Process
Posted: 28 September 2009
Word Count: 178
Summary: The rhyming seems a bit random in this one. Does it work?
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Take a cat.
In life it is only a cat
but an image flickers,
prickles my imagination:
a busy nose, a spray of whiskers
and I decide to frame
this cat in words; a poetic creation.
A thought cat? If it needs a name.
On a page, it may change
colour or movement.
Crow black or slow black?
And how to pin down
the sly/feral/patient/indifferent
grace of its frown?
And so, filtered through me,
the cat on the page pads
away from reality.
Take a reader.
He/she loves/hates absorbs/debates
the cat.
And likes the poem. Or maybe not.
Reviews the imagery
and a response is hewn
from surroundings, history.
And thus, the cat is spun
through six hundred experiences:
each a seed for further translation.
Carried on fertile torrents
of manipulation.
The Bible writers were wrong
about what happened in Eden,
showing innocence was gone,
the apple eaten.
The fig leaf was not the test.
It did not insinuate, corrupt, protect.
Since Adam's weak willed 'yes',
it is words that we erect
between each other
and our souls.
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Comments by other Members
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 FelixBenson at 15:00 on 29 September 2009
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I like this very much - especially the arugument as it is revealed in the second stanza.
This final passage:
The Bible writers were wrong
...
The fig leaf was not the test.
It did not insinuate, corrupt, protect.
Since Adam's weak willed 'yes',
it is words that we erect
between each other
and our souls. |
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And the closing lines of stanza one:
And so, filtered through me,
the cat on the page pads
away from reality. |
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It is tricky to explain or rather reveal the process?
What is tricky about it, and that is what I am not sure about here, is that to reveal that you need to use the words that you might otherwise discard (i.e. those that don't quite capture the image of the cat's frown) - and that means you have to use a lot of adjectives, ones which you might not have put in the final poem.
All justifiedby the argument of the poem here though. But still...even though they are justified...I don't know if they do dilute the poem a little bit. I don't feel confident of this judgement though. I'll be interested to see what the others think.
I think the argument is very strong - so maybe some compression is a good idea, to given it maximum power...?
It is these lines I am not sure about:
And how to pin down
the sly/feral/patient/indifferent
grace of its frown? |
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and
Take a reader.
He/she loves/hates absorbs/debates
the cat. |
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An interesting, thoughtful work.
Kirsty
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 James Graham at 21:05 on 01 October 2009
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Hi Sarah - I'll post a comment in the next couple of days. You are not being ignored.
James.
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 Nella at 17:26 on 02 October 2009
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I think the rhythym is good and the random rhyming works for me. I'm not quite sure about the last line - it sounded out-of-place to me - rhythmically speaking, not content. I wonder if it could be dropped.
Regards,
Robin
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purpletandem at 17:32 on 02 October 2009
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Hi Sarah,
I have had to come back to this poem a few times to properly absorb it, which has paid dividends because I do like it.
The image of the cat padding around is very strong, and the way it becomes more than ‘just a cat’ through the poet’s and the readers’ intervention and interpretation. I liked the opening …
Take a cat.
In life it is only a cat
but an image flickers,
prickles my imagination:
a busy nose, a spray of whiskers
and I decide to frame
this cat in words; a poetic creation.
A thought cat? |
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Does this refer at all to the ‘thought experiment’, Schrodinger’s Cat?
Also …
And so, filtered through me,
the cat on the page pads
away from reality. |
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The rhythm and flow of your writing is very pleasing and even seems in the first stanza to have the same sense of graceful but purposeful movement as a cat.
As regards the rhyme and your question, for me the rhyming is very good. Needless to say, poetry does not need to rhyme, though sometimes it helps. I imagine it is best if the texture of the rhyming matches the feel of the poem. With your poem, because I didn’t register the question to start with, it took me some while to realise that it contained rhyming, which of course is good – rhyming is there to hold a piece together appropriately, not to obtrude.
On the question of adjectives, I didn’t have any problems there.
I’m coming to realise that I’m not particularly quick on the uptake when it comes to ‘getting’ allusions and subtle arguments in poetry and I look forward to reading some more group comments on your work which always helps me. At the moment I am not quite there yet with ‘Crow black or slow black?’ and the section ‘The Bible … yes’.
I would go along with your conclusion:
it is words that we erect
between each other
and our souls. |
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But, might there be a paradox here, if words (well chosen, well timed, etc) can also be what connects souls?
Thanks again for this poem.
pt
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SarahT at 20:32 on 02 October 2009
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Thank you all for your comments so far. I have been really busy so I've not had a chance to absorb them fully yet but I will just answer pt queries. The thought cat was a reference to Ted Hughes' Thought Fox and the 'crow black or slow black' is a reference to Under Milk Wood. I was trying to bring in ideas about how others wrap words into poems.
Sarah
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James Graham at 19:16 on 03 October 2009
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A very nicely crafted poem. The voice speaks informally but at the same time the poem is held together by the ‘cement’ of rhyme (unobtrusive rhyme, as pt has noticed). It’s shaped by the structure too, the parallel sections - the closing lines of the second section taking the argument on to another level. I don’t find much to criticise technically, and I’m not going to hunt around for minute faults that don’t really matter.
My take on the poem is that it gives very accessible expression to a philosophical question - conundrum, even - about the difference between a real cat and a ‘thought cat’, or in more general terms the difference between the world as it is and the world as we perceive it. As soon as we bring imagination to bear, the cat ‘pads away from reality’. This is a very striking phrase, and it brings all those perennial questions to mind again: how can we know ‘reality’? Is our perception of things the only reality we have? Does language remove us from reality?
Then you go on to explore reader perception - how readers of a poem (or any literature; or viewers of a painting) translate the already metamorphosed cat into something else again. ‘The cat is spun/ through six hundred experiences’. All this reminds me of Picasso’s animals, especially his cats which have padded quite a long way from reality and yet seem to represent a feline essence.
There’s a different note, it seems to me, in the lines about Eden. They’re not at all out of place, but there’s a modulation, a change of key as it were. Language transforms the world around us, creating thought-cats, thought-landscapes, thought-people; but language is also the vehicle for our downfall: our loss of innocence is not brought about by an apple or a fig-leaf, but by our perceptions of sin or failure, and the language we choose to articulate these things. We are no longer innocent because that is how we perceive it, and because we use language to define our condition as such.
After that, I found myself re-reading the poem and seeing the ‘thought-cat’ as something to regret - not an enhancement or enrichment of the real cat, not an improvement on reality. Even if we write a beautiful, vivid, memorable poem about a cat, even if Picasso makes a vibrant sculpture of a cat, it will always fall short of the real thing.
In the end, I began to see an ambiguity - something I love to find in a poem! As poets we take something from the real world and use language to turn it into something different. But should we be glad, or should it be a matter for regret, like our loss of innocence in Eden? Well, why not both at the same time! As real things are ‘filtered through’ us, they become further and further removed from reality, which is a pity; but if the filtering process creates a great work of art, that’s wonderful. This ambiguity, for me, gives depth to your poem.
I hope you will find these meanderings at least coherent. This was my response to the poem - it set me off on a train of thought. I’ve seen poems described as ‘thought-provoking’ which I found didn’t provoke much thought at all. Not so in this case - this really is thought-provoking.
James.
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SarahT at 15:37 on 04 October 2009
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Thank you for your comments. I am going to start gathering my thoughts on this one shortly and I'll keep everyone up to date if I need further thoughts on re-writes.
S
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SarahT at 15:49 on 04 October 2009
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Actually, that sounds a bit flat, in retrospect. I feel very glad and honoured that the poem elicited such thoughtful responses as it seems to me that you can't ask for much more. Given the mix of responses, I can't see any immediate candidates for change - although I am tempted to lose the very last line as Robin suggested.
Sarah
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Arian at 18:14 on 05 October 2009
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I like the rhythm of this, Sarah, and its subtle use of rhyme. I read it as a thoughtful commentary on the interpretive process: the inherent fallibility of language as a mechanism for taking us from the individual perception of phenomena to a collective understanding of the world. Unfortunately, as you imply (as I read it), words are all we have. We’re stuck with them, warts and all.
There’s a couple of places where I tripped on structure. For example:
Reviews the imagery
and a response is hewn
from surroundings, history. |
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isn’t a properly-formed sentence. This is an entirely legit device, of course, in a poem, but it reads (to me) awkwardly in an otherwise orthodox syntactical context (everything else is conventionally punctuated).
Still, just a nit. A very nice read. Thanks.
peter
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