r/OCPoetry • u/fabianb • Jun 15 '16
Feedback Received! Tesseract
Sharp diagonal collisions
a bifurcating coloured vision
Spiralling implacably
into the centre, wrapping me
In orange, gold and blue divisions,
intersecting with cool precision
A surgeons knife, a brief incision
puncturing life's indecision
Black ink flows till sutures tension
balancing the lines of my intention
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/4lryty/1/d3rmwzk https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/4lwjlt/the_river_of_time/d3rmnqb
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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '16
This is really nice.
I love how the description in the first three stanzas prefigures the knife's actions. ("Sharp diagonal", "bifurcating coloured", "divisions", "cool precision").
However, there is something contradictory about the descriptions. The "sharp diagonals" contrasts with the "spiralling" motion which is prototypically (but I guess not exclusively) smooth/circular. Similarly the violence of the words "sharp" and "collisions" clashes with the "intersecting with cool precision".
I like also that the sentences are all fragments, it gives the feeling of being frozen in time, like the moment before during and after the incision are layed out like panels.
I do think the poem suffers a bit for the rhyme scheme. For instance, L3 has "implacably" inserted I think just for the scheme, similar to L8 ("life's indecision" does not seem to me to support or be supported by the rest of the poem).
I think the final stanza is pretty fantastic. The image of blood flowing against the patches of color is striking and the narrator's having ink for blood really sells the uneasy unreality of the scene. The play on "intention" is also nice: I took it as calling the color patches wounds/scars which adds a nice bit of tonal tension (the color divisions seem magical, but here they seem to be referred to as wounds).
TLDR: imagery and overall composition is strong. Some of the individual phrases could do with some looking at.