The end of the chains

Finishing off The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford, something happened time and again. I would have a poem read, turn the page and find more poem. For a lot of the poems in which this happened it's a big problem since each was stronger in my eyes before the page was turned.

Poetry is about brevity. There can be long poems, but as I wrote in the previous entry on this collection of poetry, long poems run the risk of overcooking the idea or the feeling that they're getting at. Epic poems are possible, still, I think, but even they vary their ideas, characters, and viewpoints enough to keep the material fresh - even for thousands of lines.

It's possible that each poem that presented this sort of false end was planned. It's not outside the power of the poet to make decisions about how a poem appears on the page. But each time I discovered what I thought to be the poem's end was false, what came later was just an explanation of the emotion or idea that I had already gleaned from what of the poem had come before. In other words, these poems are examples of their poets nattering on a little too long.

A professor in my undergrad once said that when you've written a poem and feel that it's finished you should cut the last two (or three or four) lines so that instead of resolution, the reader's left with loose threads. Not because good poetry is vague or somehow hard to read by nature, but because good poetry shouldn't need to explain things with elaboration; word choice, word placement, sentence structure, and/or enjambment should be used instead.

That said, C.D. Wright's pieces are what I look for in poetry. There's music in her lines, and reading the two poems she has in the penultimate chain offers just enough to grasp what she's saying. Or, at the least, to feel like you grasp it. Nonetheless, I have to say that Linda Tomol Pennisi's "Doll Repair Shop" is still the best piece of the entire collection.