This reads to me more like a lineated Facebook rant/complaint than a poem. I'm not seeing its poem-ness at all. I'm not seeing images, metaphor, wordplay, rhetoric, humor, tropes, form, pattern, distinctive rhythm, etc., just a very familiar and typical complaint about a frustrating call to customer service. I know that your poems are always tightly crafted and technically ambitious when you write formal verse, but I think you went too far in the other direction when you decided to do this one as free verse, especially since the subject matter is ultimately a rather low-stakes and familiar experience that doesn't give the reader anything to think about or react to beyond saying, "Yeah, don't you hate calling customer service?", which of course we all do.
|