Snow - Shakespeare's Monkeys

Snow

While accumulating snows
deposit layer on white layer
in slow muffled accretions,
the land beneath inexorably goes

like lost certainty, fading belief.
A numbing whiteness blurs
the boundaries, everything concurs
that doesn't stand in stark relief.

Snow men and snow women
struggle into life with coal-black eyes;
they suffer the snow's white lies
to make them almost human.

Fisk Brent -

concurs, inexorably, accretions? Someone's been using their dictionary again! Why the love of large Latinate words? Their use makes me want to consume vast quantities of vino. Poetry isn't meant to show how well you scored on your GRE, but how well you're engaged in your surroundings. This is too abstract and cold for my tastes.

Brent

U668857 -

Ha!...God forbid a "poet" should have a love of words!

What's GRE ?

Joseph Nardoni -

I, too, wonder about the big words in the poem. Accretions, for instance, doesn't add anything to the sense of the poem. The snow falling, it seems to me, is quiet, but the accretions themselves never had any sound to muffle.

I'm also a bit confused by the level of abstraction in the notion of the land going inexorably like lost certainty, faded belief. These ideas are too vague and quite large, actually--they could be anything, so it seems to me a reader could turn them into nothing. I'm also puzzled by the level of reality in the poem when everything concurs, because the personification is lost in an image that ultimately remains undefined.

I hope you find this helpful.

U668857 -

For those with a lexical deficiency (and have an aversion to dictionaries - apologies to anyone else!) here's a definition of "accretion" - "an increase by natural growth or by gradual external addition; growth in size or extent." Sounds a bit like what happens when snow falls!

For those lacking in poetic theory - a poem should "suggest" - not specify or overtly dictate (having said that, this piece pretty much spells out the suggestion by an explicit simile !)

Fisk Brent -

No, not deficient in language skills, but there's much more to writing poetry than selecting an "accurate" word.

for example, "...those austere and lonely offices?" is an ending to a fine poem. It uses an unusual word for a poem, austere, but in this case it adds to the distance between the working class father of the poem and the more educated boy who took him for granted for many years.

Accretions is the wrong word here for many reasons but mainly for the sound of it, not the sense. It sounds harsh. It sounds like secretions. It doesn't do any extra work to help the sense of the poem along.

As far as the abstractions, you are correct about generally using suggestion over more strident, obvious language. It adds to the mystery of a poem. Abstractions are a different animal altogether. They fuzz up the narrative in frustrating ways and prevent the reader from connecting with the material.

Have you read the Emporer of Ice Cream? If not, you should check that out.

Brent

U668857 -

Interesting rejoinder. I'm still not convinced "accretions" is a wrong choice of word. There's often an unconscious weaving of vowel-music - in this instance "accretion/beneath/belief" is a sound-thread in the way that "snows/slow/goes" also inter-weaves.

Regarding the charge of "abstraction" - yes, I've introduced an idea; that's because I'm not interested in snow per se. I hijack the natural phenomenon of snow falling, causing everything to "concur", become a blanket uniformity; while the previous certainty of features in the landscape prior to the cover-up becomes a metaphor for lost certainty/belief in general.

I may be overly fanciful with the notion - but there it is. There's certainly some truth to the idea that many of us lose our certainties/beliefs as we age and conform into the accepted blanket norms of societal roles....

This isn't really a poem about snow (you may have gathered by now!)...

I'll check out that reference - thanks for the debate!

Rgds., Alan.

Fisk Brent -

As with all feedback, you're free to take or disregard whatever you feel works. As long as you recognize that my comments do not boil down to "this poem sucks." I think the core metaphor here is interesting, but I would enjoy it more if there were more concrete description and more of an emotional anchor. I suspect that if you do the old "put this poem in a drawer for a month" you'll look at it with very different eyes than you do right now. Good luck with the revisions.

Brent