On Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 12:11:37 PM UTC-4, George J. Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
Spring Rains, by Zod
Bathing
in the gentle rain
naked and free
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2023/04/spring-rains-zod.html
#pennyspoems
On Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 8:57:23 PM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
On Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 12:41:27 PM UTC-4, George Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
Spring Rains, by Zod
Bathing
in the gentle rain
naked and free
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2023/04/spring-rains-zod.html
it makes little *grammatical* sense, wallows in clichéd sentimentality, and doesn't really say much of anything
In other words, like with the poetry of William Carlos Williams, ee cummings and T.S. Eliot, Zod's poem went over your head.
Wow! No wonder Michael Monkey had such a meltdown when I said he didn't understand one of my poems.
I like Zod's poem, but I think you're over-hyping it here.
No surprise there, Pendragon.
I think that between the two of you, Zod's poetry is sorely in need of fair criticism, so I'll try to provide one:
I published Zod's poem because I liked it. What I liked most about it was:
(1) The mood or tome of the first three stanzas. They come across as completely free and spontaneous, and gave me the same feelings of freedom and spontaneity, of doing what you want rather than doing what you're s'posed to. For me, dancing in the rain
is the perfect objective correlative for that. That may be just me -- I actually picked up that feeling from seeing Gene Kelly in an old movie -- but a poem like Zod's is enough to reinvoke it.
(2) What could have been weaknesses in the poem -- it's short, and looks like it was dashed off in one go -- actually reinforce the above feeling. It's a successful integration of form and function, as an architect once put it.
(3) The sudden change of mood in the last stanza -- suddenly he's lamenting -- and its unresolved paradox -- why is he lamenting when everything is so wonderful? -- may have been purely his own idea. But it's one I have seen used before; in English
poetry it goes back at least to Surrey's famous sonnet about spring.
(4) Zod's rhymes aren't notably skillful -- his talent for rhyming is still limited -- but the way he puts his talents to use is. Unlike with the "Loretta" poems, he isn't trying to rhyme everything; rather he's using them in a limited way, in full
knowledge (conscious or not) of his limitations in that area. In the process, he gives the reader his rhymes as an unexpected surprise.
All those positives were reason enough for me to print it. Having said that, though, the poem is extremely short with not a great deal to say (it's meant to inspire feeling, not thinking), and I think it might even have been embarrassing to put it
between, say, Shakespeare and Eliot. So I took care to frame the poem, placing it between two other short, free verse poems that IMO are also meant to inspire pure feeling rather than thinking, and so like his have not a great deal to say: "The Red
Wheelbarrow" and "Wet Evening in April."
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