Poem 10 - "Wood Glue"


Wood Glue
Avigayil Rosensweig

Opacity congeals translucent
Caught in an eternal drip
Down the side of a dining room chair
Like a tear, still shedding
Over crooked slats drenched in dry glue
Unstable limbs overturned onto newspaper
The glue pools over yesterday’s news
Distorts its reporting

Comments

  1. Professor MillerApril 10, 2018 at 1:29 PM

    William Carlos Williams' poetry comes to mind when I read this one. He's one of the masters of lingering on a single image and mining it for all its worth. This poem is quite succesful in helping us to see the drip of glue. There is a minor irony here in that the glue drips down across other glue. This "glue on glue" element seem purposeful enough that it carries over for me into the last part. Is the news somehow also a form of glue? Binding us to events?

    My suggestions here are twofold: try to tighten this up (pehaps using shorter lines?), and consider this line further: "Over crooked slats drenched in dry glue." This seems to be a description of the floor, but if so, why glue? Why would the slats be crooked and why would the floor be drenched in glue? Is it really wood lacquer?

    That image just feels a little off to me, as if it were trying to describe something imperfectly or using the wrong word here or there.

    If you like this kind of short poem, consider reading some Williams. I recommend his selected poems or just picking around his work available via credible online sites like poets.org.


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  2. UnknownMay 9, 2018 at 8:36 PM

    THE IMAGERY IN THIS POEM IS OUT OF THIS WORLD. WOW. Also loved how the glue is dripping on other dry glue that dripped previously. Really enjoyed reading the last lines and found them so clever "The glue pools over yesterday’s news
    Distorts its reporting" I am assuming this is something more than physically distorting a newspaper but that you meant that people being "stuck like glue" to things doesn't allow them to be open to other opinions or something of the like. Amazing poem. Loved it.

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