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Mark Schweickart
Mike – Nice poem. Thank you for that. It is good to see a post like this on our site to possibly raise a discussion about poetry.
So here goes; I'll take a crack at it.
I must admit that, for my taste, this poem was far more prose-like than poetical, until, as you pointed out, it takes a philosophical turn at the end. I say this because there is not much that suggests that these sentences could not be presented in paragraph form instead of being broken up rather arbitrarily as lines of poetry. Okay, okay, I know that modern poetry no longer needs to conform to expectations of rhyme, rhythm, or scansion as in previous centuries. But still, doesn't one expect a certain density of thought in the phrasing to justify it being in this form? So I was a tiny bit disappointed when reading this poem, because most of it read as somewhat ordinary descriptive sentences. And given the way you built it up, let's face it, you set a very high bar for it. You said, It's as pretty as the prettiest postcard you've ever seen, and as deep as any philosophical or spiritual musings you've ever had. That is a lot for any poem to live up to. But, for me, the setting described in the poem, although quite interesting, did not seem to be all that pretty. And the poem's conclusion, which waxes philosophically about how knowledge flows to us from the natural world, and how we draw it in, seems to be so abstract as to be rather meaningless. I cannot help but wonder why you thought this was such a deep philosophical conclusion.
Isn't it nice we can disagree about poetics rather than politics from time to time? (This is not to say that you and I disagree about politics much, if at all. I just mean in general for those on the site.)
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