My brief attention span balks at longish poems, and this one bewildered me with its profusion of analogies, metaphors and wordplay, but I won’t say it’s too long or too much. Those who think so may be right, but I found the course exhilarating. The skiing/marriage analogy is cleverly drawn and intertwined with a third strand: lines of writing, scripture, calligraphy.
The unpredictable rhymes and line lengths work for me and add to the sense of openness and adventure, but S2 disoriented me with its “paths that are already written.” I almost thought the adventurers were both literally and figuratively looking down on habit-bound “believers,” but S13 set me straight. I also thought “practising their lines” might refer, inter alia, to rehearsing vows before the wedding, but that’s another false lead.
A couple of my typically trivial nits:
- S1L1 should probably end with a comma.
- S14L2 should probably end with a period and the following line with no punctuation.
- The “yo-yo’s spin” seems an odd, comical metaphor for skiing, but that’s a non-skier speaking. The skiing lingo didn’t lose me, btw.
Among many fine lines, I was struck by the last line of S1.
Last edited by Carl Copeland; 03-17-2024 at 05:37 PM.
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