Comment by mcguire
6 years ago
"Midnight" by Sara Holbrook
When it’s Sunday
and it’s midnight,
the weekend
put back in its chest,
the toys of recreation,
party times
and needed rest.
When I lie in wait
for Monday
to grab me by the ear,
throw me at the shower,
off to school
and when I hear
the train at midnight
from so many miles away . . .
when it’s Sunday . . .
and it’s midnight . . .
the train
in passing brays and boasts
it’s steel-track-straight,
on schedule,
arrival times to keep.
And I meander to its rhythm,
flopping like a fish.
Why can’t I get to sleep?
Why can’t I get to sleep?
(I personally have never really understood poetry. Possibly because I don't have a sense of rhythm.)
To go along with the text, a quote from the article: "Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication."
Asking author's-intent questions without checking the author's intent isn't great, but asking students to explain a stanza break that doesn't exist is a particularly exciting sort of unproductive.
> (I personally have never really understood poetry. > Possibly because I don't have a sense of rhythm.)
The first thing most people think of when they think 'poetry' is patterns with a fixed meter and maybe rhyming patterns, but there's a great deal of poetry that doesn't really have either. Instead, those poems use line endings to give breaks and maybe an overarching pattern. Some of it is quite good at making use of those breaks, and they can form a rhythm of a sort, but it's not necessarily an obvious one.
This poem, though, is... weird. It almost seems like there was an attempt to use a rhythm, and then it got busted up by line breaks to try to do something else, and in the process both context and rhythm got broken to the point of making it hard to read.
This being the first time I've come across it, I can't say I'm a fan of the poem. It's alright, but there are strange choices made by the author that I can't get past.