"Why There is no Socialism in the United States of America" shows the ease and flexibility of your blank verse, and is my favorite of these. The last four lines are a fitting epiphany of rage and alienation for this narrator, though admittedly, for me, the immediately preceding descriptions of five co-passengers seem to mark this narrator as verging on the psychotic. The poem might be more powerful with fewer of those hated passengers bunched together (or just fewer, period), but it's hard to say.
"Saturday Afternoon": the final three stanzas make this one, but the hex/sex rhyme doesn't work for me:
The sagging eyelids give it all away,
the fumble for her purse, the murmured hex
against the brightness of this Saturday
afternoon. A subtle stench of sex
Eyelids don't "sag" in my experience (that Roy Cohn look is usually described as "hooded eyes" or eyelids), but the bags under some eyes certainly do. "Murmured hex" stops the poem for me and seems forced for the purpose of the rhyme, otherwise are we really in the realm of satanism and witchcraft here? Seems a bit much to believe.
A little less hostility and contempt on the part of the narrator (even for such loathsome characters as we find here) would give the poem more dramatic tension.
Last edited by Terese Coe; 10-07-2009 at 09:04 AM.
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