[David Callin]

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

Thanks, David. The Beckett went over my head. My cultural memory is cluttered with old sitcoms.

Aaaay, Carl! No problem! (Mine too, although you've probably never seen Porridge, for instance.)

[Rick Mullin]

I'll be honest, Cameron, and in doing so perhaps revealing the true quality of cement in my head:

I found this a somewhat torturous read. On the other head, if read to me, I think I'd like it a lot more. My problem has to do with enjambments and what seem to me to be complicated expression that would be more appealing if more direct.

I am braced for the backlash against my initial response, meanwhile really intrigued by what you are doing with rhyme.

I love the Goya painting, but I interpret it somewhat differently, which is what is so great about the Goya painting. Are you familiar with Turner's "Dawn After the Wreck"?

Rick

[Roger Slater]

I think I would have followed the poem better on first read if you broke the line after "beside you" for a pause to signal a transition of sorts, like so:


beside you.
beside you. Language cannot scrape this scene:
the doglike eagerness, pathetically small,
& up to his neck in black with the sky slabbed

[R. Nemo Hill]

There is something almost cosmic about the painting, with all that vast empty space and the dog staring expectantly into it as if seeking/waiting for deity. The poem can be read as the story of a kind of relationship here on earth, Cameron, but I can also read it as if the you of its direct address is God. (And, by the way, I like Roger's suggestion of the drop down line at Language...to emphasize the dramatic turn.) I would not have gone to God without studying the painting, but after a close visual reading, my verbal reading expanded, and that expansion lifted the poem from a merely articulate view of relationship to a tragically transcendent one.

Nemo

[Rick Mullin]

When I look at the Goya painting, I think of a doomed and abandoned and paniced last hope in the landscape of a sudden and final devastation. I have the same response to the Turner painting. An end of the world.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Cameron,

I find this an awkward read. I could enjoy it more if it was not styled as an ekphrastic piece. The intellectual remove from the painting is too much.

The emotion in Goya’s work is not here. There is so much more to dog than a licked hand. As Rick has said it has so much in common with Turner’s work. The lost, lone and wistful in the enormity of its world. Here is the eternal question of dog as it tilts a quizzical head.