Re: PPB: Silk Diamond / George Sulzbach

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george...@yahoo.ca wrote:

H C wrote:

On Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 7:51:42 AM UTC-4, George J. Dance
wrote:

On Saturday, September 11, 2021 at 6:07:48 PM UTC-4,

genera...@gmail.com wrote:

On Saturday, September 11, 2021 at 5:18:01 PM UTC-4, George J. Dance

wrote:

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Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
Silk Diamond, by George Sulzbach
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Silk diamond
September golden bullet
The leather horse
Rider
With bad news.
[...]
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https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2021/09/silk-diamond-george-sulzbach.html

I thank you G.D.
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Looks great..!

Thanks. I'm glad it's on.
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As someone else put it, not as diplomatically, some people have

challenged my judgement in including it. So I'd like to take a few
minutes, and talk about why I included it.

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First of all, I'll admit, SD would not have been included if it hadn[t

mentioned "September." But while referencing the month was necessary, it
was hardly sufficient. I read over a dozen poems about "September"
Saturday morning, and rejected all of them as being unsuitable for the
context (where it appeared in the monthly archive).

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It's very much in the Beat (or post-Beat) genre, of disjointed,

swirling, "fragmented" images that so many people were writing (and so
many were parodying) in the '70s and '80s, when I first got interested
in poetry. As such, it fits with the selection that comes before it
(today's), which is by a recognized Beat (but very light-hearted).

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Post-Beat poetry is very much written in what Northrop Frye calls the

second stage of a lyric poet's evolution, the 'private language' phase;
so I've got to admit that I have no idea what story and theme you
intend; I had to read the poem myself and make up my own. The first
phrase that struck me and I had to interpret was "September golden
bullet": I imagined a single yellow leaf blowing by in the wind, the
first sign of the end of summer and the coming of winter. That gave me a
story: because winter's coming on, the speaker has to leave his lady
(whom he calls "Silk Diamond" - your "Picture of the Lady" reinforces
that idea), because he has to "cross the pass" before winter.

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He has to leave her and cross the pass because of the "bad news";

there is a "desperado / With a taste for murder" loose in the land. That
gave me two interpretations. On the first, he has to leave her to go
fight against the

desperado; which reminded me of Richard Lovelace's "To Lucasta, Going

to the Wars." On the second interpretation, "crossing the path" was an
allegory, for dying: he's leaving her by dying, and the desperado is
simply Death itself.

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That last interpretation made it a great lead into Wilcox's poem about

the "September of her Life," her good days being over and her death in
front of her. It fit, in a way that no other poem did fit.

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As I say, I could have completely misunderstood your poem; that's a

hazard of "private language" poetry. But most of your poetry is "private
language". Which brings me to my last reason for including it. It is
representative of your work; and while you already have two poems on the
blog, neither are representative: "Expecting Inspiration" was in a whole
different vein, which is what attracted me to it initially. And
"Dandelions" was (1) specifically written for a poetry challenge, ie not
a topic you chose, and (2) changed by an editor into a format that owes
more to Stevens than to Sulzbach ("Four ways of looking at dandelions").
Adding SD gives a fairer picture of your work.

>

Someone challenged my judgement last night,
and it might have caused a huge family fight
had I not simply said, "Alright!
You win! I'm in no mood to write!"
>
I lost the argument. I'm told
that happens more as we grow old,
so without words, our truths unfold.
Silence is worth its weight in gold.

Very nice, even if off-topic. Definitely a keeper for your blog and your
own book (should you decide to do one).
I'd encourage you to post it in it's own thread, where I'd like to say
more.