On Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 8:50:05 AM UTC-4,
george...@yahoo.ca wrote:
On Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 8:27:21 AM UTC-4, H C wrote:
On Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 7:51:42 AM UTC-4, George J. Dance wrote:
On Saturday, September 11, 2021 at 6:07:48 PM UTC-4, genera...@gmail.com wrote:
On Saturday, September 11, 2021 at 5:18:01 PM UTC-4, George J. Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
Silk Diamond, by George Sulzbach
Silk diamond
September golden bullet
The leather horse
Rider
With bad news.
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2021/09/silk-diamond-george-sulzbach.html
I thank you G.D.
Looks great..!
Thanks. I'm glad it's on.
As someone else put it, not as diplomatically, some people have challenged my judgement in including it. So I'd like to take a few minutes, and talk about why I included it.
First of all, I'll admit, SD would not have been included if it hadn[t mentioned "September." But while referencing the month was necessary, it was hardly sufficient. I read over a dozen poems about "September" Saturday morning, and rejected all of
them as being unsuitable for the context (where it appeared in the monthly archive).
It's very much in the Beat (or post-Beat) genre, of disjointed, swirling, "fragmented" images that so many people were writing (and so many were parodying) in the '70s and '80s, when I first got interested in poetry. As such, it fits with the
selection that comes before it (today's), which is by a recognized Beat (but very light-hearted).
Post-Beat poetry is very much written in what Northrop Frye calls the second stage of a lyric poet's evolution, the 'private language' phase; so I've got to admit that I have no idea what story and theme you intend; I had to read the poem myself
and make up my own. The first phrase that struck me and I had to interpret was "September golden bullet": I imagined a single yellow leaf blowing by in the wind, the first sign of the end of summer and the coming of winter. That gave me a story: because
winter's coming on, the speaker has to leave his lady (whom he calls "Silk Diamond" - your "Picture of the Lady" reinforces that idea), because he has to "cross the pass" before winter.
He has to leave her and cross the pass because of the "bad news"; there is a "desperado / With a taste for murder" loose in the land. That gave me two interpretations. On the first, he has to leave her to go fight against the
desperado; which reminded me of Richard Lovelace's "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." On the second interpretation, "crossing the path" was an allegory, for dying: he's leaving her by dying, and the desperado is simply Death itself.
That last interpretation made it a great lead into Wilcox's poem about the "September of her Life," her good days being over and her death in front of her. It fit, in a way that no other poem did fit.
As I say, I could have completely misunderstood your poem; that's a hazard of "private language" poetry. But most of your poetry is "private language". Which brings me to my last reason for including it. It is representative of your work; and while
you already have two poems on the blog, neither are representative: "Expecting Inspiration" was in a whole different vein, which is what attracted me to it initially. And "Dandelions" was (1) specifically written for a poetry challenge, ie not a topic
you chose, and (2) changed by an editor into a format that owes more to Stevens than to Sulzbach ("Four ways of looking at dandelions"). Adding SD gives a fairer picture of your work.
Someone challenged my judgement last night,
and it might have caused a huge family fight
had I not simply said, "Alright!
You win! I'm in no mood to write!"
I lost the argument. I'm told
that happens more as we grow old,
so without words, our truths unfold.
Silence is worth its weight in gold.
Very nice, even if off-topic. Definitely a keeper for your blog and your own book (should you decide to do one).
I'd encourage you to post it in it's own thread, where I'd like to say more.
Hi and THX again.....
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