Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Journal Response to Chris Martin


            Martin clearly is a fan of short, meaningful lines. My own style doesn’t agree with it but his style works well for him. He is able to get important meaning across about whatever his subject is. He also can use a lot of caesura even though he has those short lines. They make the poem choppier, but this allows the poem to get more to the point. To the true energy of the writing that Martin seems to try to center his writing around. I was very intrigued by his ‘Time’ poems. All the different ones just called ‘Time.’ That in of its self is quite interesting to me. How this series shows how time is always there with something different happening in each moment.


            These poems to me are harder to follow and seem much more abstract. With more of a broad meaning, the clarity of the poem is lost but the sounds seem to be what matters. For example, in The Bubble, the lines “doubling bubbling bubble/we grow young/who sing/endless babble/who add only/another flawed wing/aloft in our Merzbau.” Then it’s not just the physical aspects of the poem such as line set up, length, stanza use etc, but it is the way the poem sounds that becoming intriguing. I find it quite interesting how much more power a poem has when read aloud versus when it is just words on a page. It says the same thing but can have multiple different meaning after being read aloud. 

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