1·Dec·2005 · "With The Devil" · champagne1982

[The Poets]

With The Devil

Genocide was committed in Rwanda just over 10 years ago. Over 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates died, as some of their countrymen immersed themselves in an orgy of slaughter. At the height of the killing, 10 people each minute were massacred, a human life every 5 to 6 seconds. The murderers ran out of bullets, thereafter they hacked their victims to death with machetes.

The UN withdrew all but a few members of their mission out of the country and denied General Roméo Dallaire a clear mandate on how to end the horror. He is still haunted today.

When the world subsides into the yawning pit
of chaotic abomination, how can one soul
contend with a million agonized shades?

The touch of blank-eyed petits
washed cold with hot blood.

Le sang a lavé des mains de mort.​

Whisper despair, Roméo,
as you shake hands.

Stay Roméo, don't run away!
Our last hope rests with you.​

Thousands die each spinning
day, rescue only one.

Rwanda,
heart of Africa,

your blood taints the Nile.​

Your screams are muffled
against the gag
placed in your mouth
by UN strong men.

It was said, they offer nothing
there are millions of them.
Let them kill each other
we'll be better off
when the blight
consumes
itself.

Rwanda,
heartbeat of a continent,

your pain taints the future.​

Whisper despair, Roméo,
you've shook hands with the devil.

Stay m'sieu don't run away!
Our last hope rests with you.

Be noble.
Don't go.
Be brave.

Stay.​

Do what is right.
Reject escape
with every strong fibre
of morality bred into you.​

 

[champagne1982]

I'm not sure why this is so lonely here. Are you daunted by poetry dealing with the "unpretty"? Please, I'd like to know how this piece strikes you.

I don't have any author guided critique questions because I am still not sure about what possessed me to write about this massacre.

I was moved upon reading about Rwanda and the unfortunate results of the UN's Bandaid mission to the country, especially in light of the departure of the Belgian forces; I liken their leaving to the way a scab leaves a wound if the bandage isn't removed carefully -- hurtful, bloody and not very good for anyone.

So, even if you simply would like to leave a gut reaction to this poem, it would be nice to see your comments.

 

[BooMerengue]

Hey Champ!

You know me, Kiddo! I wouldn't change one single thing. I've also written about Rwanda and I am amazed at how many don't care. Its a heartbreaking blot on our own history, that we hardly gave it a glance. No oil there, see.

I am curious about the way you placed your lines.

 

[wildsweetone]

i've read it Carrie, ultimately there's nothing i would suggest you change. i like the space you've used, it fits with the poem you're telling.

however, really scratching the ground to see if i could come up with something...

Whisper despair, Roméo,
you've shook hands with the devil.

is there any reason you've used the word 'shook'? why not 'shaken'?

your pain taints the future.

i might change the word 'taints' as it appears twice, perhaps the second time could be a stronger word?


and, hmm, some parts sound a little 'preachy' - but i'm not sure if that's actually what you're aiming at.


i think this is great writing.

 

[bogusbrig]

With The Devil

Genocide was committed in Rwanda just over 10 years ago. Over 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates died, as some of their countrymen immersed themselves in an orgy of slaughter. At the height of the killing, 10 people each minute were massacred, a human life every 5 to 6 seconds. The murderers ran out of bullets, thereafter they hacked their victims to death with machetes.

The UN withdrew all but a few members of their mission out of the country and denied General Roméo Dallaire a clear mandate on how to end the horror. He is still haunted today.

When the world subsides into the yawning pit
of chaotic abomination, how can one soul
contend with a million agonized shades?

The touch of blank-eyed petits
washed cold with hot blood.

Le sang a lavé des mains de mort.​

Whisper despair, Roméo,
as you shake hands.

Stay Roméo, don't run away!
Our last hope rests with you.​

Thousands die each spinning
day, rescue only one.

Rwanda,
heart of Africa,

your blood taints the Nile.​

Your screams are muffled
against the gag
placed in your mouth
by UN strong men.

It was said, they offer nothing
there are millions of them.
Let them kill each other
we'll be better off
when the blight
consumes
itself.

Rwanda,
heartbeat of a continent,

your pain taints the future.​

Whisper despair, Roméo,
you've shook hands with the devil.

Stay m'sieu don't run away!
Our last hope rests with you.

Be noble.
Don't go.
Be brave.

Stay.​

Do what is right.
Reject escape
with every strong fibre
of morality bred into you.​

With a poem like this, one has to deal as much with the political content as the poem it self. The first thing that jars with me is The UN withdrew all but a few members of their mission out of the country and denied General Roméo Dallaire a clear mandate on how to end the horror. The UN is not an autonomous body that can order troops in or out of any country, that is the security council with its five permanent members USA, China, Russia, Britain and France and ten other temporary members. To get even the slightest agreement with countries with such differing interests is nigh on impossible. All this sort of argument does is to play into the hands of right wing Americans ie. Bush and co who would love to see the demise of the UN, but would they be so keen to send troops into Ruwanda where there is no oil? I think it was a mistake politicizing this poem, it stops one from concetrating on the true human horror.

For example. Take the houlocaust. The horror isn't that the death camps were manned by devils incarnate, the real horror was that the death camps were manned by ordinary men who were loving sons, fathers and husbands, yet their work was routinely dispatching countless lives. The politics is a side show to the realisation that we are all capable of becoming camp guards and executioners and those people that think they aren't, are fooling themselves and no doubt finding themselves in such a situation will rationalise their guilt. Such events in the history are neither unique, you can go back to the bible and find Moses espousing genocide in God's name and the whole horror has been going on ever since. It's just in the modern age these events are recorded and interupt our comfortable lives with a little reality of human nature.

I think another mistake you make with the poem is to become emotionally involved as a narrator. Neutrality and understatement usually makes poems about such horrors all the more horrific because one reads about the unfolding horror without arguing political points with the writer.

When the world subsides into the yawning pit
of chaotic abomination, how can one soul
contend with a million agonized shades?

The world didn't subside into a yawning pit, a little part of Africa did and that is why it was largely ignored. To speak from this perspective you need to place the narrator in the middle of the events.

Your screams are muffled
against the gag
placed in your mouth
by UN strong men.

The UN doesn't have strong men, that is the point and why Rwanda happened. The US administration refuses to allow the UN to be strong, it refuses to participate in many international treaties. I find it difficult to read your poem because I find myself arguing with it politicallly and not noticing the real horror of the event.

Got to work, sorry I haven't really dealt with the poem yet, be back.

 

[WickedEve]

I'm not sure why this is so lonely here. Are you daunted by poetry dealing with the "unpretty"? Please, I'd like to know how this piece strikes you.

So, even if you simply would like to leave a gut reaction to this poem, it would be nice to see your comments.

I'm not daunted. It was only up for a day. It takes people awhile to react.

I actually need to read this poem again, perhaps. But I will give you my first impression: Too much.

Some spots too dramatic:
your blood taints the Nile

Stay Roméo, don't run away!
Our last hope rests with you.

Your screams are muffled
against the gag
placed in your mouth
by UN strong men

Too much tainting: your pain taints the future (earlier it was the nile)

Too cliché: you've shook hands with the devil.

Not a great ending:
Do what is right.
Reject escape
with every strong fibre
of morality bred into you.

I'd like to see a more subdued poem. For me, I think it would have a bigger impact. As it is, I'm not feeling it. It seems to be more tell than show. Sometimes, describing a more simple scene and in a less dramatic way, can better leave the reader feeling how horrific the situation really is.

 

[WickedEve]

After I hit submit, I thought of something else I wanted to add.
"I don't have any author guided critique questions because I am still not sure about what possessed me to write about this massacre." As a poet, I can relate! I wrote a poem about the Holocaust. It started out being too much in the beginning, and many weeks later, it was edited into something better. Something--I don't know--calmer, smaller, a stronger piece than the original. I feel like you have an incredible poem about to happen. If you like it the way it is, keep it that way, but if you edit, then jump in and rip it apart. I'm glad I did with mine.

 

[PatCarrington]

champ,

such travesties to humanity are very difficult matter to cover poetically, i think, but if one attempts them, certain cares need to be taken. and if this poem were mine, to address those concerns would require major revamping.

in my opinion, you have the skeleton of a very good poem, and some excellent thoughts and lines to work with. i have two major problems with the work, as written:

(1) author slant, and (2) formatting.

not only do i find author partiality a severe weakness in the writing of poetry, but I believe it is counter-productive. even in horrific situations like the one you write about, i feel that a writer being judgmental (which you are, and strongly) actually sucks life out of the poem rather than injecting it, as the writer intended. i find that to be the case here.

also, i think your formatting has a negative effect, and from your own personal standpoint, is impractical. not only does it seems too wild for both the content and the eyes, if you are ever plan on submitting this poem to a journal for consideration, the practicality of space (width) considerations become problematic, and you’d be forced to reformat it anyway if it is accepted. there’d be no choice (since there are width restrictions, and in some journals, MAJOR width restrictions) , so you might as well do it now.

i find the two-paragraph introduction unnecessary, to the point of being burdensome to the poem itself. i also feel it (the intro) has a ‘preachy’ element that certainly should not be present, as if you are instructing your reader, even proselytizing.

and i agree strongly with many of the points that bogusbrig and eve made above, namely:

a) politicization in the poem has a severe weakening effect
b) it is overdramatic in spots, when a subtler hand would be far more effective
c) i think the last stanza is very weak


that is all opinion, of course. your thoughts, after reading everyone else’s, are the only one’s that will matter.

i know you are a very talented writer, and i think can really mold this into something very worthwhile.

 

[bogusbrig]

I was hoping that someone would attack my comment about Bush to prove the point about introducing politics with a capital 'P' into the equation is futile. That being said I'm not against politics with a capital 'P' in a poem, its just a very difficult trick to pull off. My belief is that all culture is politics anyway.

I'm assuming the introductory prose is your own statement as it is not in quotation marks. When using a prose introduction in a poem I always think it is better for the poem to argue against the introduction to give the effect of a balanced argument or use the poem to illustrate the proposition in the introduction. You do neither here but extend the proposition into the poem. I agree with Pat that you are telling the reader and not showing the reader and that is a major flaw for me. I doubt there is any disagreement amongst any of us that what happened was a terrible thing and shouldn't have been allowed to happen but I'm sure we could argue all day as to what went wrong and why it was allowed to happen. I think your best tactic would have been to make the reader empathise with the individuals in this human tragedy. It is very difficult to relate to the Holocaust when you talk about 12 million people being murdered but when you reduce it to one person's experience of the horror and then think, this happened 12 million times, one begins to relate to the scale of the horror.

I am not against the formating of the poem in principle but I'm not sure why you have written it like you have in this instance. I don't think it is necessary for me to intellectually understand why you wrote it like you did but I do feel the need for the format to feel intuitively right and in this case it doesn't for me.

I do think you have chosen one of the most difficult subjects to write a successful poem about and all credit to you for that. You are putting yourself out there and that is always to be applauded. It is too easy to stay within our own particular comfort zone.

 

[Belegon]

To me the most striking thing about the poem, other than the emotive content at least, is the format.

I found it to be vaguely unsettling...but I liked that in this context. It made me move my eyes, made me dart around, figure out where to go. It took me out of my comfort zone.

In the context of this piece, I felt that was a positive.

 

[darkmaas]

I loved the formatting. It gave the sense of multiple voices and the chaos of the situation. This is also one instance where repitition is also used very effectively.

My feeling is the formatting would not present any problems to a publisher (even one setting type by hand). I took the liberty of printing the poem without the Literotica background and it was starkly beautiful.

I will agree with Pat though that the intro is unnecessary and the last stanza is a disappointment. It does give a certain "not with a bang but a whimper" ending that might be worth thinking about ... but I don't think that's what you had in mind.

 

[Guest]

I’m not sure how anyone could successfully portray the horror that was Rwanda in poetic format. This is a valiant effort, Carrie. I like the way you force the reader to struggle to follow across the page as he/she reads.

I know the story of Delaire, how he was denied help by the UN to protect a desperate people and how he came home a broken spirit as a result. It’s so hard to write an emotional poem. If one gets too emotional it becomes mawkish on the other hand it can read as cold and sterile. I think you did your best to bring out that frightful period in African history.

There’s very little I’d change. Only a brave soul would tackle such a subject and you are certainly that.

 

[PatCarrington]

I loved the formatting. It gave the sense of multiple voices and the chaos of the situation. This is also one instance where repitition is also used very effectively.

My feeling is the formatting would not present any problems to a publisher (even one setting type by hand). I took the liberty of printing the poem without the Literotica background and it was starkly beautiful.

I will agree with Pat though that the intro is unnecessary and the last stanza is a disappointment. It does give a certain "not with a bang but a whimper" ending that might be worth thinking about ... but I don't think that's what you had in mind.

champ,

i believe darkmaas would know more than i do about the publisher's end of it.
i think he has experience in that area, so i would consider his words here with great weight.

i was speaking strictly from my experiences on the writer's side. i have had journals break lines arbitrarily and in bad places, without asking, simply because they hit the edge of whatever page they had decided to print them on. in this particular poem, just one instance of that early in the poem might turn it into a spilled jigsaw puzzle, especially if the printer is lazy, which many are.

i do not like the formatting of your poem, even if it is not too wide to print, but i'm very happy you are getting opposing opinion, so you can judge for yourself.

 

[champagne1982]

I would like to thank you all, so much. I tried to find a poem of mine that would require some thought as it was read and then I complained (a little) when your thoughts were taking some time to make it onto the thread. You honour me.

Formatting this poem was something I was experimenting with. I wrote it in html as an exercise and that's when it began to cascade across the screen, much like I imagined the blood flowed across the streets. There was also a desire to introduce chaos, but I see I may have been successful in that, only to fail, perhaps, in producing a clear message.

I found it very difficult to remove myself, emotionally from this poem. I still blink the blur from my eyes as I recall the documentary footage, the impersonal camera's eye as the photographer screamed, somewhere out of view, at the image. I still sorrow for the healthy men that accept their orders and lost their sanity, rather than their souls.

I never have read the poem free of its format. I will, I suspect doing so will show me the weaknesses in the verse.

I had concerns about the overly dramatic segments that have been pointed out, until I really thought about General Dellaire's emotional breakdown on his return to Canada and I'm still reading about the aftermath of the events, the war crimes tribunal and the committees investigating the failure of the world to do enough about this civil war before it happened. I believe anything with that sort of a resulting ending cannot be over done.

This should be read in at least three voices. Each different message is tucked into a column. There is the main narrator, the voices of the people who were trying to survive and the voices of the others who were just as damaged by answering the call to slaughter their countrymen as the survivors who watched it all occur.

The man who is the main centre of this poem was on the brink of suicide. His fellows -- the men he served in Rwanda with, rescued him from the attempt. That is why the last verse is there. I believe the story has died with a whimper, making the ending of the poem fitting, albeit poorly.

Boo, thankyou for your impressions. Your quiet encouragement is appreciated and I think I've explained the formatting? This poem can actually, and has been before, a much narrower version. I think it allowed the reader to stay too linear and as a result, I widened it.

WSO, I used the past simple conjugation of the strong verb, shake. I think "shook" indicates a handshake with someone better than "shaken". Call it a minor prejudice, but all I think of when I read shaken, is James Bond's martinis. The repetition, of certain words, is there for reinforcement. You noticed the word taints, I'm curious as to why the word blood is less noticeable? Yes, I am preachy in this poem. It still angers me that such an event occurred and could, conceivably, happen again. I'd like to thank you for the compliment, I appreciate it.

bb, As I read through your replies on this thread I see where I have fallen down in my clarity. I don't want any part of this poem, except perhaps the intro, to be taken literally. I speak and preach of the figurative world, if I restricted my terms to describing only one small corner of Africa, could I accuse the world of abominable behaviour? As for UN strongmen, yes, it's a lousy illustration, I don't think anyone, in the light of a post-9/11 world, would ever accuse the UN of being a potent force in anything. I'm fairly certain I'm going to be doing a lot of work on the intro as well as on the poem. I think the scene needs to be set, I'm just not sure as to the artistry I'll style it with.

Eve, I know I will struggle with this poem, eventually attaining a bit of success in rousing empathy in my readers. You're correct, if I edit, I'll have to be ruthless in the seam ripping. Thankyou for the encouragement.

Patrick, You've managed to hit the nail on the head. I am emotionally invested in this piece and I'm not sure I'll ever manage to edit out my bias in it. The Rwandan Civil War is unavoidably history that a person has to have a strong feelings about. I've mentioned the thoughts behind the formatting. Yes, I use the jazzy eye jumps to hide other flaws. Editing will rescue me, I hope. Your honesty and your encouragement can only help!

Belegon, I'm glad to know that I messed up your comfort zone a bit. Thankyou for your thoughts.

d'mass! How nice to see you. I wanted to have a barren look in this poem. That you find it starkly beautiful makes me think of the video and stills that occassionally squeaked their way into the anglo news, starkly ... can you call carnage beautiful though? I'll try to do something with this peice. It may take a while, I'm not sure I feel ready to tackle such an emotionally tasking job right now.

Tristesse, Another nod from another Canadian can only mean that I've found a little something in this poem. I'll be revisiting this piece again and maybe I'll manage to find the stark beauty in the writing that d'mass speaks of.

I'm looking forward, with a kind of reluctant anticipation, to working on this poem. Again, my wholehearted gratitude to everyone who has taken the time to comment.

Thanks,

 

[bogusbrig]

I think you have made a very brave attempt at a very difficult subject and I hope you keep on experimenting with it. With any experiment in formating you have to hope that what you are trying to do clicks with the reader. It seems from your explanation you are really trying to write two poems, the genocide itself and the affect it had on General Dallaire. Its difficult to combine the two in one poem but like anything, its not impossible to pull off, just very very difficult and I think that is probably where the poem is falling down. It might be worth considering writing this poem from Dallaire's view point, as if he was the actual narrator, poetry is art after all and not reportage. I assumed the voices of the poem were random voices in the spilling of the horror and I don't see a problem in that. I think however, it would be better to avoid writing opinion and stick to unargueable facts, the facts in this affair are very strong and damning.

Good luck, I hope you post a revised version and aren't disheartened by the criticisms of the poem. I think it's wonderful to see someone experimenting with form and language and wish you every success.

 

[ozymandiask]

All of us

I think that Pat Carrington, Bogus and Eve have covered most of the issues well but I would add a particular point. The poem got so involved in your own feelings that it failed to draw out the most dramatic point of all and that is that almost all of us has the capacity to be coaxed and trained to be evil. Blaming institutions and politicians for their failures makes it too easy to ignore the fact that there is a Sergeant Mold in most of us.

I think that a 'political' poem that relates the horror rather than the fact of being horrified is much more stark. The absence of your judgement would then tend to force the reader to take their own position rather than merely follow yours.

I admire the fact that you have tackled a very difficult subject .

 

[jthserra]

Something I have found...

when trying to write of something as massive as the genocide in Rwanda, as in Cambodia, Bosnia and others is that it is difficult to garner the intense tragedy when talking of so many.

Stalin perhaps said it best when he said "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." I wonder if, in a effort to show the depth of tragedy here, you compressed your work not to address the entire scope of what happened, but focused on a single person or event in the genocide to set your image and then in a closing expand the image from one to 800,000.

Just a thought here...

jim : )

 

[Senna Jawa]

I'm not sure why this is so lonely here. Are you daunted by poetry dealing with the "unpretty"?

No. I was daunted by the embarassingly poor quality of your poem. It feels like an enthusiastic but ignorant high school theatrical production, with a lot of running for nothing and with a lot of misplaced dramatic gestures.

Please, I'd like to know how this piece strikes you.

This poem tells the readers that its author cannot tell Rwanda from panda. So instead, the text concentrates on the UN. On the top of it, you are intensively using name "Romeo" rather than "general", "warrior" or Dallaire. Poetry is the art of words. "Romeo" has its place in the literature. Thus if you use "Romeo", the usage has to respect the word, in this case "Romeo". In general, words are the strength of strong poems, in which the words get their full sound; and the same words are a weakness of weak poems, in which the author neglects the total personality of each word, when the author thinks it possible to strip the words of all of their aspects save for the convenient one. It doesn't work.

Now that we know from your poem that you felt deeply and bad about Rwanda tragedy while not knowing anything about the country and their people, was it possible for you to write a meaningful poem about that horrible event?

It was. But since you don't know about Rwanda, you need to write about something that you do know. And you need to use your imagination (doing research about Annihilations of whole people could help too). For instance, you could mention Rwanda, but you could write about imaginary Annihilation which would happen around you. You could write about months of killings in your city, say Cleveland or Detroit or Chicago... Such killings don't happen instantly. The terror increases gradually. You could write about the fear of going out onto the street, to work or to a store. Children want to go to school, to meet their friends, to have their social life intact, but they can't. You and others used to go to restaurants, Mc Donalds, movies... for a walk... You are deprived of all these small pleasures of life. There is fear everywhere. You and others don't have fat bank accounts and food delivery to their homes--you have to work for living, you have to go to the store while you are scared. And the nearest store is destroyed anyway, you have to go still further. Things happen. First people are routinely beaten up on streets, raped, soon they get killed. You never know who will return to the apartment, or will you yourself. The hunger and sickness get into the picture, and the stinky trash all over the neighborhood which used to be pleasant. Food gets expensive. You sold everything of any value to get some food. Fewer and fewer relatives and friends stay alive. It's not clear if it makes sense to go on with life, for whom? Three quarters of the population are gone. Then nine out of ten when it is finally over. You end up away from where you used to live. You have no more contact with the world, the whole world is foreign. Nobody cares anymore about your childhood stories, jokes, values. That world is gone.

If you have written for instance along such lines then you'd have your chance. Instead, you replaced the great tragedy by trivial and superficial bickering about the "strong UN men" etc. It's ok for a poet to have shallow, naive views, but it's not ok to preach them or to preach any views in their poems. Good intentions, cliches and general statements can't make a poem.

Let me mention also a technical detail. You've written:

[...]
placed in your mouth
by UN strong men.

It was said, they offer nothing
[...]
​

At first "they" are the "UN strong men". Very soon it is clear that "they" are the Rwanda's population. In a high school paper this would be only a minor blemish. In the case of a poem this is unacceptable. The reader should not be mislead by the pronouns like this, not even for a split second. (I am not rigid--I've shown that in Anna's "Panties..." this kind of pronouncian mishaps can play an artistic role; it was an exception. In general the pronoun ambiguity and plainness problem shows that the author has problems with the poetic expression). The reader's effort should not go into solving trivial logical challenges. It should be totally concentrated on the poem (images, actions, ...), not on what is not in the poem. There should be no distractions caused by a poor writing technique.

Regards,

Senna Jawa
​

 

[KillerMuffin]

The first thing I asked myself is "what is this poem up to?" What is it about? What is it saying? What is its meaning?

I think this poem is trying to convey the horrors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, what the UN--and perhaps its unconcerned constituents--ultimately did not do to improve the situation. I think this poem takes a political stance that the UN is the bad guy and the General they left behind could be a good guy, if he only stayed and did something to improve the situation. This poem uses emotionally charged language and emotionally disturbing imagery to elicit a reaction from the reader. There is a reaction, but I think that ultimately, the reaction isn't necessarily the desired reaction. I'm guessing this because I think the poem wants the reader to feel how the genocide itself was horrible, but the worst horror was that the people (UN) that were in a position to stop the genocide not only did nothing to stop it, but made it worse by mostly pulling out of the country and turning their backs on the situation. If that is the desired reaction, then I believe the poem failed because the imagery couldn't make the emotional connection between the horrible images of genocide and the UN's pull-out.

I should point out that I had a lot of trouble physically reading this poem. I don't know how much thought is given to the way the poem, as a whole, is displayed. The gapping between the left, middle, and right sides were so great on my monitor, that it was impossible to tell where lines were broken without minimizing the screen. I don't know how you wanted the poem presented and other than justification clues, can't begin to guess how important the white space is to the poem. I have a 17" monitor, 1280x1024 resolution, IE6, Imagize-liquid forum skin, and text size set to "small". This changes the effect of a poem like this because the presentation is just as much visual as it as about line breaks. I have a lot of white space; it minimizes the visual impact of the poem as a whole and minimizes the message.

The thing that bothered me the most about the poem was the tone, particularly the tone set in the epigraph. It was, well, melodramatically overpowering. It tried too hard to bring about the notion that April 1994 in Rwanda was awful. I say that not because the poem shouldn't be partisan, dramatic, and attempt to manipulate powerful emotions in the reader; I say that because I formed an instant distrust for the poem's Voice from the epigraph and it didn't get better as it went along. What created the distrust? "Genocide was committed in Rwanda just over 10 years ago." This statement has several things wrong with it:

• it's in passive voice;
• the subject of the sentence is "genocide", which is a word that inspires strong emotions, and a positioning that makes the statement, mmm, fence-sitting and non-committal--particularly since it's coupled with passive voice;
• the credibility of the epigraph and this statement relies entirely on the poet--making blanket statements without a credible authority to back you up, particularly when involving an accusation such as genocide and against people who are supposed to be the "good guys" (UN), gives a sense of emotional blackmail (in other words, going for the drama rather than the strictly accurate);
• the fact that this one statement puts the kabosh on the poet's credibility also puts the kabosh on the poem's credibility. It's too easy to dismiss the poem as dramatic posturing for effect when you don't have credibility--particularly when you're dealing with a politically charged subject.
• Um, I mean "credible" as in possessing believable authority on the subject not "credible" as in plain old believable or not.

There are some grammatical weaknesses in the poem. Your epigraph should not have a sentence fragment, nor should it be passive voice. There are sentence fragments within the poem--I find such things acceptable, but only if there is a reasoning behind them. One instance: The touch of blank-eyed petits washed cold with hot blood. The predicate is iffy and may not convey your meaning. Touch washed cold? A cold is washed by touch? Is washed cold a phrase? If so, there is no predicate. If washed is the predicate, the sentence logically assumes an object, which would be cold. You can't wash cold. The fragmented quality of the sentence heightens the sensation of drama, but with no logic, it comes across more as a poetic gimmick to manipulate emotions than as an inherent piece of the poem rather than a poetic device to convey meaning.

Unlike S.J., I did not find the use of Romeo inappropriate. I found the parallel interesting and rather redeeming in the poem's theme. Shakespeare's Romeo stayed and died with his Juliet because he thought she was dead and he could bear to part with his lover. Rwanda's Romeo is being entreated to stay, even though he might die if does. Coupled with the epigraph's notion that Romeo cares about Rwanda and her people, it instills a nobility of emotion in the character created by the poem. I do think that with the abundance melodrama in the poem, the use of Romeo's first name is something of a straw that's breaking the camel's back.

The three columns were interesting. I didn't "hear" three different voices in them; I read verses and a chorus. The right-hand column didn't necessarily appear as something separate. I think the reason why the center part stood out as different from the left part was that it was both chorused and a direct plea to the character Romeo. The rest of them poem "spoke" to someone else, presumably the reader, and didn't plea for anything. In the left and right columns, the words blood, kill, die, and pain form sort of a repetition--even when they don't repeat--of single word imagery. The problem with relying on these words to convey images is that everyone has a different picture to associate with them. The poem relies heavily on these words, by themselves, for its emotional content. Why? For example blood in the Nile has been a cliche since the Bible was translated into English.

I also think that romantic poetic language (eg When the world subsides into the yawning pit of chaotic abomination,) is working at cross-purposes to the images the poem is trying to hit the reader with. It's just trying too hard. Take, instead, this phrase: Your screams are muffled against the gag. The difference is that the simplicity of the language brings a clearer and more powerful image than the first phrase. You can't re-interpret or confuse with simple sentences. What is chaotic abomination? Chaos is the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a natural system. It's also confusion.

I think that the biggest problem to solve is the getting the imagery to work with what the poem is trying to tell the reader. Yes, there are powerful and emotional images in there, but they're not hooked into the poem's mojo. If you're interested in re-writing it, I would suggest putting this poem away for a while, then reading an academic or encyclopedic version (not a documentary) of the events, and then editing your poem until it's up to what you want it to be up to.

 

[champagne1982]

Senna Jawa,

Thankyou. I see we both have tinder for the fireplace now. <edited> Now, that I have the personal reaction over with, I would like to let you know that I intend to put this poem away, back into the dead file that's my poetry page here on lit, until I can edit and rewrite. I appreciate your feedback.

 

[champagne1982]

ozymandiask and Jim, You both address the idea of a more narrow focus for this poem. I was considering condensing most of this down to the moment when General Dallaire actually shakes hands with the boy he calls the devil.

Thankyou for your insight.

 

[champagne1982]

Killer Muffin,

It's very nice to see you on the forum. I'm in the midst of rewriting the dreaded epigraph. I am still torn over keeping it as a vital part of this poem or editing it out and putting any key elements of its narration inside the body of the poem.

I agree, the vB formatting isn't the greatest medium for this poem. I'll be continuing the experiment, I'm sure.

Thankyou for the editor's eye you've used on this poem. I'm glad for the advice.

 

[Senna Jawa]

<This post is edited. I've removed from the original some unnecessary stuff.>

I've written: This poem tells the readers that its author cannot tell Rwanda from panda. This only means that the poem makes this impression. It still does not mean that the author actually does not know about Rwanda.

***

I do not think that you have artistically justified the usage of the general's first name, which happened to be Romeo. Sometimes such incidental items work well in a poem, then by all means enjoy the chance, use it. Here the usage of "Romeo" was only distracting and obscuring your poem. Genocide+Romeo?! C'mon, be real.

Now, that I have the personal reaction over with, I would like to let you know that I intend to put this poem away, back into the dead file that's my poetry page here on lit, until I can edit and rewrite. I appreciate your feedback.

Are you sure or are you diplomatic?

Do comments on poems have certain implications about the author her/himself? Within a certain scope and limits certainly yes, it's anavoidable. For instance, I have pointed to your mishandling of pronouns in:

Your screams are muffled
against the gag
placed in your mouth
by UN strong men.

It was said, they offer nothing
there are millions of them.
Let them kill each other
we'll be better off
when the blight
consumes
itself.​

Indeed, first you address Rwandians as "you". Next you use "they". Thus against your intention 'they" cannot be interpreted as "Rwandians=you". I am writing exclusively about your text but the implication is that at least on this occasion, in this particular place, you have indeed messed up. One may even probabilistically conjecture that you may be prone to this kind of mishaps also on other occasions--I cannot help it if someone would entertain this kind of possibility.

So, yes, my comments about a poem may be difficult to take, they may hurt the author. But what can I do? I may refrain from commenting or if I do write than I have no choice.

You say that you are going to edit and to rewrite your poem. Then next to nothing will be left of it. You have to write it in a completely different manner, with an artistically drastically different attitude. As it is now, please do not get offended, this poem does not respect the tragedy. Respect is silence, meaning here that the author should not be heard, the author's existence should not be felt; it means in particular that you are not going to show off any ad hoc metaphors and other oh-so-poetic-expressions:

if in any poem you call something "heart", and in the next lines this something is screaming and is gagged, then it is a poorly written poem, which turns images into a joke (like the gagged screaming heart). And when your something is a country, in which half of the population has perished in a short time, then such writing is especially bad. It's just disrespectful to use ad hoc metaphors, especially cliched metaphors, when writing about things bigger than our everyday experience. It is also the eternal issue of the artistic taste. Here I mean for instance specifically the first part (4 lines) of the above quote from your poem.

It is also disrespectful to the victims to write in a sarcastic way, or even to quote or rather paraphrase some offending statements or opinions, as in the second part of the fragment of your poem, which I have reproduced above. The introductory phrase "It was said" does not justify and is not a sufficient excuse for what follows after it. Perhaps it'd be very different if instead of "It was said" you'd have specific scenes and characters saying those things under specifically described circumstances. Then possibly it would be poetry instead of offending, cheap talk.

I don't see a continuous way from your text to a reasonable poem. Write it anew.

The cliched but strong phrase "The murderers ran out of bullets, thereafter they hacked their victims to death with machetes." has some potential (in the poem you'd still pay attention to the effect of words "ran" and "out", especially that in your phrase they are used not in the regular way but idiomatically, etc).

Elsewhere in this thread you have written: I was considering condensing most of this down to the moment when General Dallaire actually shakes hands with the boy he calls the devil. This sounds like (another) good idea (while in your present poem the whole handshake episode is obscure).

******

"Ad hoc" is one of the key notion in this discussion. If one pushes even the least probable idea to its extreme, then thanks to such extremal creative energy, the idea may work after all, while ad hoc means are destined to fail. The present ad hoc genocide+Romeo combination feels to me like disrespect towards victims. One could joke: and, oh, where is Juliet?! -- no, don't add another ad hoc metaphor for Juliet. However, if one would introduce a whole team of characters from "Romeo & Juliet", and would somehow skillfully embed them into the Rwanda scene, then the result may have a high artistic value. It would take a lot (lotsa lotsa) work and ability to pull it off. We would get something which at the same time, simultaneously, would and would not be about Rwanda. Such a creation would have its own independent existence.

Regards,

Senna Jawa​

 

[champagne1982]

Senna Jawa,

I meant what I said in the last paragraph of my reply to your original posting on this thread, I really do appreciate your feedback. I also would like to reassure you that I mean this apology. I had no reason to write my initial reactions to you and post them on this forum, other than that I was feeling particularly petty at the time. I'm sorry I behaved as immaturely as that post indicates I have.

I would ask your allowance in my deleting the contents of that reply. I cannot take them back and to expect that you would, in any way, believe I could, would be childish on my part. I accept the deed as done, just as I can admit my error in airing it in public.

I am sorry for the attack on you and your work.

Your critique has merit and I appreciate that you have offered me guidance in making this poem better, or at least, advised me as to its future disposition.

You are gracious. With sincere apology -- Carrie.

 

[Senna Jawa]

off topic--the button in my hand

Senna Jawa,

I meant what I said in the last paragraph of my reply to your original posting on this thread, I really do appreciate your feedback.

Sunny Side

they have their sunny side
i am not negative
my words cast shadows
'cos they are 3-dimensional
and they have their sunny side

my words are like bricks
heavy and they can hurt
but you
may take them
and build your home
with large windows

​

wlodzimierz holsztynski ©

1982-01-14​

I also would like to reassure you that I mean this apology. I had no reason to write my initial reactions to you and post them on this forum, other than that I was feeling particularly petty at the time. I'm sorry I behaved as immaturely as that post indicates I have.

Carrie, thank you, but there was nothing for you to apologize for. Your post was still nice, despite being written under certain duress. I have here participants writing small, snotty, mean spirited things about/against/at me all the time without the slightest provocation on my part, I am even used to it. On the other hand, regardless of your understandable frustration, you were still truly cultural. It is actually me who should continuously and permanently apologize for clumsiness, crudeness, awkwardness, ... of my commenting style. In poems sometimes I manage to achieve delicate precision within a few words (because I hardly use words like "delicate" ). But otherwise my sentences tend to be long, I repeat myself, everything feels heavy in my prose... and I do nothing to avoid potential confrontations. All this is happening due to my priority: my whole effort goes toward making relevant points about poems, hardly anything else counts to me. There is also a more objective difficulty: each time I write from scratch. If I posted on the Internet my treatise on poetry then it'd be much easier for me to write comments on poems because I would reference that general text. As it is now, I am writing about the notions in a short and by necessity incomplete way, hence I am often misunderstood. All these are (excellent ) excuses. I simply apologize to you for the unpleasant tone of my comments.

I would ask your allowance in my deleting the contents of that reply.

It's fine. I'll edit my previous comment respectively, so that everything will harmonize with everything. On the other hand I think that you were rushing/panicking . Nothing that terrible has happened, while you and I would enjoy reading this exchange in the future as some kind of a souvenir.

I am sorry for the attack on you and your work.

Not at all! I don't have any regular ambitions as an author of poems. Yes, if I write then most of the time I'd like to write as well as possible. That's all. I do not try to publish my stuff. If someone says that my poems are poor and worthless--I don't object. When people say that my poems are boring then I feel like objecting but I still hardly ever do. When you say something more objective & specific, like about the length of my pieces then I may provide the info to the contrary. But these are almost trivia.

******

Before Sleazy Ice in a great hurry will run to me to shut the Lit's door on my ass let me mention a certain psychological aspect of writing.

In the 8th grade I got B+ for an essay. The teacher praised it as the second best in the class. I expected C or D, so I was quite surprised. Next, after writing another essay I felt confident, but on this occasion I got something like C- (the grade scale in Poland at the time was 2 to 5--yes, communists had abolished 1 as degrading ). I understood that the teacher was right. The first time I had provided a solid text while the next time I suddenly believed that I can write like writers, in a more artistic, free, relaxed manner. My teacher gave me a signal that I was wrong, that one should put real work into a text. I understood that "artistic manner" can be cheap.

A few years later I started to write poems. The first one was fine. But later there was a period of time, fortunately short, when I believed that the standard, common sense rules of writing and communicating do not apply to poetry. I mean such things like not talking too much about oneself, like not pronouncing BIG STATEMENTS, etc.

Today I can be more precise about these issues, I can place them in the whole question of poetry, but it's not my goal here.

I just want to share my observation that a lot of authors of poems are under an impression, or act/write like they are under an impression that writing poetry places you outside the laws of communication. Authors act like they have a special license. But nobody does. One should always imagine holding a stranger by the button and spilling his text on that poor innocent bystander. Only the button will be left in the author's hand when s/he tries to impress strangers with his/her persona.

Regards,

Senna Jawa​

PS. ok Sleazy Ice, relax, I'll be gone for a while, but stay on your toes all the same