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10/10/2019 9:39:50 AM beto riginale Posts: 5	Comments welcome Beto howl of despair iron gate swinging shut slowly ’til but a crevice remains. life obscured mourning that unlived. sorrow unheard forgiveness unspoken darkness enshrouding death without dying howl unvoiced alone.
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10/11/2019 5:51:12 PM Jack Webster Posts: 255	I think the strongest ideas are ‘forgiveness unspoken’ and ‘death without dying’ I think using complete phrases/ sentences would make it stronger. i would invest more time in what you’re wanting to say. Experiment with coming at it from different angles. Maybe play with the idea of sound and silence; you use the word howl which is sound, but you also say things are unheard or unspoken, which is silence. Is the howl begging for a sound to answer it? Is silence just a howling that has lost its voice? How is silence like death, but not like death? Is silence a form of death? Is howling a form of being alive, trying to stay alive, trying to battle against the silence? Does howling win the battle? Is howling heroic even if it goes silent in the end - if it goes silent is it the silence of a literal death, or a temporary death? Does a howl that grows horse and goes silent one day regain its strength and howl again? Is a howl satisfied by an echo, or must it be an original sound? Will any sound satisfy it, or only the sound of forgiveness? Can forgiveness be given through silence or can it only be given with sound? If the howling is answered with forgiveness, will it go silent and will that silence be life instead of death? Can silence be both life and death? Are all silences the same? Good luck!
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10/12/2019 10:41:08 AM beto riginale Posts: 5	Thank you Jack for your comments. To paraphrase Dirty Harry's phrase, you made my day. This poem is perhaps my most difficult to understand, but the questions you raise are precisely my intent. To raise questions in the reader's mind. The style is my attempt at absolute minimalism. So allow me to explain it a little. The first part describes my experience of falling into absolute despair, despondency, the depths of despair of life. The second part is (a list of) the resulting feelings of one in that state. There is a hint of what is to come in the last line of the first part, mourning that unlived. The poem was inspired by the final scene of Godfather III where Michael Corleone is sitting in a chair, alone in a walled courtyard, blind and weak and then dies.The feeling that I had when viewing that scene was that he mourned all that he had tried to do in his lifetime, but had not succeeded in doing. In the poem, I present despair as regret for all the errors made in one's life, the sorrow not heard by others for having made those errors, the offer of forgiveness not offered others for their errors, the darkness surrounding one near death, how that all feels like death without being dead, and the loneliness that results from those errors. The howl unvoiced is the inability to voice those things. Beto
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10/12/2019 3:56:01 PM Jack Webster Posts: 255	The questions posed in my response were not questions raised by the poem. I was presenting them rhetorically to give the author possible directions to explore. The poem reads as a pre-write. It is not effective on its own.
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