tempust's comments (member since Jun 23, 2009)

tempust's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

I think it would be stronger in both if you removed the ellipses (...).

As far as changing the line in the parenthesis to "am i only dreaming of getting home with a white capsule in my hand?", I'm not sure. My initial reason for writing the line was to play on the famous song "White Christmas". While the singer dreams of a white Christmas, the woman in the poem just wants to come home so she can save her child. I wanted her to sound desperate and determined and just - like a mother.
And thank you for the support, everyone. Much appreciated.

Oh! That actually looks pretty good.

i wade through three thousand
feet of snow up to my calves and
my soft blue jeans have frozen
and i am cold, i am cold, i am
cold - she is fevered at a hundred
and four degrees fahrenheit
and i can’t find any pills in the
medicine cabinet above the
chipped basin, and maybe she
will die because i can’t see the
way to mr.anderson’s stop&shop
because of this thrice-damned
white christmas ( i am only
dreaming of getting home to
my baby with a white capsule
in my hand ) and oh my god,
i am cold, i am cold, i am cold.

Maybe it's just me, but I think it's probably the best version on this thread.
If anyone else agrees with me, then Ruth - you are a Godsend.

Oh. This is frustrating.
Grr.
Maybe I'll come back to this one in a day or two.
That seems to work well for me.

Okay, I tried to do some fixing and this is what I came up with:

i wade through three thousand feet
of snow up to my calves, and these
soft blue jeans have frozen stiff ( i
am cloaked in rimy denim, every
stroke of thread etching the day’s
story on my thighs like blue veins )
and i am cold, i am cold, i am cold,
and i wonder if it is worth it - she is
fevered with a hundred and four
degrees fahrenheit and i can’t find
and chewy pills in the white cabinet
above the chipped basin, and what
if she dies because i can’t see the
way to mr.anderson’s stop&shop
because of this thrice-damned white
christmas ( i am only dreaming of
getting home to my baby with a
white capsule in hand ) and lord,
will it be my fault if i don’t turn back
right now and call up the store to
see if they are even open - should
i have walked south, east, west
instead? i should be kissing a silky
forehead and wiping the red off,
not slipping on ice, and oh my god,
i am cold, i am cold, i am cold.
---
I don't know, I sort of feel as though some of the desperation of the tone was lost. And not to mention that it's - what? Eight times longer?
Critique, please.

Gabrielle - many thanks for the critique. I like it when people read poetry with a critical eye.
This is the story I was imagining when I wrote this:
It's Christmas and everyone's supposed to be happy and cheery and ripping sparkly gift wrap off huge boxes.
Instead, this woman's child is burning with fever.
The woman wasn't expecting this. She has aspirins, she has vitamin A, she has medicine for arthritis pain - but she doesn't have any Children's Tylenol in her medicine cabinet.
Her nearest neighbor is gone visiting a grandmother for Christmas. So the woman leaves her child with the woman's mother. She has to walk through piles of snow to get to the nearest store. I think if you were in that situation, even a foot of snow would seem like the whole damned ocean. Personally I feel like an exaggeration was appropriate, given the woman's state.
Actually, now that I'm rereading it, I think I was referring to how far away the store was - because it says the snow is "up to her calves", right? So three thousand feet in distance. Which usually isn't that much, but with the weather and the realization that the store might not even be open, it seemed like an awful lot more.
And that's where I was going with "i wonder if it is worth it", as well - what if the store wasn't open, and she was just wasting time that she could have spent with her daughter, cooling her forehead, reading her stories, giving her water, etc? What if it was a better idea to have walked in the other direction, where maybe there was another store two miles away?
I realize now that I did not make that clear enough at all, and it does sound pretty awful in retrospect.
Hmm.
I'm going to try and fix this. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you everyone :)

Thanks, Kenneth. Happy holidays to everyone! Hope your winter isn't too chilly. :)

i wade through three thousand
feet of snow up to my calves and
my soft blue jeans have frozen
and i am cold, i am cold, i am
cold and i wonder if it is worth
it - she is fevered at a hundred
and four degrees fahrenheit
and i can’t find any pills in the
medicine cabinet above the
chipped basin, and maybe she
will die because i can’t see the
way to mr.anderson’s stop&shop
because of this thrice-damned
white christmas ( i am only
dreaming of getting home to
my baby with a white capsule
in my hand ) and oh my god,
i am cold, i am cold, i am cold.

Michael wrote: "tempust:

WOW! This poem blew me apart---and as you know from the Brigitte thread, I am not a big fan of free verse. Stunned is too weak a word to describe how this poem left me. If you don't min..."

Oh.
I think I just squawked.
Your offer was ridiculously generous, and I'm so honored to have been granted your approval.
Yes, I actually have read a few of Anne Sexton's poems and I enjoyed them immensely. To be compared with Sexton is...incredibly flattering, to say the least.
Feel free to play with the poem to your heart's desire, as long as you don't claim authorship.
How important is writing to me? I don't love to write. I don't even like to write.
I need to write.
I turn grouchy and irritable when I don't write. I write for my own health and sanity, because when I don't write then the words and ideas start gnawing at my brains and my whole mind is taken over and I can't concentrate on anything else. I write mental poems if I don't write them on paper.
(I am hopeless.)
I definitely want to major in English and become a writer. I might become a freelance journalist or something, but will for sure continue with creative writing on the side.
And if you can help me out there at all, then I would be extremely grateful.
Again, I'm honored by your offer.
Thank you so much!

I guess you're right - I tend to ramble once I've started. I don't know what I can take out though...or how I can space it better...I'll experiment a bit and try to fix that. Thank you!

Michael - listen, you can rip my poetry to shreds any day! I wouldn't mind honesty once in a while.
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2600...
Anyone else up for "bullying" me?

on saturday evening she decides she is a rainbow.
she is standing beside her elliptical all-knowing mirror,
which she had hung beside her wide open closet,
and then regretted (because it was right next to
the window and her curtains were filmy and sheer).
her mirror tells her that she is a surreal oil painting
of a harpy, psychedelic swirls coating her like sweat.
she runs her hand over her own self and must agree.
her legs are pale, the white fingers of a sleepy giant,
and her breast is whiter still, and thick fingerprints
stain her like she is a glass storm door in the fog.
and her arms are tan and dark, and her stomach is
a bulge of arabesque designs and double-stranded
dna helices and her eyes are blue day-old bruises,
and her thighs are fleshy, and she is scared of what
may come and what will not come because these
kaleidoscope whorls cover her, but she is a wrinkled
raisin, bleached white by sun and who will want it,
who will want it, who will want it, who will save her?

Oh, I choose the Parrot-Ox as well! I love the humor. Second place for me is probably "What has happened to the sylph of tears?".

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... ;)
Such a cute poem! You really should try and turn this into a children's book, it's simply too adorable to be wasted away.

Wow.
That wasn't what I expected!
I like it. :)

Really loved this. It was intense and thoughtfully written. I saw the pain as figurative, I think it's because I hate knowing that there are people who have to go through physical agony everyday. But that's sort of stupid of me, because emotional pain is just as bad...?
Anyways, I was going to ask - you wrote this for your English class? If I wrote something like that - okay, no. If I showed what I've written like that to my teacher, then I'd probably find myself being poked and prodded by men in white, before I can even ask if the teacher enjoyed reading my alliteration.
Not that my writing could ever be so deep.
So, in conclusion. Incredible poem, well done. And I'm sure you'll do well if you submit it for a contest. :)

Oh! I really like the beat the poem has got going on. I particularly enjoyed mentally-singing the lines "hey little girl with a Broken Smile do mind if I sit for a while?" and "Hey Baby Girl with a Broken wing there's a hole in your heart where it used to sing."

There's some obvious problems with capitalization, punctuation, spacing, etc, but I think if you work on it, it can be fixed. I'm wondering - are the seemingly random capitalization in the middle of the verses a result of spacing that never translated from paper to the computer screen? If you know what I mean, I don't know how to say it. Anyways, just try to remember that you should only capitalize pronouns, and the first word of every sentence or verse. Capiche? :) It'll really make reading the poem easier.

Woooooow.
I love your imagery and all - "bullet cried,/Its tears dripping red on the sidewalk" and "The smoke made circles on the asphalt".
Powerful much?
Yeah, the ending really shocked me, but your reasoning made it seem perfectly clever. And the whole argument a few of the you all made about how a child wouldn't know a lot of this stuff - hm, sort of agree there, but it just it makes it so much more powerful to me? I don't know, if I grew up in a town like that, I'm guessing I would also know a lot more about this type of thing even as child.

So, all in all, Erica - wonderful work, keep it coming!

I really liked the metaphors. The title turned me off at first, but it's really great. Some of the best phrases were "the snake who gave eve the apple", and "the 3 o'clock inspiration, the stranger in the bookstore." Really creative.