Two New Poems — And A Little Gloss

I have two poems in the current issue of Shot Glass Journal, January 2017, Issue #21. It published the beginning of February. I thought I’d posted this. . . but it turns out, you can have too many drafts in your WordPress dashboard. Thank you Shot Glass Journal for taking a chance on my work! Especially on “If Anyone Can : Say Anything” which is in unconventional form. A little gloss on each poem is below.

Shot Glass Journal — Issue 21, January 2017

You can read the current issue of Shot Glass Journal here. U.S. poets are listed on the left side of the page, International poets on the right. I’m right at the top of the left hand list–hurray for alphabetization!

The two poems are “Journal” and “If Anyone Can : Say Anything”.

Gloss on “Journal”

“Journal” was triggered by a sunrise. I was driving to work and noticed that this particular sunrise wasn’t as spectacular as many I’d recently seen. This sunrise seemed to creep up on me, even though the colors were just as brilliant as on other days. When I got to work I snapped a photo with my phone.

But my phone doesn’t do the sunrise justice. I read somewhere that the human eye has a dynamic range twice that of the best camera. So to my eye, the scene was more like this edited version, though of course this is not as sharp as the eye sees:

All day I kept thinking about the difference between what is seen and what can’t be captured even though it is there to be seen. Though the poem isn’t exactly about that difference, that thought was the trigger for the initial drafts of “Journal”.

Gloss on “If Anyone Can : Say Anything”

“If Anyone Can : Say Anything” is a poem that comes out of the division between printed poetry convention and the rhythm & sound of poetry performed aloud. So it has as a trigger the same kind of dichotomy as the “Journal,” but perhaps more dramatically so.

When a poem is read aloud–or better, performed from memory–line breaks do not always have the same effect as on the page. The line break functions as musical notation, an extra pause of varying length depending on the rhythm of the words around the break.

On the page, the line break is inescapable. You must notice it, must notice the division of words it creates, even if the rhythm would have you emphasize it differently.

In the same way, the caesura in a given line is more or less emphasized depending on the context of the line within which it falls.

In “If Anyone Can : Say Anything” I’m experimenting with the line break and the caesura. The poem is lineated by the more compact indicator of the forward slash (/) and the caesura by the colon (:).

Causura comes from the latin for cutting, meaning to cut the line in two. In this poem, the colon doesn’t so much cut the line in two as hinge two parts together.

The compactness of the lines, allowed by the notation of but lack of implementation of the line breaks, speeds the poem along from hinged pair to hinged pair. Without creating quite the pause of a traditional line, yet keeping line break effect not otherwise found in a prose poem.

In fact, the caesura of each line is stronger than the line break between lines–made so because the colon is such a strong stopping point in English punctuation.

Too Much Gloss?

That may be more than you wanted to know about what is going on in these two poems. Is this TMI? You tell me.