Inside the Maze by Hadara Bar-Nadav from Poetry Daily.
By and large this worked very well indeed for me. I’m always a sucker for thoughts from inside famous dead heads. In this case, the Minotaur. Smooth choice of detail and I like how the thoughts run on from each other and the overall feel of the piece. One section that didn’t work for me is the one with all the greens — (shouldn’t that be “fir” not “fur”?) in the middle of part IV. I enjoyed the sonics of the green catalogue, but couldn’t work out its significance in the scheme of things (possibly because I just don’t see leaves or greenness when I visualize maze? Or some mythological reference I just don’t get?)
One chronology nit — Daedalus and Icarus didn’t do their waxed-wing thing until after the Minotaur was dead (they got locked up in their tower in the first place because Minos was mad Theseus escaped from the maze after killing the Minotaur), so the Minotaur couldn’t have seen them fly over the maze.
But detail-schmetail, what’s poetic license for, after all? I love that whole scene as described here, positively cinematic. Also seriously digging the ending, beginning with: “This morning the starlings…”. It struck me as luminous and poignant, both for itself and in view of how things actually played out, and has stayed with me all day. Evoked a Plot Against the Giant feeling, have to think about why.
One serious issue, though, and am hoping someone can help me out here: the format. I can’t see how this complements, plays into, or in any way supports the content of the piece. Four one-word columns arranging text to be read in traditional left-to-right horizontal format. At first I thought there might be some vertical cleverness going on too, hence the columns, but if there is, I couldn’t discern it.
So how does the format help, people? Claiming it evokes a maze seems to me rather a stretch. So far all I am seeing it contributes is a stop/start rather dragging read, which I think detracts from the content.
Help, anyone?
It looks kinda hedgey. No, not our Hedgie, but like a hedge.
At least, that’s what it reminds me of.
It creates a hesitancy, as if the words are being dragged out fighting.
You can vote for or against this poem in this week’s Daily Poem Project:
http://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2007/06/dpp10.html
Will do. Think it’s the hands-down winner of the list you have up this week. Only the one by Eliza Griswold comes anywhere close. The others are difficult and scrunchy in different ways.
[...] voted this into third place on Andrew’s Daily Poem Project for this week. I put Inside the Maze in first place and In Another Year of Fewer Disappointments in [...]
I’ve posted the results now:
http://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2007/06/dpp10-results.html
Your hands-down winner won!
I would have put you on my email list announcing the results, but I could not locate your email address on any of your sites. I hope you don’t mind receiving notification here.
As I just noted in response to your comment on the results, she does have a website, so we could ask her to comment on her poem:
http://hadarabarnadav.com/