That Christmas poem; final.....
I've read and re-read your comments, and given this quite a bit of thought, and I've decided not to try to revise the Christmas poem any further.
Thanks to your input, I think I now understand that poem: Its subject is the conflict between two sets of messages. There are the surface Christmas messages -- of love and peace and joy and glory and community. And then there is the other, lower, layer of Christmas messages -- of discord and hostility and distress and sorrow and envy and exhaustion and isolation. Both sets are going on at the same time, and we can only struggle to find some sort of compromise. And I suppose it must be like that for all the other winter holiday seasons in this difficult-to-manage world as well.
I have a tendency to turn individual pieces of writing into metaphors for their content. [That's how I got into so much trouble with the third book in the Native Tongue trilogy.] And that's what has happened with this poem. It's hard to speak it and hard to sing it, and the cacophony and dissonance of its form is intended to embody the conflict between the two message-streams. The more I try to fix that, the less accurate it will be as a metaphor for itself.
That is, I could rewrite it to make everything flow melodiously, but when I got through doing that it would be some other poem -- it wouldn't be this one. It might well be a better Christmas poem, for all I know, but it would be an entirely different one. It would be better just to write a different poem from scratch instead.
Many thanks for all your help....
Thanks to your input, I think I now understand that poem: Its subject is the conflict between two sets of messages. There are the surface Christmas messages -- of love and peace and joy and glory and community. And then there is the other, lower, layer of Christmas messages -- of discord and hostility and distress and sorrow and envy and exhaustion and isolation. Both sets are going on at the same time, and we can only struggle to find some sort of compromise. And I suppose it must be like that for all the other winter holiday seasons in this difficult-to-manage world as well.
I have a tendency to turn individual pieces of writing into metaphors for their content. [That's how I got into so much trouble with the third book in the Native Tongue trilogy.] And that's what has happened with this poem. It's hard to speak it and hard to sing it, and the cacophony and dissonance of its form is intended to embody the conflict between the two message-streams. The more I try to fix that, the less accurate it will be as a metaphor for itself.
That is, I could rewrite it to make everything flow melodiously, but when I got through doing that it would be some other poem -- it wouldn't be this one. It might well be a better Christmas poem, for all I know, but it would be an entirely different one. It would be better just to write a different poem from scratch instead.
Many thanks for all your help....
