The Word Doc. (revised)
Cutting & pasting efforts
nothing black ink can't fix.
Fancy fonts tango across the screen looking pretty
while substantial ideas are hidden right behind.
Mistakes come & go freely, as ones do in a deli
the undo button reverses all things carelessly.
Words are displaced, scattered everywhere
taken control over every sitting & standing.
Lines & paragraphs are broken up, rearranged
no questions allowed, no comments welcomed.
It's one document, a word document
& the irony rocks me
no one ever speaks of it -
The lack of noise & protest
belonging to groups of words
which gather to serve another.
They gather not from their own will
but from the one coercing them to
wake & work for a tyrant, a tycoon.
nothing black ink can't fix.
Fancy fonts tango across the screen looking pretty
while substantial ideas are hidden right behind.
Mistakes come & go freely, as ones do in a deli
the undo button reverses all things carelessly.
Words are displaced, scattered everywhere
taken control over every sitting & standing.
Lines & paragraphs are broken up, rearranged
no questions allowed, no comments welcomed.
It's one document, a word document
& the irony rocks me
no one ever speaks of it -
The lack of noise & protest
belonging to groups of words
which gather to serve another.
They gather not from their own will
but from the one coercing them to
wake & work for a tyrant, a tycoon.
I think this poem is a lot of fun and shows real progress. My first though is--nice work. I tend to like poems born almost purely out of the desire just to write something, as this one seems to. While some poems are and must be heavy and intense, poetry can also be whimsical and witty like this poem.
ReplyDeleteThis line made me smile: It's one document, a word document
I can really hear your voice coming through in that line.
Some lines I think could be better phrased. For example, "Since there's a known button reversing it all" might be better if you could get a little more word processing language into it. Maybe: "Since there's a known button to undo what's done." That line gets the word "undo" in there, which is the name of the function in Word, and phrased this way the line also has some pleasing sounds. I also think you can trim some of the little words. It would be great to see you apply that "fine toothed comb" that I described in class to prune out unnecessary words that aren't helping move the poem forward.
But overall, I like where you seem to be going with this poem. I really like the ending with it's funny association of the author with being a tyrant and the words her serfs. Also, in general this poem really SHOWS. It's clear from your commitment to description in this poem that you're willing to try some of the things I am trying to teach, and I'm happy about that.
I wonder why no one is commenting on your poems. We will have to discuss this in class.
ReplyDeletei love the playfulness of this piece and I think the wording is super strong. I would love to hear more about how the speaker relates to the word document/writing in general. Why did the speaker choose to talk about this subject? What is the speaker's relationship to editing and writing?
ReplyDeleteI like the way this poem is formatted in couplets until the last 3 stanzas, it makes it easy to read. The only thing with doing it this way is it seems slightly choppy, I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a central theme besides typing a document and the process.
ReplyDelete