Sunday, 5 July 2009

Slavery and Freedom


Slavery
I woke amidst a silence infantile,
The ennui suffered froze time – aeonic
Disease held my mind in its casket. Bile
And blood that brewed a spirit: platonic
Love liquor conjures beneath despising
The cherished nemesis; he poisoned, drugged
With hate the addiction I do now cling.
The emotional opium thieved, mugged
The inner being of its purity
I depend on a substance which induced
The bruising of my own security.
That infringed protection I am reduced
To. Memories I’ll take to my near grave
From my life as an African child slave. . .
Freedom
I listened carefully amidst reposed
Calm. Admiring her façade, weak and strong –
Both rivals battling for turf. Exposed
As lovers in affairs they should belong.
She conquered mental wounds an unaided
Eye would be blind to see. A soul of man,
A mind of woman. Tears had evaded
Her long ago. A medicine began
To guard her spirit from the ocean’s cries,
Far away in a heaven not yet heard
Of. Strength: the healer. Hope and faith baptised
A woman made of velvet steel. Her words
Echoed, resounded back to my sewn heart –
Sojourner’s words I cannot be apart . . .
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6 comments:

  1. Andy Parrott9 July 2009 at 09:51

    Hi, STARDUST,

    It's a treat to read your work again. I can see that you've fully grasped the demands of the form - I can't find fault with your rythm or ryhmes, the subjects you've chosen are powerful, and your language is great. It's a marvel - you should be really proud.

    I love the way you've layered the first poem. Time and the mind are beautifully explored in your 'aeonic disease' section, and the underlying sense of something being 'brewed' that you've cultivated with images of different substances - substances that take time to make - is amazing. Even the title is performing just as you'd want - it informs the piece - it makes the subject clear before we delve into the eloborate web of images you've created.

    You're tackling some complex emotions too - your way of describing that negative cohesion - that sense of being brought together by a shared hatred, is done so well. And the subject itself isn't treated in a linear way. The thought of freedom is an 'addiction,' a risk to life. Your thinking has probed into the frustration of freedom unachieved as well as simply treating it as the achieved 'good.'

    I'll give some pointers for the first peom before we move onto the second.

    This line: 'Memories I’ll take to my near grave' could cause confusion. I see that you mean the narrator is near death, but we can assume she'll carry the memories to death as well, even thought it's not certain. Maybe use the past tense - 'memories I've kept...' something like that.

    The pressures of ryhme are tricky too - it puts a strain on sentence structure. You've avoided that well generally, keeping things natural, but 'Silence infantile' sounds like an adjective placed in the french way (I must say I still like it though).

    The second poem is equally impressive. I like that you're observing the inner battle as an outsider. 'Velvet steel' is a great image, and the semi-biblical language serves you well too.

    Some little bits - the line about tears has lost some of its meaning (probably due to ryhme constainsts). It's clear that she should be avoiding tears - staying away from them, but by making the tears actively avoid her it's a little confusing.

    Similarly the 'lovers in affairs' line and the final line were difficult because of their strange structure. I just thought I'd make you aware of them, but generally the way you've juggled meaning and form is beautiful.

    I'm glad to have read these, and I look forward to your next piece. Take care,

    Andy

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  2. Shadi14 July 2009 at 08:33

    Hi Stardust,

    I enjoyed reading your work, you have chosen a really interesting and challenging topic for your sonnets. Stylistically they are pretty perfect- you have managed to stick rigidly to the rhyme scheme and metric form required for a sonnet, yet have also managed to find freedom within the constraints of such a form through your use of enjambment and caesura.
    In ‘Slavery’ I was impressed by your layering of the disease imagery you conjured with ‘disease held my mind in a casket’ ‘bile and blood’ and my favourite line ‘the bruising of my own security.’ Violent imagery and wounding is threaded throughout your sonnet and gives your imagery great consistency.
    I was also impressed by the way the sense of oppression you create in this sonnet seems to hang in the very atmosphere and tone of your verse. The language you use is consumed by repression and restriction- all your verbs are inflicted upon the character, ‘held my mind’, ‘poisoned, drugged, mugged’, whilst she remains passive and confined in her state of ‘ennui.’
    I felt that the tone of ‘Slavery’ is spot on: full of pain and resentment that her childhood as a slave has tainted her life and has marred any future happiness she could have had. I do feel however that a greater change in tone or mood is needed to distinguish the two parts of your sonnet- the octet and sestet. You could perhaps achieve this through separating the octet and sestet into the past and present- how the character felt/ thought in the past and how perhaps her feelings have changed now she is nearing death. This would create a shift in mood and atmosphere in the poem.
    I also felt that more of the voice of the slave could come through in your first sonnet. You are clearly a gifted writer with an expansive vocabulary, yet someone who was a slave in childhood would not have received such an education . You could be expressing in your own language what this character perhaps cannot express for herself, yet if you wanted it to be in the character’s own voice you could think about the language and dialect that such a character would have had.
    Your lines:
    ‘That infringed protection I am reduced
    To. Memories I’ll take to my near grave’ I felt could be altered slightly in terms of structure. Ending on the word ‘to’, on which the stress falls, looses your rhyme between ‘induced’ and ‘reduced.’ Is there someway of manipulating this phrase so that it ends in ‘reduced’ instead as this would be less clunky and flow on smoothly to your next phrase: ‘Memories I’ll take to my near grave.’
    Your second sonnet ‘Freedom’ is equally as impressive in terms of language and meaning. The tone of this poem is a real contrast to your first sonnet. The voice of this character seems much more calculated and analytical. My favourite lines were ‘A woman made of velvet steel’ as this creates a wonderful juxtaposing image which weaves skilfully into the later line ‘resounded back to my sewn heart.’
    A few phrases in this sonnet did confuse me slightly though, such as ‘Exposed as lovers in affairs they should belong.’ I think you should maybe rethink the word order of this phrase to make its meaning clearer. What do you mean by ‘Far away in a Heaven not yet heard of’? Do you mean the metaphorical heaven of freedom? Maybe I’m just being short sighted!
    Overall you have followed the task criteria scrupulously, with brilliant results. This is sophisticated and engaging piece of work which shows that you have fully grasped the construction of sonnets to the point where you can begin to be experimental in your work and push the boundaries of this form. You show a clear zest for language and a love of poetry. I look forward to reading more of your work!

    Shadi

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  3. Jonathan15 July 2009 at 07:09

    Stardust, hi there. I’m Jonathan, your third moderator for this year. It’s my first year, and so I guess you know the drill better than I do, and I’ll launch straight in.

    These two sonnets are intense and ambitious, and dig deep into their subject matters. If my reading is correct that the object (the ‘she’) of the second poem is the subject (the ‘I’) of the first poem, then that is a wonderfully mature response to the task at hand.

    Equally, the vocabulary is impressive, as is the use of enjambment and caesura, but all in all I found it, as a reader, rather too dense, too challenging. The complicated syntax, no doubt reaching after a period style, sometimes got in the way of the meaning of the poem, but it also impeded its flow. Getting in the way of the meaning isn’t necessarily a problem – you’re using a difficult form to discuss a difficult subject matter, after all, and there’s nothing wrong with making a reader work – but you hobble the rhythm of a sonnet at your peril!

    An example of this would be the fifth line in ‘Slavery’: ‘Love liquor conjures beneath despising’, which is part of a longer phrase stretched over three lines that (if I’m honest) I simply don’t understand. Purely in terms of rhythm, however, the row of three two-syllable words in the centre of the line (‘liquor conjures beneath’) seem to block the flow, to clog up the line. Far better are phrases like ‘Disease held my mind in its casket’ and ‘Bile/And blood that brewed a spirit’: simpler words, wonderful imagery, clearer meaning. Similarly, the last three lines have a clarity of emotion and expression that I wanted to find in the rest of the poem.

    ‘Freedom’ by contrast (perhaps aptly) flows better, although there were still sections that I couldn’t understand: e.g. ‘Exposed as lovers in affairs they should belong’ and ‘Sewn heart’ – do you mean somehow sewn-up, or repaired? In this poem the imagery is less complicated and the rhythm less clogged: ‘rivals battling for turf’, ‘She conquered mental wounds’, ‘Hope and faith baptised…’ All lovely stuff.

    Clarity, then, and flow are what I’m after, to go with the intellectual reach and imagery. For the flow: don’t just write your poem, read it out loud. Don’t just read it out loud, recite it to yourself, preferably while walking. I look forward to reading more.

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  4. STARDUST18 July 2009 at 09:27

    Dear Moderators,
    Thank you ever so much for your comments. As always, they point me in the right direction and aid me with my faults and I sincerely appreciate the support you offer me each and every week.
    Jonathan:
    I do understand that my work can get rather long - winded and very difficult to understand sometimes, but I'm afraid that is just how I have nurtured my writing style over the years - I prefer being discreet and secretive with my meaning. I will of course listen to you and try to be less elaborate when things are getting a bit too wordy, but anything other than that I will prefer to keep the same. To suddenly alter the way in which I write would be incredibly hard for me.
    Many thanks,
    STARDUST.

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  5. englishguru18 July 2009 at 11:02

    Hey, Stardust - just thought I would briefly interject here. :)

    Nobody is asking you suddenly to alter the way in which you write - and, indeed, a writer's individual and personal voice is something to be cherished rather than cast away. But when style becomes a barrier to meaning - which I think happens here and there in these pieces - then this is something to address; secrecy and opaqueness are fine, but, as Jonathan says, sometimes you do not actually make sense here.

    As I have said to you before, the best writing is prepared to take risks - and this includes risks which take your writing in directions you would not usually follow; and a simple, lucid, pithy style can often be even more effective than more florid language and syntax - and much more difficult to achieve too. I think this is the next challenge with which for wordvoodoo to confront you: after all, just as the best artists, musicians, writers etc evolve and develop during their creative lives, so will your own writing evolve and develop over the next few years and thereafter.

    You've bags of potential, and a vocabulary of which many adults could be envious - but it needs tempering and regulating at times too, that's all. Imagine a fashion designer all of whose creations were dripping with the most lavish fabrics and accessories; or a composer whose every piece used every single orchestral instrument the entire time; or even a dancer who worked so hard to display the fanciest, most complex moves that they never actually stayed still: with all of these, moderation is key, and I think that is the case for you too.

    I'll be very interested to see with what new directions you experiment on Task 41 - and how bold you can be with a pared down lexis and syntax. If you can't try out new things on wordvoodoo, after all, where can you do so? To go back to your final sentence in your comment: that something may be "incredibly hard" for you is surely a reason to DO it, isn't it, rather than NOT to do so? :)

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  6. STARDUST18 July 2009 at 12:24

    Dear Mr. Savage and Jonathan,
    You have given me a challenge (probably one of the hardest yet) and I will most certainly try and excel in it as best I can - regardless of how long it takes! I have realised from the both of you that it is all in your best intentions to improve my writing and I will most definitely benefit from it in the future.
    Yours sincerely,
    STARDUST.

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