Friday, March 30, 2012

I guess this is revealing what a wretched aesthete I am: I am cheered that Evie Shockley's poem in honor/in anger at the death of Trayvon Martin does not just repeat an end-word in each couplet to form its Ghazal-ness, but also employs that, for my mindearheart, utterly necessary front-rhyme preceding the repeated end-word.  Honestly, I find, aside from its prosody, the poem a bit dull: there's indisputable truth in it, but it's sociological more than linguistic, and so I am not taken to a "new" location for consciousness, and so the poem for me ultimately ends up lacking urgency and instead seems like a summary of some of the worst of racial politics in the USA.  That said, the newly added couplet which directly references TM works the best I think, as the idea of being punished for surviving is poignant.

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