Interesting to read the variety of responses to my poem "4 a.m.," most in comments after being republished at Tom Clark's blog. First, the poem:
Waking up to pee
at 4 a.m.
it occurs to me that
my weekend has begun
but I don't celebrate
everyone I know
who would go out for coffee
who would go out for breakfast
at 4 a.m.
is dead
And a sampling of responses:
One of the things I like most in the poems I like most is the disguising of exquisite technical expertise within the rough cloak of common and universal experience.
The subtlety of the internal rhyming and off-rhyming here -- "pee"/"me"//"know"/"go"//"m."/"dead" -- brings it all back home for me.
It's almost 4 a.m., I'm up, everybody in the world is dead, and Charles... I'm tipping this cup of terrible Safeway coffee to you, my brother.
Tom Clark
---
Very Zen, very pure in its artistic grace and simplicity,
Nin Andrews
---
This is very fine and I agree with Nin's description.
ACravan
---
Ahh! Beautiful.
Reading every poem out loud is in itself a joy. I really like the lines-
who would go out for coffee
who would go out for breakfast
Don't they look (and when read out loud sound) like they were an Aram Saroyan creation?
aditya
---
They [the poems] can be, sometimes, a little in love with their own loneliness (4 a.m.).
Bob Hicks
Some of these responses made me smile, none made me scowl, but one made me shake my head. Nothing surprising about this. Indeed, a much more thorough documentation of this kind of variety of response is in a book I studied in grad school and that I still consider a work of extraordinary accomplishment,
Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism by Morris Weitz.
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