Hi Team! Thanks for your ongoing feedback. It is truly so helpful.
In America there is always a road, yes,
but there is also (for now, anyway) always a football team.
There are conferences a fan has never heard of,
mascots so obscure you’d need a field guide to recognize them,
chimerical hybrids of wildcats and buffaloes and rockets,
regionally-themed cheers complete with cued key-jingling
and foam props passed out by the pep squad.
Listen to the singing, the fast songs and slow songs;
each stadium full of people
knows a different songbook by heart.
* The italicized words are the title of a poem by Christopher
Cessac.
Dear Dargie,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this poem and its vibrant imagery, especially “chimerical hybrids of wildcats and buffaloes and rockets.” This poem offers a portrait of the U.S. culture (football) and of the ways it brings people together and highlights their differences (regional perhaps? Also team affiliations?). So the tension that seems to structure this poem is between a collective and individual experience of football. This is very interesting to me. These lines seem particularly important:
each stadium full of people
knows a different songbook by heart.
As a reader, I need a bit more in order to understand the full dramatic situation being described. I don’t fully understand the stakes and the overall tensions/problems/story that the poem is trying to communicate. I don’t necessarily mean to suggest making the poem longer (I like the brevity of it), but perhaps you could think about how to show the drama (stakes) more clearly? Why is it important, for example, that everyone knows a different songbook by heart? Is football a magical experience through the everyday? Is it a cult ritual (I don’t think so)? Thinking about the emotional take a-ways and/or the political ones and making them more explicit might help your reader.
Thanks for sharing!
Shannon
p.s. I want to add, too, that I think this poem is about football but it's also a commentary on larger U.S. culture. So I'd like to know a bit more about what that commentary is.
DeleteThank you, Shannon, that is super helpful. I should probably have said up top that I see this poem as part of the Kansas sequence, so I suppose I am hoping that the stakes of those poems transfer here to some extent. Regardless, thanks for the comments!
DeleteHi Dargie-- my favorite lines in this poem are lines 5 and 6. "Chimerical hybrids...cued key-jingling"-- both the sounds and the images jump off the page. I wondered whether line 3 might be smoother as: "There are conferences no fan has ever heard of,"
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why in line 2 there is the hesitation --(for now, anyway)-- I'm supposing that in the context of your whole manuscript, this anxiety about the direction of America is made more evident, and so this aside makes more sense. The implication that large groups of Americans not sharing the same heart/songbook is poignant-- perhaps you could insist on this poignancy even more in this poem. Thanks, as always, for sharing this. Hope you have a Happy Fourth!
Hello Dargie! Another interesting poem in your Kansas sequence. The opening line is intriguing and I too love the chimerical hybrids of wildcats and buffaloes and rockets! I also like the Listen to the singing line, the fast and slow songs. It seems like this poem may be functioning as a sort of bridge in the larger MS?
ReplyDelete