Monday, January 28, 2013

Fluorescence Blogger Challenge

Fluorescence by Jennifer K. Dick is more creative than any poetry book I have ever came across before in my educational career. The poem "What holds the body" starts with a mind blowing beginning that has little structure with lots of meaning and few words that are worth a million words. It is crazy how in so few words the writer describes such a vivid picture of an incident that happened in her life and than she takes it a step further by adding a personal touch of emotions. Emotions that are spaced and changed throughout the entire book but I love how in part four of the book she completes her thoughts and sums up the feelings in the beginning of her story. Jennifer conveyed her experiences through this elegant piece of work and even then I'm not sure of the meaning. How creative can one piece of work be?

How creative isn't even the right question because reading her work is like putting together a lot of pieces to a puzzle. A great puzzle I might add because of lines such as "to mock up the marker of X:". I pull that line to show that without reading the book in its entirety you'd never be able to find out what each line means. Hence the creativity that flows so that you continue to read until the understanding is clear which takes more than one go around for the work of Fluorescence. During my second time of reading Fluorescence I pointed out the line that reads "And the heat rips up, rumbling, trembling, the building under me". I pointed this line out because these words in one line describe every feeling you would have during an event like a explosion. I mention explosion because that is exactly what she seems to be referring to as she describes different sceneries and emotions throughout the poem.

The art form of poetry seems not to be all that Jennifer adores as she uses past events in history to relate to the message she is trying to convey. As I write this blog I say message but really she is just telling a story through poetry and to me there isn't much of a message to be gotten directly, or is there? My opinion and interpretation for Jennifer's work may be different than someone else's so I'll leave that open for debate. There is appreciation given to visual art as well starting with the cover page of the book that simply seems unrelated and abstract to me as a reader. Things like though make the book of poems stand out more because you can see the poems but there may be an abstract meaning like the cover picture. Something to think about if you read Fluorescence after reading my blog!

3 comments:

  1. really great comments here, well done.

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  2. I want to thank you for your attentive, close reading of my book Fluorescence. I just came across your post tonight and it is so exciting to read about your process of reading into and through my own language. I am currently writing a series of poems that may well be the most syntactically "straight" of any I have written (they are called CERN) and reading this and your comment or query at the end of paragraph 1 above about How creative can one piece of work be?" seems timely. I have also been asking myself whether the kind of wordplay that dominates both Fluorescence and in a different way my recent book CIRCUITS may also have its limits. Questionging those limits seems to be a place I found myself in recently, not that I am opposed by any means to what I do naturally (piecing and unpiecing the puzzling parts of language) but rather asking myself what it would be like if my lines all drove straight forward in a classic semantic manner. And then the new poems began to emerge, as if a subconscious response. So thank you for your reading which makes me feel my new explorations are also an excellent move.

    But I wanted to also thank you for noting what you did about the line about the explosion. Tonight is the night of the Boston Marathon bombings and I am unable to not think of my own experience also near an explosion years ago. I was pleased you completely "got" and heard that experience which is interwoven with other experiences and narratives in that first poem "What Holds the Body".

    I wish you all the best with your own writing and your creative writing course with Jill Darling (I gather from her posting here!)

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