Re: The Carpenters Son revised

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Kenneth2816
Posts: 1619
Joined: 01 Jun 2008, 09:17

Re: The Carpenters Son revised

#1 Post by Kenneth2816 » 15 Aug 2017, 05:29

My father was a quiet man,
good with his hands.
He could make anything out of wood
except a boy to be proud of.

The woodshop was his sanctuary
with its pegboard wall where hung
the implements of his salvation,
each outlined with black
marker to note its absence.

Sometimes he'd take me with him.
He taught me how to hold a hammer,
square lumber, use a tape measure.

Then I'd fuck something up and he'd fly
into a rage, throw it across the room,
rail at me, his face inches from mine.

I stood silent and motionless until his voice was lost in the whine of machinery,
his countenance obscured by
a blizzard of sawdust.

It was here among the scrap wood
and unswept shavings I danced for him:
A stupid, small, pathetic little figure
pulled by human strings.

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Carpenters Son revised

#2 Post by Bernie01 » 15 Aug 2017, 07:54

Kenneth---

I didn't focus on the poem, the first time. sorry. very sorry.

now, coherent narrative, engaging and peppered with excellent phrasing.

good with his hands.
He could make anything out of wood

and...

his countenance obscured by
a blizzard of sawdust.

Then I'd fuck something up and he'd fly
into a rage, throw it across the room,
rail at me, his face inches from mine.


oh, that "faces inches from mine."

and...


A stupid, small, pathetic little figure
pulled by human strings.


closing with something "upbeat" like an image of dancing is a wise and artistic choice.


bernie


THE VIRGINIA STATE COLONY FOR EPILEPTICS AND FEEBLEMINDED
Poems
By Molly McCully Brown
77 pages. Persea Books. $15.95.

Molly McCully Brown’s first book of poems, “The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,” is part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread. It arrives as if clutching a spray of dead flowers. It is beautiful and devastating.

The title refers to an actual place. The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded was a government-run residential hospital in Amherst County, Va. It opened in 1910.

Its doctors were eugenicists. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s, thousands of patients, seen as defectives and moral nonentities, were sterilized without their consent. For many if not most of its residents, it was a house of horrors.
Continue reading the main story

(Books of The Times
Book reviews by The Times’s critics).



Brown grew up 15 miles from this looming brick institution, which since 1983 has been known as the Central Virginia Training Center. Recalling how she would drive past it with her mother, she writes, in this volume’s only autobiographical poem:


I am my own kind of damaged there,
looking out the right-hand window.
Spastic, palsied and off-balance,
I’m taking crooked notes about this place.


and here:


Most nights, they knot
the bed sheet in my mouth
so I will not bite my tongue.




larkin's poem:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”
― Philip Larkin

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Carpenters Son revised

#3 Post by BobBradshaw » 15 Aug 2017, 09:39

I agree....this is much better...best, Bob

Kenneth2816
Posts: 1619
Joined: 01 Jun 2008, 09:17

Re: The Carpenters Son revised

#4 Post by Kenneth2816 » 16 Aug 2017, 13:19

Bob and Bernie

Thank you

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Billy
Posts: 1384
Joined: 22 Jun 2006, 10:56

Re: The Carpenters Son revised

#5 Post by Billy » 17 Aug 2017, 05:14

Yes, much better. I like the return to the Pinnochio image in the end. I'm not sure I like "dancing". I know it goes with the puppet image, but it is something good and uplifting and the boy is not dancing out of joy. Don't know if it is that important or how to fix it. The dancing is more like the kind of dancing a poor wretch does when a bully cowboy shoots his six-shooter at his feet and tells him to dance.

Good poem

Kenneth2816
Posts: 1619
Joined: 01 Jun 2008, 09:17

Re: Re: The Carpenters Son revised

#6 Post by Kenneth2816 » 17 Aug 2017, 05:58

Thanks Billy

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