Grease
Oozes under the skin.
Miss the gristle,
Aim for the white
Crunch, smack, wipe
The gross from my face.
Jangle me a tune
From wince have I
Never inhabited.
Yet, I occupy
My natural desire
To rip the flesh from
The splintering bone.
Animalistic urges
Overcome me
I devour
Morsels of what was
Living.
I thrive from the
Kill.
I survive to murder--
Once more.
I wrote this poem purely on a whim. I have given it very little attention so there is much room for improvements. If any of you have suggestions on how to improve this piece please let me know. Thanks in advance.
The strongest part of this piece is in the first couple of stanzas. Some great phrases there: “miss the gristle,” “jangle me a tune,” “the gross from my face.” This is great language at play, so make sure to take those phrases, figure out where they came from, and milk that for all its worth.
ReplyDeleteNow, I interpreted this poem as someone eating the bones in meat, like how sometimes people eat the bones in chicken. If that’s not what you were going for, then you might want to work on making the poem a little more explicit.
Some suggestions for future drafts: try expanding. As this draft is, you have only a little to work with. I think in the beginning stages of writing poems, more is better. The more you have to mess with and nip and tuck, the easier it is. Creating more and then cutting down is a downhill coast, whereas pushing for more from bare bones is more difficult. Also, be careful of “expected” language, like “To rip the flesh from / The splintering bone,” “Animalistic urges,” and even words that are high in tone like “kill” and “murder.” What are some imagistic ways you can portray murdering and killing, instead of just telling those words?
Good luck on future drafts.
Thank you so much for your suggestions! I will definitely expand and post another draft later in the semester.
ReplyDeleteMackenzie has a point on the “expected language” front. Really, bones splinter far too often as it is, nevermind how much flesh is torn from various sources on any given day. It almost feels like you hit the ground running with something, but tripped a bit and fed the draft some clichéd kibble. I will say that the opposite end of the spectrum is a very real danger as well, which is to say that “Jangle me a tune” (6) doesn’t hit my ear quite the right way. Of course, this point could be entirely unfounded—I have a penchant for such things, but, to me, “jangling” is almost always a sonic verb and, while it may instantly convey the notion of keys or some other metallic object, the idea is still firmly in place that “to jangle” means “to create sound”—i.e. “a tune.” My concern with phrasings like this is that they’re often overlooked because they pass one of the main tests in the poetic toolkit—to borrow Dr. Davidson’s phrasing: “if I stood on a New York street corner for a year…,” which is invaluable criteria when drafting, but the notion of “useful language” can’t end there. This is especially important with verbs, which tend to draw a great deal of attention, and double or triple-checking to make sure that an easy cliché doesn’t slip in under the guise of unfamiliar phrasing. Moreover, the notion of a “tune” is terribly general. The jangling does some work in providing a sort of dissonance as backdrop, but the tune itself is mute in this piece—which I feel is a bit of a missed opportunity.
ReplyDelete…last thing, and this is totally my own, dumb predilection, but I’m not all that comfortable with the capitalization of every line…
Thank you Tim! I was trying to make a snide reference to Bojangles with "Jangle me a tune" but I must not have had enough to make that noticeable. I really appreciate the time that you guys have taken to help me become a better writer. I will take all these suggestions into consideration when I re-draft.
ReplyDelete