The poem is not very original and yet it is intensely personal. Oddly, that must mean I am pretty much like everyone else. It is over two years old. What has changed? I move less well, have newly developed ailments and all the older ones. Yet the world goes on quite the same. I was once full of dreams. I cannot say exactly that I have lost them but I have let go my iron grip. The nineties changed my world beyond recognition for the third time. The first time the world took that big a turn was in 1966-67. The second time was in 1972-73, and while the world changed beyond recognition, it was really a course correction. The nineties were in their way much more difficult, wiping out the world much like the first time, only I had built so much. In 1967 I had little to lose.
Progress
When I was twenty
three and full of smokey dreams
I would stride along
a colossus down
from the pedestal fashioned
from my opinions.
Now I am sixty
four, and creak along, listen
to my joints speaking
and know so much less
than I intended to know
by this time today.
April 9, 2010 8:10 AM
I love this; it's got a bit of AE Housman about it, quite a bit of Dylan's Back Pages, and it has indeed that a-ha! sense of something we all know, but hadn't quite expressed or heard expressed that way before. This kind of unfamiliar familiarity and homage to others, shouldn't be just put down as unoriginal or derivative, it's actually deeply satisfying, I think.
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ReplyDeleteI don't know...there's something lacking...a feeling that I normally have in reading my own work, almost a perfume or something, and it's not there in this one. I get what you say, sort of, I think...
But deeply satisfying?? Thank you. I have posted other poems I think are clinkers and had a similar positive response from readers. I would be better served to just be quiet, to let the poem speak for itself. The right thing is to continue the work and improve. Then I might never have to decide to post a poem of thin gruel - a poem I know others will like it even though I don't know why.
Poems have their own life, apart from their creators (or those that listen for their first breath..the poems, that is, that first nudge of something stirring). It has always bewildered me which poems strike to someone else's heart..and which seem to sit there not breathing.
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness. Wow. How nice to see your words. I have missed you though I didn't know it. You went quiet and I continued busy. I agree that poems have their own life. And yet...I have fifteen hundred since 2008. The poems I like come to me from somewhere not me. I can't say that of this one. I can say that of most of these fifteen hundred. They come from somewhere beyond my ken.
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