Notes from English lecture, March 8th
- machinery over-------- humanity
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Posted Apr 25, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC
This feedback is going to be extremely basic and is not going to address your content very much, but I think you should consider whether or not it's important to your poem that it is unpleasant and difficult to read on the most basic level. If it is, you have certainly achieved that goal. However, if this poem is not intended to be difficult and to put up a wall between the reader and your meaning, then I think you should consider reworking your form into something different.
Yeah, the readability is not important.
Meaning that how readable it is is not central to the piece? Or that it being accessible is so outside of your concern for the poem that you're fine with this confrontational format?
If the first, then you've got a space bar to hit a lot. If the second, well, I still would suggest hitting that space bar.
Well, I would say that the difficulty in reading it is the point. It's not really meant to be read all the way through from start to finish. It literally is disjointed notes from a lecture, and the flow together of words is supposed to get across the idea of taking in information without processing or comprehending it - like a stream of words and phrases are coming at you, but when your brain has trouble taking them in they jumble together into meaningless nonsense.
That said, I don't think the piece is particularly amazing, it's just a form I've been experimenting with and I was curious to see what comments it would get. Obviously it's quite obtuse.
I actually read the whole thing through (it gave me a bit of a headache, no lie).
I think it's a cool idea (representing visually the feeling of being overwhelmed by words), but I have two suggestions which may or may not actually be good suggestions.
Shorten it. Whether you still use the lecture notes as your base text or use something else is up to you. I feel like you can accomplish the same thing ("your brain jumbles a stream of words into meaningless nonsense") in (maybe) half-to-three-quarters of the space?
Start with actual words, then "degrade" gradually into non-words: maybe non-words that look like they could be real words—sort of like how this song sounds like it could be English, but isn't. Then, at the very end, slowly (or actually, abruptly may work better) return to using real words. I might suggest ending it, at least in part, with one of the "phrases" you've used near the end of this version: "andthatsitfortoday." Ending with that (or something like it), after confronting readers with a chunk of literally unintelligible non-words, could mimic that feeling of realizing a lecture is suddenly over, but having no recollection of what was actually said during it.
I didn't dislike this, by the way! I just don't think it works the way you intended (yet).