black eyed Venus
your lascivious confessions
a voice of thorns
made the priest jerk off
and for seconds he felt close to his god
i burn for you on this
iron jawed fire escape
crying on your thighs
as if landing on a dream
like a canon
that could take out the moon
feel me fickled fingers
I am potters clay
prom queen
sex goddess
luminous dusty winds
of the miraculous
everything is about death
even being born
clouds like asphalt flowers
and ancient monks
her mouth
wet like peaches and syrup
her beauty
an arrow in my throat
and the moon claims the light
i consume you a thousand times
before i die by your hand
oh so willing
tired of living in this dead house
of harsh destiny
palanquin of lust and blood
Comments
Hi Z
the poem has a nice beat/rappy cadence. Some stanzas have more isochrony (similar beats) than others. Most the irregularity works.
this line "-and for seconds he felt close to his god" is totally off the beat, and needs to be metrically adjusted.
But the images and lust come through the flow of images. No pun intended. No...Pun intended!
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Hi Mark
Hay many thanks for the visit ….yeah I'm not sure that I have a deep understanding of cadence as it applies to free verse Perhaps something extremely out of bounds would make it clear Ill read up on it and if you feel to delve into it ...maybe examples id soak it up
I suppose the way a piece is read is critical to cadence So I'm interested in exactly how it goes wrong for you
...Just trying to get through m,y blind spot
made the priest jerk off
and for seconds
he felt close to his god
by changing the structure have I changed the cadence? What I learned from listening to Vuong read aloud was the feel of half cadence too I mean we are really talking about breaks as in natural speech right?
Thank you very much!!!!!!
be a drummer
You don't really need to know the terms, of which there are so many for those who study accents and meter of poetry. You need an ear. Just drum the accents: da- da, da-da-da, or DA- da da Da da da , or da-Da da-DA,
Accents are tricky, this is language, you can speed up words like like composers used sixteenth notes, but it has to work for us the reader. the words need to take on an inner cadence, a music, otherwise what is poetry? how does it differentiated from prose or conversation?
You work depends on that , how you jump around with each line. Each line is a musical statement,
either the lines repeat themselves (isochrony) or they don't, but there is a connection or the poem fails. It becomes prose pretending to poetry. That's why poetry is also called verse. It's important.
Perhaps, after all is said and done, the most important aspect.
see the beats here : the first line being DA da DA da
black eyed Venus (DA- da DA-da)
your lascivious confessions
a voice of thorns
made the priest jerk off (da-da Da da-da)
and for seconds he felt close to his god (da da da da da da da da da)
see what I mean?
Here's Vuong- from Devotion
Instead, the world begins
with my knees
scraping hardwood,
another man leaving
into my throat. Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
each flake a letter
from an alphabet...
see what I mean. there's a natural cadence to each line. each line is connected by beats. it's not regular but flows with cadences.
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