You have hair.
That might have been the first thing I noticed.
I stared at your hair for hours,
honestly,
hoping to capture it somehow.
I think your voice struck me next.
And that’s strange
because you’ve been talking to me for so long.
But there was your voice.
And I listened to the sound instead of the words.
Weirdly…
your hands, too.
I want to touch them, not hold them,
not yet,
just brush against your knuckles,
and hope you do the holding for me.
I think it took tem minutes
for me to notice your lips.
(I had to get past your eyes and cheeks and smile.)
That’s when I went to talk to someone else.
Revision:
You have hair.
It's not impressive or noteworthy, really. But still,
I stared at your hair for hours
of days, over months,
hoping to capture it somehow.
Your voice struck me first,
violently and constantly,
because you'd been talking for so long,
and I listened to the sound instead of the words.
Weirdly,
I want to touch you, not hold you.
Bump into you as I walk past,
just brush my hand against your knuckles.
I think it took ten minutes,
that first day,
(I had to get past your eyes and cheeks and lips)
for me to speak.
And it came out angry.
My approach to this revision was, first, removing every other line. I was honestly surprised that it still made some kind of sense and, actually, gave the poem a whole new tone. It was similar to the tone of the original, but stripped down, harsher in some way. This led me to finding my new speaker, or at least a new attitude for my speaker, and the additional lines sprang from there.
2 comments:
What I really like in the revised poem in the contradictory feelings in the speaker toward the addressee. There are a bunch of moments where it seems the speaker likes something about this person, but not wholly. The speaker first notes the hair, which is "not impressive" but for some reason the speaker is obsessed with it, staring at it over hours, days, days, and months, trying to "capture" it. The speaker also want to "touch" the addressee, but not "hold" them; this implies a difference between the two things for the speaker. "Hold" might have a romantic connotation and it is here rejected. The "touch" seems to speak to something other than romance, and I am led to question: does it have to do with "capturing" this person like the hair? Interesting. I love the last stanza (especially the use of the parenthesis). It appears as though the speaker is mustering up courage to confess feelings for the addressee because it takes "ten minutes," but the last line remains consistent in the theme you have already built. There seems to be something about this addressee that is not liked.
You have a very complex speaker here and it works really well. I am reluctant to say that the speaker hates the addressee based on the last line--anger can be indicative of a lot of things. That's what I like about this poem. We aren't sure what it is that makes the speaker so distant from the addressee while there also exists an obsession or curiosity for this person. It's very intriguing. If I had to suggest something, maybe add an ending that speaks to this distance based on what the addressee has done to the speaker directly or indirectly. That might be bad advice because I really like the "not telling-ness" of the poem. Honestly, I'm just curious...
I also like the difference in attitude between the poems. The original leaves it more open for interpretation and I personally felt a more positive vibe from the it. It sounds a lot like the speaker is admiring this person and all their different features that drew them in.
Then with the revision that attitude was completely altered with a just a few changes. My favorite was the change in the first two lines. "It's not impressive or noteworthy, really. But still,", just with this the entire poems feeling was changed from the original. I like the overall angrier tone, it seems to give the poem more power.
Post a Comment