PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Wow!  What a reading experience.  I cannot speak to the situation that inspired this poem, rather its provenance is real or fictive, or if it expresses obliquely truths circumstances that are known only to the Poet.  Therefore, I can only respond as an ordinary reader, and my comments are meant with the utmost respect as I proceed.

   I love eerie poems.  I think T. S. Eliot's great eerie poem, The Hollow Men, probably awakened that tendency in me.  I get bogged down in prose ghost stories, especially the Britishm because they move so slowly; hence a poem, which both compresses and enegrizes both time and space, strikes me as a better venue for a haunted tale.  And this poem, this magnificent "The Re-do.  Misplaced," compresses and enegrizes time and space perfectly.  And the title itself has a very eerie implication to it, compelling the reader to begin to enter the poem.

    And with all the elegance of a British ghost story, this poem proceeds with ordinary language which one would hear at any dinner gathering, or a visit with friends, or perhaps echoing through a bus or train in public transporation.  The grammar is not broken, or wrenched, or convoluted.  The mounting eerieness appears in the way the lines are phrased,  I will not quote them all because, if you are reading this, you have already read them; so I will cite just one example, the second line "glisten in your brooding eyes."  That line refers to the previous line, a description of skies, and skies do glisten (and I love it when they do, rather that is in my window, or in a poem I am reading).  But these skies glisten in "brooding eyes," and brooding is word freighted with the potential to become either haunted or haunting.  This is how so many of the Poet's words in this poem operate.  Ordinary words, perfectly set in ordinary grammar, and yet, the Poet has put just a little sharper edge on them than would be ordinarily heard.  

    But what, after all, is a haunted house?  It is an ordinary building, sturdy, a structure built as well as its architect could design or its construction crew could raise up.  Yet, there is something else in there.  This poem is like a haunted house.  It is built very well, it has a inviting format, it reproduces ordinary human conversation.  The best poems always do that:  one could describe Vergil's great epic, The Aeneid, like that.  Or The Hollow Men.  Yet, there is something in those poems, as in this poem, that is "other," and, as the poem proceeds, not only "other" but "eerie," even "horrific."  

     To me, the two greatest British ghost stories are Bram Stoker's "The Judge's House," and Robert Aickman's "Pages From A Young Girl's Journal."  In each of them, the language proceeds according to the common elegances of well written English, and, rather than the gross splatter and noisy chaos of American horror movies, the language itself becomes electrified with the very negative (but heavily compelling) charge or power that leads to the final horrific shock.  This poem that Ssmoothie has give us takes its place righfully and successfully with those two pillars of eerie language.

     I applaud the accomplishment demonstrated in this poem.