Pronouns/Amateur Nouns and SHARING

Today had a marvellous day. Got together with some fellow poets from last Fall's workshop, caught up on each other's news and read/critiqued each other's poetry, over wine, dip, crackers. A lot of the work read and shared was very good, definitely "publishable" or nearly so. Would it have been as good to me had I run across it in a literary magazine, and didn't know the living, breathing poet who wrote it? If the poet hadn't been there providing context and commentary, his or her reading voice and body and personality and living self providing itself a kind of context and commentary? Who knows? But I felt privileged to be part of a poetic event which may never have further record than this. And it reaffirmed an old realization, of which at times, it seems, I need to be reminded, especially when I haven't participated for a while in a get-together like this: that poetry is so intimate a medium, that it makes such demands on its readers, that it is best appreciated in an intimate context like this, and so resists the kind of commercial dissemination that goes much beyond this kind of personal, one-to-one or small group sharing.

To kick off our reading, I shared with my friends Charles's wonderful post on risk, which inspired a couple of us to share some risky poems, work which ventured into the arbitrary, solipsitic, or socially reprehensible (or at least, heavily confessional). Charles, your liberating influence spreads across the globe!

One good spinoff of the experience for me at least is that I got a critical tuneup for one of my poems, the write~~~dance thing I quoted about a couple of weeks back, and which I'll have to submit soon to the dance company. Here are the first few lines (it runs over a hundred, so this is just a taste):

here
in this circle
of light
i'm alone

teasing the air
torsion    contortion

limbs lunging out
into the blackness

flesh    glowing pink
round
fingers
that flicker

flight out of spotlight
flight   out of sight

i'm dying
but spinning
in circle of
 light

One of the poets there pointed out that several of pronouns (+ one connective) were kind of unneccessary, that the poem would be lighter on its feet without them. And I think he's likely right. Hence:

here
in this circle
     of light
  alone

teasing the air
torsion    contortion

limbs lunging out
    into the blackness

flesh    glowing pink
round
  fingers
  that flicker

     flight out of spotlight
    flight   out of sight

 dying
 spinning
  in circle of
            light

Pronouns become amateur nouns when they take up too much space. N'est pas?