[Perry Miller]

I'm a very literal-minded person, and this is an example of where I find myself getting caught up when trying to appreciate a poem:

I know you dying and I know you alive
Captivated by a pair of hands
The harp glistens down its waterfall
And choirs rise above a distant dune

The first line is great, in my opinion. But what does a pair of hands have to do with a heart? What does a harp have to do with a heart? Or a waterfall? Or choirs? Or dunes? Do you see what I am getting at?

In my own poetry I don't rhyme a lot, and my meter is sometimes shaky, but I am a formalist in the sense that I write clearly. I never throw a series of images at my readers that are not closely connected to what I've written on the lines above.

Perhaps the connection between the heart and the images that follow is the word "captivated", since we all think of the heart as something that can be captivated. Even so, the connection to all of those images is a weak one for me.

[Siham Karami]

Perry, certainly I can see where you’re coming from. These are certainly leaps, and in fact I had originally written the “harp” line followed by the distant dune, then the “hands” which captivated the harp and the choirs. But I felt that the hands preceded the harp with its sound I envisioned as a glistening waterfall and the sound of choirs in the distance. All these elements are metaphors for what happens to the heart. The pair of hands are what the person does with their heart’s energy, creating this music by listening to the heart’s rhythm. Some poetry, for me, can’t be explicit. At some point having to explain everything pedantically exhausts me and leaves me sad, so I actually write this in a very specific meter, but the images either come across or don’t. There are many poets on the sphere whose work you’ll enjoy and find pleasing. And I do write poetry where everything is pretty clear. Here I was trying to do something else. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Siham