(Week One) Critical Commentary (1)

Lisa in Atlanta to EJ underground:

How you must hate, to be without sound.

Dear father, content must you be until

we’re around. You’ve sneered with a mouth, still

echoing the insult to the others in my life,

I know your pain, alone and full of strife.

You’ve tried to raise us right,

never angry, except when I broke mother’s light,

and they say widows are always

black, grim, like it rains for days.

You left with a twinge below the ribs,

like a knife, over and over, jabbed like fibs

told that one day, turned into lies

oozing, through the backs of our eyes.

My Critical Commentary:

Tay-Tay,

I absolutely admire and respect you for making yourself vulnerable to form.

With regards to this specific improv', I think your choice a rather wise judgement. On the one hand, you aren't pressured by form here, in the Elegy, not as strictly, anyway; so this allows room--for those of us not so acquainted (just yet) with the mechanics/tiny gadgets of poetic forms--to experiment without being overwhelmed or finding oneself overtly oppressing the poem to comply by making absurd demands: "Be a villanelle, damn it!" On the other hand, Berryman's elegy, with it's rhyme scheme, forces a little pressure on your improvisational writing, albeit gentle-handedly.

As for the improvisational draft: I definitely think you are on the right track. Of course, you're producing imagistic and scenically rich lines throughout--but those are now trivialities in a 4210 workshop. That is, in this workshop you should be honing in on content, on the contextual components of each draft. (I'm still busting my buns!)

Advice: I would revert to the anthology and carefully (re)read the overview for the elegy. Look closely at the last two sentences, especially. As I previously noted, this draft is on the right runway; it just needs a little more maintenance.

I would consider--as the antho. also maintains--the conflict: locate the tensions, introduce them--but you must find a way to situate contemporary cultural customs of death while still being orderly, refined and decorous about it. And you cannot forget the private sentiments. Dying is easy; writing about it, however, is not.

Like always, if you have any questions, concerns, opinions, ideas, etc., just hit yo girl up. Don't forget: I'm learning this form-stuff with you. :)