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ashellessmind — Sermon
Published: 2011-11-07 21:05:08 +0000 UTC; Views: 241; Favourites: 3; Downloads: 2
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After church, the pastor, a man of unapproachable finitude, invited us all to go out to the playground and try our hands at the monkey bars."As soon as you let go, you have to swing forward and grab the next," he said.
And also: "I know that it's possible because I've seen my children do it."
The monkey bars had been raised fifteen feet in the air, so in order to reach them we climbed on the backs of the worship team. They strummed their acoustic guitars and smiled as grown men and women were crawling all over their backs.
"These attempts have a one to one correlation to your life," the pastor explained to each person making the ascent.
And also: "The first bar is your Honda Civic and the last, well the last is Jesus Christ."
We fell and twisted our shins and laughed out and shouted Hallelujah.
The pastor stood on the sidelines conducting the band and cheering us on. There was no reason for him to participate. He had clasped hands with the monkey bars many times before
and had always failed magnificently
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Comments: 5
This was a nice comment. Thank you.
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It must feel good to let loose a bit.
I like this piece. I like the idea of lengthening your lines for it, too, though that They irks me, as it hits the far margin like a line of prose. But whatever. It is a prose poem, after all.
Tate's influence is apparent from the start: your "man of unapproachable finitude" corresponds to Tate's "man of such exquisite loneliness" or whatever the line is exactly. The key to it is the paradox, the one-two boxer's punch, contrasting too oddly matched or paradoxical elements: "unapproachable finitude". It prokes in the reader that which would have them reconciled.
Tate is felt, even more, in the absurdity, which as Camus will tell us is always born of comparison - in Camus, the comparision between man's life and its death, the paradox of his caring in an indifferent and inhuman universe - here it is in the comparison between solemn dignity of churches, and the childish frivolity of monkey bars. And, as absurdity, it works really well.
I think you'll look back at this and have things to cut. You're such a harsh critic in that regard that this comes as a surprise - but a good one. I think that this is a good and successful experiment, but doubt that it points to an ultimate destination for you aesthetically.
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I think this is a very apt criticism. And prophetic -- I did cut a bit and had already cut quite a bit by the time you had seen it.
You would be amazed I think to see how much I cut out of every poem.
What I don't like about contemporary poetry is the temptation to just narrate everything. I see a lot of longish poems with uniform lines where you can tell that the poet's main goal is to make sure that some sort of important word falls at the end of each one of their uniform lines. Those are the kind of poems that bore me to sleep.
As a result, I think I most often go for something short and hopefully gripping. This is the other kind of response -- one that is at least occasionally worthwhile.
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