Weekly Assignment for 2/5

"The image is the poets pigment The image is not an idea It is a radiant note or cluster A fort from which and into which Constantly rushing it is true thing to sculpture as it is to poetry" 

    When determining the length of my lines, I firstly create a line and see if it fits to my breath, too long and I shorten it. Too short and I increase its length. It should come as an easy breath; effortless and easy to grasp. I do not like poems with long proses (it seems a waste of breath). I consider each line break as a pause, or an intake of a breath, often follow the pattern [ breath] in and exhale, to later repeat the process. As an avid lover of poetry, I admire poetry at its most simple, for then the artist must become creative with their language, for a bare minimum of words may have exponential impact if done so correctly.  Edward Hirsch’s poem, The Horizontal Line, is a fair example of decent line breaks, however, he could have been more direct with his word choice. Take note of his incoherent stanza lengths— it makes one wonder, what purpose does it serve? It seems to detract from the poem rather than add to it.  In his single line, “The nostalgia of a cathedral for the open plain” and the next line, “The nostalgia of a soprano for plainsong” seems repetitive and vague, and makes one wonder what their correlation may be to the next stanza, “I know a woman who slept on a cot And sailed over the abyss on a wooden plank”. It appears as if it could have almost been two separate ideas, scattered as they seem. Yet one must take further note who this poem is dedicated to; a woman by the name Agnes Martin. She was an American Abstract painter who’s work has been defined as an ‘essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence” and due to her nature, it makes perfect sense for this poem to have an element of abstraction to it, but by doing so, it runs the risk of disconnecting with the reader.