the Greater Nomadic Council

Q: Yeats?
A: Keating, John.

I don't get it. :(

Well, I messed it up, but it probably wouldn't have made sense even if I had gotten it right.

From the brief discussion on free thinking between Mr. McAllister and Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) at the dinner table. McAllister said "Not a cynic, a realist. Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams, and I'll show you a happy man." To which Keating replied: "But only in their dreams can man be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be."

Q: Tennyson?
A: No, Keating. (wink)

Oops, I should have clarified further: from Dead Poet's Society (guess you knew that by now)...

Oh. I see. I lack your encyclopedic knowledge of quotes. Sorry. :) Thanks for the useful comments though!

Funny that it's from DPS. As I read it, I imagined a scene from . . . aahh crap, that movie with Genius Janitor Matt Damon. They're the same movie, i guess. Or at least, Williams plays the same character.

Also, nice poem. I won't go into too much detail (I've learned my lesson on that one) but here are some thoughts.

"Paper Skin
We're so fragile.
Photographs flake from
Our bodies like confetti.
Strangers stalk them
To organize into albums."

Great opening. Oblique, surreal, but definitely pointing in a direction.

I personally would replace the two descriptions of specific photographs with more of a phantasmagoria - a whirlwhind of muliple images and fragments in keeping with the opening stanza, which implies a global happenning, through the streets of cities, on the wind.

"Of course,
It does not turn.
It's only imagination
Forcing air into dead lungs,
The awful experiment of memory—"

Really good imagery and ideas here, the observation of life being injected into dead things subconsciously. But I'm not sure why the experiment of memory is "awful" - the rest of the poem up to this point is more muted, understated, so that word kind of jumps out.

"If I could sneak behind myself
And snatch my photographs
Fluttering from the sky,
Would they show
A smile or a scowl?
Children lifted like
A sacrifice?
Dusty fields and
Rust-frozen windmills?"

'A smile or a scowl' is a too-obvious dichotomy. I far prefer the tactic of the last lines.

"Page by page,
I burn my book."

The rest of the imagery in the poem (at least what came to me) was all wind, fluttering photographs, dust, windmills - the fire image at the end sticks out a bit. I think it could be tied in pretty easily - wind whips up the flames, etc. Wind runs through the whole piece, I think it should finish it out.

Some good comments, thanks. I posted this one largely because I'm not 100% happy with it, so this gives me a few more things to consider that might improve it.

What do mean about learning your lesson from overly detailed comments? Personally, I don't mind. I appreciate thought-out criticism.

I'm generally very confident in my asessments of people's work. Whether that's justified or not is up for debate, but it means I can be very matter-of-fact when it comes to offering feedback. I think it can rub people the wrong way when advice gets too specific - "change this word/phrase . . ." "Here are the ideas you're going for, and what you can do to get them across better," etc.

I think a lot of people view literary output as some sort of infinitely malleable, magical, and entirely subjective process, any outside intrusion into which can only be seen as 'misunderstanding' - these people want feedback that's vague and/or reassuring. I tend to come from a perspective of craft, which views language as a medium that must be used in certain ways to acheive desired effects. In undergraduate courses, I found that this was a pretty rare perspective, and not everybody thought it was a good alternative to the mutual ego-stroking that usually takes place in those settings.

I get the impression that the longer someone works at writing, the more they come to view it as a craft. There's still something mystical in the act of creation itself, but turning that raw output into something worth reading takes a lot of polishing, rearranging, and tweaking. I don't mind detailed criticism, but if you suggest changing specific words that aren't clearly bad choices, I'll probably just ignore that since it becomes an issue of personal preference. :) Also, I count the opinions of poets or serious poetry readers more highly than those with more general literary knowledge (who, in turn, get rated higher than unliterary people). I try to consider every criticism without letting my ego get in the way. It's tough and usually deflating, but makes it easier for me to improve my writing, too. In other words, feel free to criticize as you see fit.

On a more general note, I'm hoping to find matter-of-fact criticism and the view of writing as craft in graduate school, if/when I get accepted. If it's primarily ego-stroking, I'm going to be pretty unpopular when I critique other peoples' writing. :)

I must admit I have relatively little exposure to poetry, and almost all of that is 20th century, so feel free to write me off as a philistine.

;)

Sweet lord, I hate using emoticons, but sometimes it's impossible to say something conversationally passive-aggressive without having people take offense, unless you put a little fucking smiley face on the end.

Writing as a craft indeed.

Cool poem--evocative imagery. Nothing really critical occurs to me at the moment.

Kind of reminds me of some passages I read from Derrida's recent book "Archive Fever". I haven't really caught on to the discourse, but 'memory' is a big topic in literary theory these days.

Yeah, they stole that from me. :)