And so begins, begins our odyssey:

Into the Forest

Deep in the dark forest
the fearsome tiger lurks.

Not some caged cat in a zoo,
seen napping by children
snacking in strollers,
but the authentic beast
with every lethal trick
that trickled down the chain
of terror at his command.

If I enter this wood,
& walk its secret ways,
will I come out unchanged?

Everywhere Uncertainty

I'm not 100% sure of the best way to do this, but I think comments are the way to go when I expand on a particular poem. This way each poem can have its own posting and discussion.

Another uncertainty is how much I should discuss each poem. I am not a fan of explaining poems, since the beautiful thing about them is how they interact with us subjectively. But I think I will at least throw light on what I was thinking, since this is an exercise in poetry writing and getting at how poems "come to me" is partly the point.

So, in that light, I begin.


Snip, Snip, Sew, Sew

One slight alteration I am considering since posting the original is:

Not some caged cat in a zoo,
seen napping by children
(snacking in strollers),
but the authentic beast

I feel the clause after children needs something to separate it from the main narrative. But I tend to over punctuate, so I hesitate.


The Misfit

I had trouble cutting the following line out of the poem following "the authentic beast":

the past coursing his veins

or what I originally wrote:

the past flows through his veins

I could not get it to play nice with the stanza's last line. But I also thought that perhaps the "trickled down the chain" bit conveyed a sense of past. I really wanted to contrast a human present with the savage past embodied in the tiger's terror.


Blake, Blake Everywhere

William Blake's The Tyger is loudly echoed in this poem.



I only realized late in the poem how closely they run. Both poems address the terror of the tiger, and peek at its origin. Is it too much like it? Or does the reference enrich my own? (I am definitely not equating the two in quality!!!) I don't know. You tell me.

My original idea was to compare the stark clean lines of a forest in winter to the teeming vegetation of summer. Immediately before the poem above I'd written:

Afraid the stark winter
lines will reveal monsters
I wish to keep hidden.

This was the tiger, lurking in the tangle of summer, revealed by frozen introspection. I still want the poem to reflect the idea that the tiger is withing me. Did it?