Well, this is a different side from what I’ve seen of you! Now then, where do we begin. . .?
I. Initial Reactions and Reactions After Rereads.
Quote:
The black collar worker.
Wood between his legs
a bow strung rigid in thought
wisps of dust drifting briefly
Lady garbed in magnificent white.
"this love is doomed"
The voyeur knows
sees the bastard child:
the nervous suitor
(he could care less about youths)
The unsure expressions, on children’s faces.
Their mistake is his bread, his sustenance for the next week.
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Giving you bread was their mistake? In spite of their passing attention to fine arts, they throw a crumb your way is their appreciation (I first read “remuneration” as appreciation, but in retrospect, I see it’s not; you’ll see why I made this mistake in section II). “Oh yes, we appreciate the classics, you see? We even give them money!” the act seems to say. Now I see that it’s not actual bread or payment that you’re feeding off of, but rather their sad state and uncertainty about the child’s paternity.
Quote:
They thought the remuneration good.
surely more than reasonable.
cultured art is well worth the price, no?
Pachelbel O’ Pachelbel if only you knew how many tears your eight measly notes have wrought loose from the shallow well.
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At first, I thought price and tears were referring to the payment erroneously gleamed from the previous bread metaphor and tears of joy when hearing listening to Pachelbel. But after chatting with you yesterday and listening to how “jaded” you were at having to play those eight notes for hours, I realized that price was likely the sacrifice to attain perfection, and that the tears were from frustration.
Quote:
Two weeks later, behind the counter.
The well paid voyeur--dressed in black
garbed in a green apron (and a matching hat to boot.)
didn't think he needed a day job.
how odd, they thought the money good.
Didn't know that ax cost 20 G.
The costs of antiquity.
Was never intended for noble falsehoods, inglorious strife.
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I like the period at “antiquity.” It makes you stop. And. Think. And pull more from a word than what the following clause notes as antiquity’s perversions. I first read the “cost of antiquity” as effort spent on preserving and presenting those old gems for today’s appreciation, and that to work in such a field and dabble frequently with the old masters should never raise someone to arrogance in their “noble falsehoods” or the letter mentioned “pretentious delirium.” I later read the cost of antiquity as the cost of an old Stradivarius, especially when I considered the “ax cost 20 G.”
Quote:
Orchestras and critiques
a smorgasbord of the cultured elite:
divinely appointed guardians of our former collective selves
(who knew the price?)
such an exclusive club.
bought for out of a parents unrelenting love, out of hope it bloomed
towards a promising future.
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I can only imagine what you must go through to strike a chord on your cello that resonates with the judges before you. You raise them to a sublime, lofty status, as if their critical ear could decide if you join their ranks in the future. This is the only stanza where the language changes to a more positive swing. Love is not “doomed,” it’s “unrelenting” and hope blooms. I often read in that you are actively playing during this stanza, as if you’re only happy when you’re playing, but that’s only an inference.
At “bought for”, I’m missing an object, but that may be a result of my interpretation of what is priced. Unless I’m just missing the obvious. After all, not everything has to be stated specifically. What matters is that what was bought for our voyeur (the cello, lessons, tuition, and even those things without a price tag) was bought in the hopes of giving him a “promising future” just as you put it.
Quote:
the well played voyeur, he can't be bitter
these reveries are merely reveries.
there might’ve been a deeper price:
alienation, seclusion, false perception, pretentious delirium.
There it is
the doomed lovers and their bastard child.
3 splenda? Why yes indeed.
wait, you want 4?
Is your sense of individuality so obtuse--that you would need one extra packet of false sugar to justify yourself, one against the other?
oh yes, your bloodshot eyes, the screaming bastard child, the way your body sits reluctantly close to his.
it tells me much more than the extra splenda ever could.
how pathetically obscene
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For some reason, even though you portrayed them as “the doomed lovers”, I saw them quite happily bouncing into the Starbucks with their kid in toe. Maybe this isn’t what you intended (and then again, maybe it is), but I feel our voyeur is projecting his own pessimism and dissatisfaction onto the family. He is disillusioned at “these reveries are merely reveries,” and he muses that his day dreaming could throw him in to “alienation, seclusion, false perception, pretentious delirium.” Our little voyeur is set up in my mind as an entity rather torn between his dreams, ideals, and reality; his ideals are as cloud-high as those divine judges, his reality is so far from his ideals, and his dreams are discarded as ineffaceable in bridging the two. The voyeur gives the family a scathing appraisal from his watchtower, while the barista smiles and gives him the extra Splenda. As we have read from the beginning, the voyeur takes a kind of passive, sadistic pleasure out of watching the family’s charade of decency. And for once he is in the judge’s seat, examining his soon to be client.
But you kind of loose me at the “One against the other;” One what against the other what? You don’t have to answer that of course. It would be like an artist telling her gallery patrons exactly what her works mean. Just know that I couldn’t really place referents to these that made much sense to me.
Quote:
There they go again.
calling their most cultured friend.
the well prayed voyeur, sipping his preferred medication.
"our father has passed. Make his death special, and we will pay you well."
sipping his coffee.
waiting for the day.
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Although fathers can only die once, this has a cyclical quality of ending at the beginning, and having the ability to repeat each day. All the intricacies of rehearsal, the damnation of satisfying one ear (even when that one ear is not your own) yet the council, unsatisfied, asks you to reach for more; the shift into work mode and then the intrusion of your music life into your work life by the request from the man with blood-shot eyes; the commission of a life’s work to honor a life in death; hints of the bastardization of not only that small, unknowing child but the musician still ambling between ideals and reality, he could make a living of playing at funerals, but would that meet his own standards? Could the well paid voyeur ever step down from his watch post, and cease to be a voyeur by walking up and possessing that which he really wants out of life?
II. Analysis of Conventions
Repetition Metamorphosis I like how the voyeur transforms from just “the voyeur” to the “well paid voyeur” to “the well played voyeur” to the “well prayed voyeur.” The substance of change between each new voyeur is readily understood by the surrounding lines, all except for the last one: “the well prayed voyeur.” It’s a stretch, but maybe he’s well prayed as a kind of stand-in clergy member for the funeral, subtly presiding over the tide of emotion in the ceremony with his bow. . .I guess it’s just one of those things left for the reader to interpret.
Also, price/cost never seems to have the same meaning twice. I thought this was a nice way to recycle language, yet keep it fresh in the context of a new situation.
Connotation and Contrast of Diction Words like voyeur, doomed, bastard, reluctance, and uncertainty were strung all about this poem, and they gave it a sort of cynical air, which aided me in thinking that the voyeur was projecting your own disgust on the man and his family, that while he enjoyed feeding on the stoic suffering, it was only because he saw that he was not the only one suffering. But breaking the consistency of words with negative connotations by the pockets of admiration (stanza 8), beauty (stanza 2), and a work that’s neither banal nor mundane, a work that we may even be able to say the voyeur likes (stanza 1)made them all the more cherished.
Semantic Constituency (because stuff like this just sticks out to ling. nerds like me)
sees the bastard child: the nervous suitor I read this like an SAT analogy ^^;. Maybe this is a punctuation thing, but when I see a colon, I think what comes after it is going to expound the clause before it. So I end up with a mixed up thought like “the voyeur knows [and] sees the bastard child: [as] the nervous suitor.” Maybe, just maybe, a semi-colon may help?
Their mistake is his bread I first understood this as “Their mistake was in giving him his bread”, his bread as a metaphor for payment allowing him to survive for the next week (I also saw this thought as supported by the next line “They thought his remuneration [his payment] good”). I guess that could be weirdness on my part and corrected via context clues, but it took me a few reads to get the understanding for which I think you were going.
Just be aware that when you use sentence structures like A(their mistake) = B (his bread) then by transitive relation B=A, which would give me “his bread as their mistake.” You can see where I got my erroneous first reading, but that could have come from me not reading closely enough in the beginning.
Then again, sometimes ambiguity is intentional. If everything was so clear-cut and dry, then we might as well call it prose.
Basic Grammars Punctuation and capitalization are such minute things that have a huge leverage in how a poem is perceived. Maybe you like the not having patterned capitalization? There’s no need nor rule that calls for uniformity of capitalization at the beginning of lines or even of proper nouns in poetry. And punctuation’s such a touchy tool that I would be out of place to even suggest “there should be a comma here,” or “a period would be more indicative of a stop than a sudden change in topic with no punctuation,” as I kind of did earlier. See, sounds haughty, doesn’t it?
But what matters most is that you use the tools of language that you have at your disposal to tell the story, evoke the emotions, get the point across that you want your readers to walk away thinking about after they’re finished.
(Although I might have walked out of this with something other than what you intended, there will always be wonky outliers like me. But don’t worry, we just sit on the sidelines, sipping our tea watching the performer before us reciprocate the gesture with his coffee ^_^).
Funny stuff as an after thought
Wood between his legs I don’t even have to say anything. Just that line out of context made me giggle. Were you eyeing the child a bit too closely, maybe? Ah, so that’s why you’re the voyeur. I see, I see. . . *o.o*
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Well, that was fun, now get to writing more so that I can review more!
09-30-2009, 02:25 AM
