2 Comments

1. 

   Daurade March 10, 2010

   Flash poetry?

   If god tells us to kill the kid, we do it. Nothing happens. Just the same parched ‘scape. But we sit around on our asses anyway, praying for the promised benefit of the sacrifice. Doing nothing, in other words.

   There is another, more positive interpretation, hard to verbalize, private, mystical (on my part that is).

   Kind of hard-boiled.

   Economy of words works wonders: I see okies in the dustbowl, cowards in the cathedral and thirsty drunks. Images galore: you leave it up to us.

   I have no idea what you intended by this but I’ll bet there was some bittler bilish (?) taste in yr mouth when you wrote it. I’m enamored.

2. 

   jonfrankel March 11, 2010

   I don’t want to disappoint you Daurade with the actual circumstances! If all my poems could be a short as this I’d be happy. But I know why I wrote it and it would be dishonest to pretend it didn’t have a specific circustance, or as Creeley would say, ‘occasion’….that said, as always I don’t intend anything more than that the reader should enjoy it and puzzle over it and create whatever meaning he or she finds there. So, I wrote that after deciding to cut, severely, my baby, Endangered Species, in the hope of making it publishable. I expereinced this as a sacrifice. The rain would be the hoped for result. The sacrifice would be the cutting. But since then I have experienced such self-loathing that I’ve abandoned the project entirely. I would rather write a total failure that is my failure than write something that succeeds on someonelse’s terms. My worst flaws are either my greatest strength or nothing at all. Anyway, long ago I bet the farm on romantic individualism, as the pomo detractors like to call it, or masculinist what have you.