[Alexandra Baez]

Cameron, I echo others’ enthusiasm for this poem (and also the last one I saw in this vein, which I’m sorry I wasn’t able to comment on.) I find the thesis fascinating and persuasive. And you bring the scenes and the n’s moods, as bizarre and distinctive as they are, to life with such detail and conviction.

“A word’s noose” is great—especially trenchant coming from a poet! Still, starting at the end of S2, it took me a while—a bit too long for my liking—to catch on to the conceit that sighted=word-using=ignorant. And it sounds like you’re asking us to imagine that Adam was still alive at the time of the Flood—is that correct? If so, as a reader, I’d also appreciate a bit of “help” with this.

But I just love that last line. Oh, how I love the way you have forced me to think about things in new ways in your poems on this theme! It’s both scary and exhilarating; it’s definitely humbling. You give exalting defense of the merely physically unsighted in making a distinction between these people and the many others who, while physically sighted, lack inner vision; even suggesting that physical unsightedness can be a portal to a deeper, truer understanding. And I think one of the most compelling and unsettling things about this concept is, Who am I--who is any sighted person--to argue it? To consider the parallels between the potentially stultifying literalism of words and of seen objects is pregnant with potency. I’m reminded of Jesus’ parable about the mote and the beam.

Carl nailed it all in saying, “I struggle with it, and it struggles with itself."

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

Perhaps Cameron will pardon my use of his poem to illustrate a broader question: I experimented on myself and determined that I wouldn’t have suspected any meter or rhyme here at all if it weren’t for the lineation. That doesn’t make it less poetical, and many here consider such closeted formalism a virtue, but it lacks the sensuality I crave in a formal poem. It must give pleasure to receptors more sensitive than my own. Thoughts? Feelings?

Carl, I perceive this poem’s meter as straddling the border between poetry and prose, and this struck me as the right balance--perfect, in fact--given the theme and tone. I definitely felt and enjoyed the prosody of the piece but think that more deference to meter would have taken some of the vital edge--that sense of angsty strain against the very world order--off of the poem.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

So much conflated here. The first time I read your work I felt the opacity was an affectation of arrogance knowing it could not be dismissed as laziness. I apologise for dismissing and that was my laziness.

A question. Goff? Or your own coining.

Here you almost beg a noose/nous tension.

The meter is loose but their is a native music in the lines. Definitely not prosaic.

The last two lines also beg Cyclops or Odin. I would plump for Odin there is a price for wisdom.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Jan Iwaszkiewicz

The meter is loose but their is a native music in the lines.

With a little practice, I’m beginning to hear the music. S1, in fact, is surprisingly regular on second (actually fifteenth) read. Even there, I would have preferred a tad more “deference to meter” (e.g., “ever could have lived” instead of “could have possibly lived,” which clunks for me), but that’s my personal—and still developing—taste.

The rhymes are still too faint and sporadic for me, though I was delighted to finally register a striking off-beat rhyme: blank wash/language. (Get me right: I’m perfectly happy with blank verse, but when there are rhymes that take detective work to find, I sometimes wonder what the point is.) And I still balk at the metrical ambiguity of apparently headless lines beginning with the not obviously stressed “If,” “&” and “from.”

Now I need to do some more sense-making (sorry, can’t help it). Nemo is the only one of us who clearly understood the poem, while the rest who attempted interpretations all thought in widely scattered directions. For example, Alexandra and I, who always agree on everything, came away with opposite takes on the relation between sight and language. But that’s all part of the fun.

[R. Nemo Hill]

For me the poem is about the relation between seeing and saying, between the image and the word. I have eyes, and so image has always seemed primary to me, with words trying to capture the image after the fact. But for the sightless it may be language that is primary, it is the word that evokes the world. And according to western traditions, it is Adam who names the individual species whose multiplicity makes up the garden, placing "a word's noose around each neck".

The poem thus calls into question my entire value system, for I am accustomed (like many self-questioning poets) to denigrating language, and to favoring the image—or rather, to viewing the magic of poetry as the clearing away of the accumulated obstructions of language that block our view of the world as it is. If I close my eyes, however, then that language becomes the world as it is. Yet the poem does not force me to choose sides—it is more skillfully tentative than that, it allows me to both close and open my eyes, and to compare the resultant worlds, both Eve’s world washed of words, and the Eve-less "kingdom of the blind". It plays with the re-valuation of biblical myths, asking: Which kingdom is fallen? Which is Edenic? And, of course, as in any myth, both realities are present at once, and their superimposition, while ultimately incalculable (and thus conventionally uninterpretable, i.e., unavailable to any single-minded interpretation) offers a world as only poetry can more fully create it.

Emotionally, however, there remains the ache of exclusion, of one world’s exclusion from the other. Here, Eve is expelled from the garden, and Adam must carry on in his blindness without her, each experiencing a different kind of flood, a different kind of washing. Locked as we are into our own realities—blinded by language, or blinded by sight—we feel “alone”, we feel the loss of that other which only poetry, or a poem like this, can irrigate with the possibilities of healingly multiple vision. Personally, I fully feel every intellectual meander the poem takes. The more I read it, the more magnificent it seems. It brings back all the self-doubts of the language of the great-outer-sighted poets of the past, and reminds me of the potential of language to build a new universe, unseeing the apparent world to make way for another inner-sighted world. Together these worlds spin in the myth-gyre. And crowning that whirl of worlds is the evocation of the loneliness of any one proposition made too real: every personal language an isolated Eden. The conflation of the flood with the creation story seems apt here, for this is in many ways an un-creation story too, an Eden of Erasure.

With eyes closed, Cameron, it makes me wonder about another element not mentioned here: sound, sound as the widow of the erased image. And it also raises question in my mind about thinking and feeling, for with my eyes closed I can I feel rather than see my way through the world, a kind of progress that shares much with thinking my way blindly through it. So sometimes seeing comes first, sometimes seeing comes afterward.

This is where you poem has brought me.

Nemo

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

The power you have accessed in this, to me, though Classical in essence, is all about questioning. Here we have ‘dubito’ before the ‘cogito’. A mitochondrial Eve un-Arked on the Deluge. Uncertainty, unreliability in meaning and in fact. Heisenberg and Wittgenstein. It begs the questions. To me this is a trigger not an explanation and so is a gift.

Does the poem bring me into it or do I inject myself? I would say both. As Nemo said, and I concur, this is significant.

Thank you for posting this Cameron.

[W T Clark]

Thank you for all your very kind takes. I am glad so many people seemed to find meaning in this. It is not my position to interpret the poem; Nemo and John and Jan I thank for their explications. I think John is right "bedraggled birds" is over much. I will say that Homer was far from my thoughts; maybe Milton was closer, though.
Thank you again.