(no subject)

[proximoception]

To have been alive might not seem so unlikely,
But I can't be convinced I was meant to live this life,
Or any other I've seen close up. To die for
Decades like these is a trade I'd call (politely)
No kind of deal, but the deal was done, though no doer
Spotted on the scene. (The scene's manure.)

But supposing life had to be lived, death needed dying,
Supposing this way was a way just as wayward as others,
And any firm terra one's bound to's bound to be trying,
Then maybe I'd say if I had just a hint of my druthers
That I'd pay the non-man set to sell me the little I have
All the lives that I'd never live anyway, tears and a laugh.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I like this. The rhyme life / die f(or) of course. But the conceit too. And that it makes sense that it rhymes. That its rhyming signifies. Which is always (these days) the great question.

I told my students that maybe I'd call my book on preferences among preferences Druthers and Others.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Or, actually, My Druthers, My Self (a title whose allusiveness is I hope still current).

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Life or / die for deserves better than this.

I was thinking about near rhyme and why only Dickinson and Owen truly get away with it, but for different reasons. Owen because of the connection between poetry and war glory - heroic couplets et al. The near rhymes fit the sliding away of expected neatness in blood-mud, but the ones where he's just switching out vowels (forget what his word for that is) do that even better. Maybe because we think of ourselves as vowels, or can - I, you, 'e. You sign up assuming the you that will be shot at is a different you than the signer, perhaps. Bit pronoun shifts are crucial to everything else he's doing too, like getting readers into the scene, into the soldiers' heads, the Germans'. And of course with death a new vowel is needed, a new pronoun, starker than "it." The shift in vowels matches the shift in number he's forcing on you, esp. in Strange Meeting.

Dickinson gets away with it because her moves are so unexpected that it just makes sense that the board would change too.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Oh, right -- "Life or / die for." I guess it felt too comic to keep the comma or on the same line?

I love what you say about Owen (and pararhyme). And Dickinson.

I think that D.M. Thomas, of all people, does it really well in "The White Hotel" section of The White Hotel, a book I think is great.