Fleeting Belief

[Ike]

Her
without a name.
dancing to destination,
nowhere.

descended,
from goddess before queens.
She
who smiles in the face of,
despair.

Her
hands as proof
of what she's seen,
how old her soul, and
what that means.

[Tim J Brennan]

Her
without a name.
dancing to destination,
nowhere.

descended,
from goddess before queens.
She
who smiles in the face of,
despair.

Her
hands as proof
of what she's seen,
how old her soul, and
what that means.

First "her" throws me off a bit, Ike, only b/c grammatically it should be "she" and it hurts my ear and puts me in a bad mood to start, although I like the her/she/Her pattern so maybe I should just shut-up and enjoy it for what it is. 

Another nit: if she is a dancer why do her hands act as proof to what she has "seen?"  I'm not following the analogy.  

I like the language of the poem. Minimal & consistent.  Some good individual images (e.g. goddess before queens, dancing to destination) to play with and build on.  
 

[Ike]

Tim,
Thanks for the reply. I see what you mean about she vs her, but maybe I threw you off by the punctuation.  I was striving for *pointing finger* "HER" "yeah, with the..." if that clarifies at all. That could be bad grammar still, I'm not sure. Your hands vs dancer nit confuses me a little bit however because my intention of dancing was more literal, she moves elegantly. The hands were alluding to her ancestry of queens and goddesses and scarred from despair (and what she's seen). I've also struggled with how the words need to come together to make a good piece and this one was simple but I was working toward the descriptive language and poetic pauses I see from most here
 

[Colm Roe]

Her
without a name.
dancing to destination,
nowhere.

descended,
from goddess before queens.
She
who smiles in the face of,
despair.

Her
hands as proof
of what she's seen,
how old her soul, and
what that means.

A bit OTT. This really is trying too hard to sound poetic. You talk about a 'soul'....
Goddesses and Queens? 
IMO you need to ground your poems.
 

[Ike]

Colm,

May I ask what you mean by OTT? Gil? This was trying to be poetry, trying in terms of that which I understand from this forum, as I tried to say in the last comment. And again, could you further "ground"? I truly appreciate your reply and am really interested in what you're saying the requisites of connection to the reader are.

[Dave]

Hi Ike
I can't speak for Colm of course but this seems awfully abstract. The language and format and line breaks are so compacted and heightened that they leave the reader a bit high and dry. Taking the first stanza, immediately indeed I as a reader have to start asking myself who is this 'Her'. The isolation of the word and the grammatical use don#t inform me of anything other than a) female b) object and as Colm said POETRY, this is poetic licence. I look to the subsequent lines for more information. Who is this Her and who is addressing her? She has no name - could be an orphan, could be above such things (goddess), could be all females, could be a specific female, what she is is nameless. Why, was there no one to give her a name. Where people fearful of that? Is it another POETIC strategy to make this an intriguing poem? Dancing to destination, nowhere. Why not simply dancing to nowhere. In which sense is a nowhere a destination? Again this seems to hide more than it reveals and seems to say, look this is a POEM. Grammatically the expectation, rightly or wrongly, would be for dancing to A destination. Again the lack of a appears poetic. In other words, one might accuse the poem of aways attracting attention to itself as a ppoem and distracting from what it wants to say.

On top of that, the constellation is abstracted from any reality that I know of: Her, descended, goddess, queens, despair,soul - these are not the concersn or words of daily life. They hint at archaic and profound.

Now I say al this free of judgement or a qualification of whether i like that or find it good or bad. In total I would say that  poem does not offer me much to go on. It remains elusive and self-referencing.

Dave
 

[Ike]

Dave,

Thanks for the reply and solid insight. My last one I posted was, in my opinion, prose-y and I didn't get any feedback. So, like I mentioned this was my attempt at "here is a poem." Funny thing is, I was also trying to clarify the abstract I gravitate toward. Looks like I need some practice 

I have all the answers, but I guess that's the point, others don't. I have always thought poems were supposed to inspire a difficult puzzle and facilitate thinking, but I suppose that doesn't work when I have all of the pieces. I will try to fill in more blanks and make it more accessible. 

Again, thank you very much. I appreciate the insight.

[Tracy Mitchell]

Ike - I like your comments which indicate you are seriously thinking about your writing. 

There is no problem with expecting your reader to do some work.  Your gift to them is to write the best you can in clear, expressive language.  A poem should try to reveal itself and not obscure.  But if the subject matter is difficult, or complex, or a little beyond words, then that will be reflected in the text.  The crux of the matter is clarity in your own mind, and then committing to the poem.

Here, I sense you  are not "all in" with the poem.  It is a nice series, but like a helium balloon without a string, it remains untethered.  

Its not hard to assume the subject is the N's love interest.  But she could also be N's estranged mother or step-sister.  She could also be a younger sister deceased in tragic circumstances.  And honestly, it could also be the musings of a Narrator watching a music-box dancer wind down.  You get what I mean.

You have a good facility with words.  I look forward to more posts from you.

T

[Mark]

I think the poem works as a sort of spartan vignette with blanks to be filled in by the reader's imagination. The line breaks add a bit of a staccato feel pausing for poise, as it were. It's good to stretch and experiment creatively. 

[indar]

Often abstract language is a shortcut---even lazy way to articulate something. She is descended from goddesses through queens. OK I suppose the N and by extension you, the writer, expects me, the reader, to know what kind of goddess and queen. I suppose the Disney fairytale kind or is it the early goddess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf

Is the queen a tyrant or is she the repressed wife of a tyrant? Aloof or benevolent? Of course these are not likely the assumptions a reader will make but I'm sure you get my point. If you want to write poetry then compare the woman to a queen by all means but support the comparison with observations that will strike the reader with a different perspective/insight.