Grand National
This aint no jet black death trap, son,
roaring off the rock lip of creation
goddamning all through the blue, violet, black.
They had a high noon in mind,
shadows sunk in the ground flush as nails,
when they made this, they took this solid
American Sunday number, overbored the six,
gave it a will and some means,
gave it that look, like a black lava glass
spearhead trailing a line of flame.
Maybe it was overkill to take the supercharger,
designed to cram air into aircraft engines
suffocated in the high thin air, like gills
on a dragon, to breathe and breathe fire at once,
and put those ancient lungs in a streetcar.
Then maybe there are bigger things
that need killing. Special made,
the suspension was just to keep it down.
Hugging turns, brakes to land on a dime—no,
no concessions were made to the lesser
and more bastard forms of speed.
The quarter mile is the rough limit
of vision and predation, and the machine
made to run it is made to make differences
between here and there, between us
and them, then and now,
or to make those differences disappear,
for opening or closing ground,
for getting free or even.
Settle back in it, youngblood. Head down
and make some trouble, find something out,
goddamning all set something free
so black it shines, run like hell.
Ok, here's what I did over the weekend. Not sure the best method to take with the collaboration. Maybe we should start by you tagging parts of it as "keeper," "tweaker," or "rework/lose." Also, make some comments on the overall organization/direction of it. Also, let me ask two things:
ReplyDelete1) write one or two sentences only, say what the poem means and sell it.
2) it starts off talky "aint, son" but moves away from that immediately. this feels iffy to me, so how could we fix it?
I should say also that the general stana form I had in mind was 4 stanzas each increasing in length over the last. and i want it to read frenetically near the end, so that the whole thing has the feel of a car moving through a 4 speed gear box. so, basically, i want to combine the last two stanzas and elaborate on them and make them fast. by this i mean alot of subject-verb-object type sentences, some pile-ups of adjs or nouns.
ReplyDelete1) Putting Southern muscle on a Detroit lounger. Car = animal = mythological beast = icon.
ReplyDelete2) I think it loses the "talky" in spots but I can't really point to sections that have it more than others. Obviously the first stanza does, and for my money the first stanza shouldn't change. I don't know how I feel about the "they" in the second stanza. The image I get is this crazed old dude in Fayette circling his car and telling a boy how he could become a god behind the wheel, how the car itself is deific. So I like the idea of the manufacturing being more organic. It's an easy fix: maybe the car has "high noon in mind." Maybe it's "born of high noon." Anyway, point is that when you take out "they" then the "them" in the penultimate stanza becomes an enemy instead of an ambiguity between enemy or the makers of the car.
I would end that second stanza with "gave it a will and some means." that's fucking balls.
The "maybe" in the third stanza (both times) lends a bit of creepy to the speaker. here's this dude that's completely capable of forgetting there's another there, and so he's in his own head arguing with himself, and wondering if the self is opposition or ally. I also like "suffocating in the high thin" rather than "in the high thin air." the word "air" is there once already, and it's more colloquial, because the dragon line KILLS!
I would also end the last stanza with "find something out." Actually, you can end with "run like hell" because now "run" is "race". This is the perfect poem for Eddie and the Cruisers "Dark Side". The "goddamning all set something free, so black it shines" just ain't working for me. And "goddamning" as a verb a second time draws attention away from it's first appearance.
Perhaps you could use some more of the "son" or "man" or "dude" or just some way to return to the directive. There's a great moment there when you're like, "between us and them" so the kid is getting a free pass into this world just by listening to the old racer's spill. There something to that, a closeness that's understood. We could try a kind of call and response: something he can do versus something he can't, ways of operating this beast. I would say a question could be inserted, but I hate questions in poems and they're really hard to pull off.
per your second post:
ReplyDeleteYou're doing the job in the penultimate stanza.
I always felt like things speed up when the sentences get choppy, if that makes sense. Short, declarative sentences. They pile on one another naturally. If you put periods in the final stanza after "trouble" and "out" then cut out the other and just have "Run like hell." then you've gone through four gears metaphorically and structurally.
also, i don't see a spot to change my bio, and i think Nethers should be capitalized.
ReplyDeleteI think you can edit Bio now. let me know. thanks for the input. some more questions:
ReplyDeleteas for "high thin air," i was torn over it myself. i think that topically it is justified, since the supercharger is cramming air into the manifold, so "air" appears three times--air, aircraft, air. but it definitely calls attention to itself. i'm not sure the device has enough of a pay-off to warrant taking the reader out of the poem for a second. as for the last stanza, i agree about the goddamning again. with that part gone, how do you feel about the other part "set something free so black it shines. run like hell"? i've obviously been playing with that as an ending, so i want to be sure it works, rather than me juststicking with it bc i'm trying to make it happen. i like the idea of makign the imperatives in the final stanza sentences in themselves--i think i played around with this in one of the revisions on the thanksgiving family recordings post and liked how it worked. gonna mess around a bit and repost
messed with order and phrasing a little. didn;t mess with S1 or S2, but here is the 3rd and beginning of the 4th:
ReplyDeleteThe quarter mile is the rough limit
of vision and predation, and the machine
made to run it is made to make differences
between here and there, between us
and them, then and now, to make either
one disappear to the other
or to make that difference disappear,
for opening or closing ground,
for getting free or even.
Above the rumble of the six, the overkill
pitch of the supercharger’s turbine,
designed to cram air into aircraft engines
suffocated in the high thin air, like gills
flaring the dragon’s throat
to breathe and breathe fire at once,
those ancient lungs put in a streetcar.
and i was thinking then i'd do something with the "they"--maybe back track and say they didn't actually make it, the engineers, rather it's been around forever in principle--this thing, this pure test, etc. play up the mythical side, then lead into the close where the youngblood is implored to take his place within the old myth
what about--"suffocated by altitude, gills flaring/ the boiling dragon throat/to breathe...yadda yadda. the issue there is that the gilled dragon image becomes ambiguous--you first read it, i think, as an image of the suffocating planes like fish out of water, but then when you get to " breathe and breathe fire at once" it resolves itself and illustates the functionality of the supercharger.
ReplyDeleteNew draft:
ReplyDeleteGrand National
This aint no jet black death trap, son,
roaring off the rock lip of creation
goddamning all through the blue, violet, black.
They had a high noon in mind,
when they made this, they took this solid
American Sunday number, overbored the six,
gave it a will and some means,
gave it that look, like a black lava glass
spearhead trailing a line of flame.
The quarter mile is the rough limit
of vision and predation, and the machine
made to run it is made to make differences
between here and there, between us
and them, then and now, to make either
one disappear to the other
or to make that difference disappear,
for opening or closing ground,
for getting free or even.
Above the rumble of the six, the overkill
pitch of the supercharger’s turbine,
designed to cram air into aircraft engines
suffocated by altitude, gills flaring
the boiling dragon throat
to breathe and breathe fire at once,
those ancient lungs put in a streetcar.
That’s the heart of it, there, special made
down to its very oldest part,
too long ago to know, a shadow pried out
from the earth like a nail
where high noon drove it flush.
Settle back in it, youngblood. Head down
the line. Open it up
and don’t look back.
Make some trouble.
Find something out
so black it shines. Run like hell.