Word: poems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...qualities similar to its characteristics of movement. Energy is parcelled out into long stretches, each followed by short rests during which the dancer returns to a state of neutral energy, gathering again the threads of the sustaining image. The work is extremely linear, a soliloquy, like the prose poem Chassler recites...
...source for this line is the following poem...
Many of the poems are written in the first person, singular or plural. Yet instead of becoming familiar with this voice--whose pattern of speech changes from poem to poem--the reader becomes aware of the themes that "I" or "we" favors: themes like the sea, a woman's sexuality, a sort of science-fictionalized view of the world, the family history and tawdry yet mysterious American middle- or working-class culture. These themes hold small clumps of otherwise disparate poems together while Sagan is trying out styles of writing. They provide, at least, a way of fitting her work...
...COUPLE of Sagan's most successful poems belong to the last of these thematic categories. Each brings to mind a genre of music and the environment it thrives in. "Edge of the Blues" is explicitly modeled after the sinuous, superstitious rhythm of jazz, blues and gospel. The stanzas wind through snatches of borrowed lyrics and a pair of lines reminiscent of a slave song, whose plea has been transported into a scene of city night life: "Just show me God, quick./Then let me sleep./...and all the soft windows of the neighborhood/are darkening, one by one." There...
...Lost at Sea" the religious imagery is gratuitous; in "Womanlove" most of what the writer has to say is, like the title, banal; "Daylight" is glutted with loaded, but not particularly related, imagery. None of these is totally uninteresting, however--unexpected phrases make them worth looking through. Only the poem about a chop suey joint and high school hangout is boring...