[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

     EDIT TWO

Mistral, Khamsin, Devil-Wind

I drink the awe-full beauty of the wind.
Attracted by its malevolence, I taste.
the gossip from its fetch. Undisciplined
and Vandal, paving angry, mindless waste,
It was born dust devil and water spout.
It steals the desert’s flesh and bares the bone.
It is the desiccating voice of drought,
the weird and easy howl, the crazing moan
harping through cracks that fret both ground and mind.
It has no substance yet has force and might.
It’s power, elemental, unconfined
can raise up sudden oceans teethed with spite.
It carries salted poison from the sea
creating dried brown blood on cancered steel.
It flays, exposing nerves in mordancy
to heighten or to deaden how we feel.
It cures ham and mummifies a corpse.
It carves, deposits and evaporates.
Attacking growth, and given time, it warps.
It flattens, lifts, shifts and yet dictates
the tremble of a leaf, the assonance
of zephyrs slowly rustling leaves awake.
The dandelion fairies blown in dance,
the waltz of micro shimmers on a lake,
the waft of honeysuckle, jasmine, rose
and yet, it voices suffering and pain.
It mounts attacks on ears and eyes and nose,
but soothes the heat and brings the healing rain.
It breathes the flutter in a candle flame,
a power weighing nothing in the hand.
It hunts with hounds and runs away with game.

Another god I cannot understand


EDIT

I breathe the wilful beauty of the wind,
its seductive malevolence, I taste.
the gossip from its fetch, undisciplined
and Vandal, paving angry, mindless waste.

It was born dust devil and water spout.
It steals the desert’s flesh and bares the bone

It is the desiccating voice of drought,
the weird and easy howl, the crazing moan
harping through cracks that fret both house and mind.

It has no substance yet has force and might.
It’s Elemental, cannot be confined.

It can destroy an oak or lift a kite.
It carries hungry cancer from the sea
and leaves the dried brown blood of eaten steel.

It flays, exposing nerves in mordancy
to heighten or to deaden how we feel.

It cures ham and mummifies a corpse
It carves, deposits and evaporates
It affects growth and given time it warps
It flattens, lifts, shifts and then dictates
the tremble in leaves and rage in a flame.

Invisible, excepting particulates,
it hunts with the hounds and runs with the game.

ORIGINAL

I breathe the wilful beauty of the wind,
its seductive malevolence, I taste.
the gossip from its fetch, undisciplined
and Vandal, paving angry, mindless waste.
It was born dust devil and water spout.
It steals the desert’s flesh and bares the bone
It is the desiccating voice of drought,
the weird and easy howl, the crazing moan
harping through cracks that fret both house and mind
It has no substance yet has force and might.
It’s Elemental, cannot be confined.
It can destroy an oak or lift a kite.
It carries hungry cancer from the sea
and leaves the dried brown blood of eaten steel.
It flays, exposing nerves in mordancy
to heighten or to deaden how we feel.
It cures ham and mummifies a corpse
It carves, deposits and evaporates
It affects growth and given time it warps
It flattens, lifts, shifts and then dictates
the tremble in leaves and rage in a flame.
Invisible, excepting particulates,
it hunts with the hounds and runs with the game.

The unseen god, Wind.

[Jim Ramsey]

Hi Jan,

David blithely named me an inveterate tinkerer. And I'm sure there are some instead would defame me an inveterate tamperer and molester of their poems, while I say I am simply an impatient nuisance who won't take the trouble to elaborate point by point the nits I sometimes only sense and cannot describe well. Here is another tinkering/tampering that isn't meant to be better but is merely trying to get my ideas across. There are many ways to say the same thing, some better than others. In the case of this poem, I can only tell you what I would prefer to hear, or not to hear, and that's a few less list-like "It(s). I know repetition can be a powerful rhetorical device, but in this case I find the use of "it" somewhat lazy to tell you the truth. Also, I know you sometimes use metrics I am not familiar with and therefore suggestions I make won't properly accommodate them, Still, I think there is an opportunity to enrich this poem with white space and some variety in the phrasing. Here is an example of one of many ways it could be attempted, whether my quickly edited example here succeeds or not:

I breathe the willful beauty of the wind—
what seductive malevolence I taste.

To gossip by its fetch, undisciplined
and Vandal, paved and angry in mindless waste,

to be born dust devil and water spout,
to steal the desert’s flesh and bare its bones,

it is the desiccating voice of drought,
the weird and easy howl, the crazing moan

harping through cracks that fret both house and mind
with ghostly substance, yet has force and might.

So Elemental, cannot be confined,
to both destroy the oak and lift the kite,

so carries hungry cancer from the sea,
it leaves the dried brown blood of eaten steel

and flays, exposing nerves in mordancy
to heighten or to deaden how we feel.

It cures ham and mummifies a corpse,
then carves, deposits and evaporates

to affect growth, and given time, it warps.
It flattens, lifts, shifts and then dictates

the tremble in leaves and rage in a flame,
invisible, excepting particulates,

then hunts with the hounds and runs with the game,
the unseen god, Wind, which seldom waits.


All the best,
Jim

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Thanks Jim,

This is one of those poems that once started took a life of its own, consequently it grew as one big chunk. I do like your way of breaking it up, opening it up. I will think on the repetition.

Nothing strange in this it is straight IP.

[Alexandra Baez]

Jan, I’m struck by the quite relentless, wild to the point of reckless, powerful, original language and rhythm throughout this. It is the wind!

I thought that the breaklessness of the original captured the onrush it describes, whereas the newly inserted stanza breaks create a new sense of continual pause, which works against that sense of onrush. As a reader, I’m now spending a lot of focus on each break and what it signifies.

I’m not crazy about the omitted punctuation in line 6, particularly, because it’s a stand-alone. However, I can handle the instances in the last stanza because they’re in a sequence and I get from them the sense of windiness.

“Vandal” is a particularly surprising and effective descriptor. Indeed, the overall condensed force of the second two lines in S1 makes me question “seductive malevolence,” a phrase that I feel I’ve heard before, or something/s like it, a number of times. It’s a cut below the bar that predominates.

I think the poem also loses some momentum in the line “It’s Elemental, cannot be confined,” which is likewise a pretty commonplace observation, and it states the obvious by the time it arrives. I would just omit it.

I miss a syllable in L1 of the second to last stanza. You could add an “a” or “the” before “ham” to solve this.

“Affects” in this same stanza seems relatively weak, and it breaks the meter for no good reason—how about something more specific (and trochaic)?

I’m thrown again by the meter in the last line of this stanza; since I read “-ble in leaves” as an anapest, I register a syllable missing after “rage.” Using “raging” instead would cure this for me.

And there’s one more metrical throw for me in the last line, of the same sort. I could come up with some fixes, but you could probably come up with better ones!

I love the title, too. Really great work overall--so much to offer.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I like a lot of this, Jan, but I don't think you have hit on the proper lay-out yet. The irregularity of the new stanza sizes is a distraction to me. Alexandra may be right about the continuous chunk of text, but I like the idea of regular couplets as well, no matter where they fall. The wind seems to blow right through the stanza breaks, healing any grammatical or thematic interruptions.

I also really don't like the word particulates at the end. After all the preceding passion, it feels like we are plunked down into a dry documentary film, or an encyclopedia entry. Would you consider something like this...?

Invisible, except in the dust it raises,
it hunts with the hounds and runs with the game.

Nemo

[Anirudh G]

Pretty good stuff nice use of longs, excellent flow. But I have a nitpick.

>It steals the desert’s flesh and bares the bone

^Nice heavy syllables going on there but then it's broken by 'it is the' In the next line.

>It is the desiccating voice of drought,

Then again you follow the nice heavy flows in the next line, so it leaves the 'it is the' bit more jarring.

>the weird and easy howl, the crazing moan
>harping through cracks that fret both house and mind.

Similar problem to what I mentioned in the last line in the line that follows.

>It has no substance yet has force and might.

How about instead, it keeps the start punchy and strong so the effects aren't as apparent.

>It has force and might yet has no substance

I think it also enables a stronger change of flow in the next line

>Its elemental cannot be confined.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Alexandra thank you for spending time on this

The breaks are relatively arbitrary I ran them up the flagpole with nary a salute.

You (and many others) and I will tend to disagree on the need to adhere to grammatical rules. In formal poetry the rules are made to be broken. But also my housekeeping tends to be slack when the pen is running away.

I have changed ‘seductive malevolence’ I could not find enough instance to render it cliche your questioning was enough for me to reconsider.

The missing syllable? The schwa in cure (cue-ah) maybe our pronunciation differs.

Thank you I hope you like the expanded edit.

Thanks Nemo there is something particularly disturbing in the fact of particulates in odour but I agree it is out of place.

I have reverted to the chunk.

Greetings Anirudh and welcome to the ‘sphere. I hope the edit addresses most of your concerns.

Jan

[Alexandra Baez]

Jan, I’m hoving in a bit late here to tell you how much I admire your latest revision. You’ve made a lot of astute edits, and your no-holds-barred language comes through now more cleanly than ever. It has something of the primal grandeur of some passage from the Old Testament. And I’m still in admiration of your mastery of narrative flow and sustained tone (though I have some reservations, as per below, about your new ending segment).

I’m especially fond of these wildly imaginative, visceral phrases:

“sudden oceans teethed with spite”
“the assonance of zephyrs slowly rustling leaves awake”

However, I do start wondering starting at “the dandelion fairies” about why you seem to shift into speaking of mild breezes rather than wild winds, and into a passive tense and then a list format. The tone of “micro shimmers” struck me as especially out of step from what’s preceded with its sudden startlement of scientific language.

I see that you’ve explained that you’re no slave to grammatical conventions, but you also said that sometimes you just overlook details, so hesitantly I mention all of the following. Did you intend to have a period at the end of L2, and to have the first word of L5 capitalized? Also, in L11, I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to have an apostrophe in “it’s,” since you’re using it as a possessive noun, not a contraction of “it is.” (Otherwise, this line in its revised form goes down more easily now that it’s not rendered as a statement unto itself.) A comma after L13 would be standard. And I read your comment about pronouncing “cures” as two syllables, but that threw me off, too. In “attacking growth, and given time, it warps,” it seems like you don’t really mean the “and” in there and that it’s there only for the meter. Your initial version of this line, in contrast, was clear.

I think this poem would be much stronger without your new, standalone last line. You’ve already amply conveyed what it says, and much more powerfully. Although I’m not sure about the downshift to breezes that the last three lines in the body of the poem reflect, these lines do feel like the climax of the poem and it seems a shame to take away from the force they (or something like them could) create by adding anything else. They’ve got the elemental power of a folk riddle.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Hi Alexandra,

I, too, am not sure if the downshift nor am I enamoured of the standalone line. It is time for the back burner on this for awhile.

My thanks