but imagine what was in that newspaper "cruising and dividing" the dinner table. You could go even broader with this though...what section is she reading, what section is he reading (I would suggest breaking the norm here, I think it might hurt the poem to have a man reading the sports section, for example) then maybe go into specific headlines (maybe one person even asks the other to clarify a headline because they are not knowledgeable about the subject).
ReplyDeleteOn another note, is there an opportunity to go "off subject" with the Sears Tower here? Could you incorporate a memory that this couple had when visiting the sears tower...was it the trip where the child was conceived, was this where a marriage proposal took place, or was the fondest memory of that trip the taste of a hot dog from a street vendor which the speaker cannot escape from?
Obviously I am just playing around and expanding on what I saw. But, no matter where you take this I agree with the other posts that the poem has some serious potential.