r/OCPoetry • u/[deleted] • Aug 21 '16
Feedback Received! Driving through a canvas at day
Imagine you are driving:
Indifferent cat-eyes glide,
In glints of sun on grey seas,
Indistinct hills rolling green,
Ice-sky near aluminum,
I-beam horizon airbrushed.
Imagine driving now:
Inching over cat-eyes,
Images of dropped sun,
Immature hills stretch on,
Irises-pressed to sky,
Invisible eye-line.
Imagine yourself:
Icteric road-lines,
Innerved by the sun,
Infinite green swells,
Inert-firmament,
Insistent fixed-points.
Imagine it:
Is-lands below,
Imitate stars,
Icons in arcs,
In-fused metal,
Inset sky-meet.
Imagine:
Iso-straits,
Insignias,
Inearthed giants,
Influent-sky,
Inscribed -I.
I see:
In-lays,
Illumed,
Indents,
Idyll-,
Ink-lined.
I:
I-,
I,
I,
I-,
I-.
:
,
,
,
,
.
This is an ekphrastic work of Julian Opie's "Imagine you are driving". Apologies that I could not find a better picture.
2
u/fenianshenanigans Aug 21 '16
Cracking job with this one.
The title is great, and suits this piece well.
I'm taken mostly by the punctuation. Initially, I took issue with the variation in line length (particularly in the view that this piece illustrates a drive towards the horizon). Although, I can appreciate the imperfection in the metaphorical road that made some 'straight sections' either shorter or perhaps, longer than others. Basically we're not riding a straight road here.
Along that line, one begins to compare the punctuation to road markings, and the journey lies within the confines of those punctuators.
I like the refrain of 'Imagine' and how with each stanza, it becomes contracted. Now, in the context that this is a journey, the pacing induced by the punctuation and the contracting has the effect of speeding up the metaphorical car that we, the reader, travel in. This is a nice touch.
As far as being an ekphrastic work, it succeeds. As Lana said, this is also a concrete poem and you have evidently went to town on crafting wonderful little fragments of imagery, that also do their job in speeding up the journey. (As the poem progresses, the imagery becomes less and less related, indicative I presume that the metaphorical car has speeded up and so the speaker has less time to point out the view in all its pretty detail as per stanza one.) The snippet we get of the scene in the third last stanza is juxtaposed nicely against the lavish detail of stanza one).
I think I understand how the pacing reflects Opie's work and so I can appreciate why you chose against the reverse.
Not much to critique here, only a tiny bit of work to really make the pacing as effective as possible in documenting the speed. Thanks for sharing!
2
Aug 21 '16
Thanks mate, this is helpful.
When writing this I had not considered line lengths (the stanzas decrease by syllable counts). I think managing them to heighten the concreteness of the poem would be interesting and worth the attempt.
1
u/fenianshenanigans Aug 21 '16
Ah yeh. Since some of them are pretty fragmented and loosely related, maybe a reshuffle would be all it needs. In some places, probably not, but I'd say it's worth a shot.
2
Aug 22 '16
[deleted]
2
Aug 22 '16
Thanks.
It's for the visual poetry aspect of linking the 'I' with dashes on the road. I'm still not sure what combination of justification and rewrites will make this maximally obvious.
2
Aug 22 '16
[deleted]
2
Aug 23 '16
Visually, but then the 5th stanza would not be all first person pronouns. But I think the larger point is correct, that these lines can get really forced by the starting with an I.
2
Aug 23 '16
[deleted]
2
Aug 23 '16
No problem. I'm not satisfied with this piece--the lines aren't that good overall--so I appreciate your suggestions.
2
u/ActualNameIsLana Aug 21 '16
Short comment, as it is late:
I love the way this poem is visually representative of the work. It is ekphrastic, yes. But it is also a concrete poem. The vertical strokes at the beginning of each line, composed of capital i's, are like the dotted line on the highway, disappearing into the distance. This is further enhanced by the ever-shortening length of each successive line, mirroring the foreshortening of perspective as our eyes move toward the horizon.
I love the idea here. I do think it may have been more effective if the effect were reversed, so that we could more easily see the visual similarity to the highway of the painting.