Cheryl L Snell fluent in subtext

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July 17, 2008, 8:55 am

Here's an excerpt from a review I recently wrote about Rick Cannon's book What We Already Knew . It shows some of the ways music can be used in a poem:

One of my favorite poems is “Commuting Notes.” The rhetoric comes to the reader quietly:
I fall a little short these days.
A comment made to a close friend, maybe.
Each afternoon, like some swollen, drowsy creature/in the lime-tinted lense of my car, I drive the green-clogged curves/of Sligo
creek
Swollen drowsy creature,” “lime-tinted lense,” and “green-clogged curves” surprise us with the shimmering unexpected. But the language is still contemplative:
Never again, I fear, to be lost

Lost” is just right against “fear,” and shares a vowel with “clogged” and a consonant with “lime.”
like that boy I was, daily, on the walk home from school, gazing up/the whole distance at a maple-cluttered sky,
Three words—daily, gazing, maple—all singing to each other’s long A. And then this, spaced on the page in a way that also shows what it says: a passage so memorized-- then, right after drop-offs, step-ups, and root-/heaved slabs of walk merely jostled my drifting face-- brazed
So tactile and succinct. 'Soldered' would not have done.
I was to what I saw, poured through the holes of my gaze
--an almost synesthetic pulse, so beautifully imagined, joining the reader to the narrator, and this--
till I was air   blue   leaf
The reader experiences the elements, the brazing, the vastness of childhood.

 

Belle Yang and Maggie Mae Photoshop.jpg

Belle Yang says:

The first line

is iambic and lulls you into the poem. Does he consciously do this, you think? Or just the way his thoughts fell on the paper? And that meter carries into the second line, only to be a reversal in SWOLLEN, which accentuates the very image!

Now is this conscious?

Belle Yang and Maggie Mae Photoshop.jpg

Belle Yang says:

Can you give me a link

to the poem and your review? Is it online? And thank you so much for all of this. More! And always link to the page on your Shiva's Arms website, please?

And don't you go away, because I've just gotten started asking questions.

cheryl.jpg

Cheryl L Snell says:

Hi, Belle!

The poet told me that his voice is always stripping down, writing more with nouns and verbs and
distrusting adjectives ("If you see an adjective, kill it!"  -- Twain). He likes William Stafford and Mary Oliver.

Here is the link to the review:

http://www.alsopreview.com/gazebo/messages/2304/17247.html?1209583685

The poem is not online, so I've written it out for you:

I fall a little short these days. 
 
Each afternoon, like some swollen, drowsy creature
in the lime-tinted lense of my car, I drive the green-clogged curves
of Sligo Creek, never again, I fear, to be lost 

like that boy I was, daily, on the walk home from school, gazing up
the whole distance at a maple-cluttered sky 
 
    
a passage so memorized

          that drop-offs, step-ups, and root-
heaved slabs of walk merely jostled my drifting face-- brazed 

I was to what I saw, poured through the holes of my gaze

                       till I was air   blue   leaf

Cheryl Snell www.shivasarms.blogspot.com