Top o' the mornin' to you, too, Bernard:Bernard wrote: After a near dozen attempts at rewriting the line, I woke up this morning with this final version. Thanks for your interest in this piece - I look forward to hearing from you guys soon. The edited version is above.
The edited version's clearly been raked over and over by you, pebble by pebble, grain of sand by grain of sand; I like your attention to detail, your precision, and your neologising bent. It's synthesising, given the poem's title. Your edit bits work for me. I will remain partial to inconformity; but, the way you've changed the line's just fine, very fine, in fact. Love the internal rhymes, the echoing assonances, very subtle, nicely achieved.
The right-margin shift's a lovely visual touch, the eye absorbs "alarming," "enlightening," "future," and "redemptive gift." Damned near sublime formal perfection. It's what concerned me about messing with the line lengths too much and I'm happy to see you were consciously incorporating that effect which jives so thrively with the title. Glimpses, visual markers, so to speak. Moving inwards, there are a couple of other similar visual effects that reinforce the poetic message, the piece's content. This really is quite fine. You've clearly got a sense of the workshop of spatialisation, something the sets this entry apart from a lot of the work I see daily (in my day job, I mean).
Speaking of, one tip I offer freely which you are freely able to reject out of hand? I mentioned it earlier; and, it was an I-opener for me. Your mind-glimpsing doesn't require any further tweaking, that much is clear; but, I notice you tend towards lexical items more aural than visual; I had to work at the visual element in my own writing; but, I was happy when one of my (legions of) critics pointed it out a couple decades ago. Since I place myself in the Tradition commencing with Aristotle, Freud, Eliot, Joyce, et.al., I do tend towards the internal, the aural, to write by ear; and, I had to work at writing by ear and eye both; not just what I heard but what I saw (and, not in any mystical mind's-eye sense, either). That's perhaps why I really respect and admire Sylvia Plath's work so much (and, she's rarely given credit for intuitively grasping that a great poem requires elements of both the visual and aural, NTM the form / content dichotomy, etc.).
Thank you for accepting my suggestions in the spirit in which they were intended.
Undeniably, BodaciousHowler xoxoxoxo
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Shakespeare's Coined Words:
http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/s ... re031.html
The Beauty of His Weapons:
http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/static ... are01.html
? Just teasing, folks... of course, that's of great, GREAT importance, but dern, I sure do love the way that line looks, feels, and sounds.
!!