Comment on I have forgotten by fllnthblnk

In the first stanza, your language has purpose, is a tool to set up the conceit. In the second, the language becomes a means to elongate the poem and try to make the metaphor all the more impressive.

"its ascension, not unlike a god,
how to ease them together
into such an immaculateness that one word"

is wordy, and falls prey to too many abstract ideas that aren't made lucid and don't provide strong imagery or narrative push. The words themselves don't do anything to round out the poem or add anything to it.

"one feather removed would mean
the hard, dark earth, or the cold, bitter slap
of the sea. It is a sort of death
that goes quietly, a third-world death."

While the imagery here is markedly stronger, it's too loud. That is to say, that it's dramatic with cause, which leads the reader to become either a) overwhelmed or b) overly appealed to, as though you were trying hard to impress instead of make the poem meaningful without being superfluously grandiose. A side note about this section, "a death that goes quietly" is beautiful, then you go on to overwrite it, "a third-world death". Too much of a good thing does exist in poetry.


"To think I had something amidst my grip,
that I could reach into the good light
of each morning"

Again, this section suffers from being too wordy, with the sounds of words becoming cluttered, as in "I had something amidst my grip"...the way the words fit within these lines becomes heavy-handed. "that I could reach into that good light of each morning" is okay, but it, again, becomes too grand without a real sense of what its purpose is in the piece as a whole.

The last few lines of the piece actually work brilliantly to leave the reader with an image, a lingering impression of what the piece was about, how it moved, and what it ultimately achieved. The lines between the first stanza and the last three lines, like I said, just seem to be a great deal of throat-clearing. As opposed to building a great scene with the power of the first stanza and the lasting image of the last three lines or so, the poem gets heavy-handed, too grand for what it wants to achieve, too wordy, over-written and ultimately muddled.

I hope that helps to clarify what I meant. I didn't mean to leave my responses so open-ended like that, my apologies.

I don't want to tell you how to write the piece or give you examples of how the piece could be better with "such and such" lines; that's your prerogative and far be it from me to assume that I can write a poem with your distinct voice and your eye.