Was he albino? I don’t know much history.
Legend has it that
if you click your heels together
and repeat three times
“there’s no place like home”
(but only after the lion’s third roar
or was it the second?)
the ghost of Ezra
#cake will accompany you
as your +1
to the social function
of your choice
and through pantomime
and etiquette
will demonstrate for
the present company
why Solomon
(who wrote not a few songs
mind you)
had such disdain for
sunny weather.
But me, my units
are metric.
Posted Mar 27, 2017, 1:13 PM UTC
212
I have to admit, I'm baffled. And that doesn't happen often.
I see several allusions to well known figures: King Solomon and Ezra Pound - though what they have to do with one another is anybody's guess. The title is a mystery – I don't know what albinos have to do with these figures. The allusion to The Wizard of Oz is similarly confusing as hell. And I frankly have no idea what the lion's roar is supposed to be referencing, if anything at all.
Basically, I'm seeing several key elements of an interesting poem here, but no real weave between them; no framework to hold this patchwork quilt in place. I wanted to like this. I genuinely do enjoy poetry that holds itself at arm's length, and doesn't give everything up at once. I think you've done that. But I think maybe you've gone a bit too far. At the end of the day, I have no idea how to unravel this thing, and that makes me sad.
Thanks for your feedback! You have a very discerning eye for verse, it seems, which is what I really needed on this piece. It excites me that you were sensitive to the allusions and still baffled by them--in fact, my motivation for uploading this poem was to see how obscure the connections between all those things are. I'm hesitant to "reveal how the trick is done," but I don't want you to be sad either! Also, I want to improve this monster!
This poem fell into my lap while I had been continuously writing imitations of Ron Padgett's work. It occurred to me in the form of an absurd musing about Solomon's Ecclesiastes in the Bible where he famously states "there's nothing new under the sun." I had wondered to myself if that applied to the dark side of the moon where the sun does not shine.
The poem begins with the allusion to Wizard of Oz, as you noticed, and the lion's roar refers to an urban legend that circulated when I was younger: that if you start playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album after the third roar of the MGM lion (at the beginning of the film), then the music matches up to the movie's plot.
Ezra Pound comes into play because of his famous injunction, "Make it new!" which encompassed his general attitude toward poetry. Naturally, he becomes the one who can offer insight as to why Solomon did not "appreciate novelty," that is, why he had "disdain for sunny weather." (The fact that he does pantomime is an allusion to his Imagist style.)
The last line about the narrator's units being "metric" means that he does not have "feet" and therefore cannot click his heels together. That is why he asks in the title whether Solomon was albino, because he does not know why he had such disdain for sunny weather...he cannot summon Pound to his assistance himself. He is just passing along the legend, apparently.
It is a weird piece. Totally unlike anything else I've written (which is why I was doing imitations in the first place! =b). It'd be nice to find a way to make it coherent enough that the suggestions it makes would be more intelligible. I can't expect that all readers to get the references, but it'd be nice if something about the poem made readers want to spend more time with it.
Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts!
I have to admit, when I wrote this, I had just given up and figured it was some form of flarf. I totally understand your concern about not giving away too much. But I think you've gone a bit too far in the other direction. The dots are all there, but there's no indication how to connect them.
It is very flarfy isn't it? Can you recommend any ways it could be made less so?
Well, I think if you ask 100 people, you'll get 101 different answers to that. That usually comes down to a matter of personal voice/taste.
For my money, I usually tend to place those "clues" somewhere in the title. For instance "Nothing New On The Dark Side of the Moon", or something similar might just give a very discerning reader the ability to crack the code of the symbolism you have here.