Poetry Forum

Can there be more waste
than a bottle
dreg-drained
next to
a glass-half-empty
and floating in it
a fly
drowned
without a wave

I like the notion of those last three lines.

The poem is a question. Should there be a question mark?

If you want to consider a poem without a question:

A half-empty glass:
a fly
drowns
without a wave.

I like to see a poem with an insect.

enjoyed

mac

Nice. But if the glass were half full wouldn't that emphasise the wastefulness even more?

Hi Disraeli

enjoyable. I missed the "of a". And might collapse the last three lines into one?

Seth

To be picky, Mr D, and in the spirit of the poem -

Who is Stevie?

How do you know the fly didn't drink itself to death?

Is it derived from "Not Waving but Drowning"?
I like the terseness of the poem.

penguin and Geoff, your questions made me laugh.

Lake

Oddly like the red wheelbarrow poem, I think. Intentionally?

Cheers

David

Well spotted, David. Yes the challenge was to write an imagist poem. So I started from 'The Red Wheelbarrow"

Lake, yes there's a nod to "Waving not drowning" by Stevie Smith. Hence the clue in the title.

Seth, thought of putting whiskey bottle or amber liquid but decided in the end to make the reader work.

Finally the fly could have drunk itself to death. Could change drowned to dead I suppose.

Penguin - didn't use glass half full because glass-half-empty is an indicator of pessimism, depression.

Mac - not sure about the question mark since there's no other punctuation. I wouldn't put a full stop for instance if wasn't a question. Interesting point.

Thanks for reading.

To get that really imagist pared-down feel, I would delete lines 4 and 6... I think both those juxtapositions are perfectly implicit in the set-up.

If you start with "Can" then you do really need a "?" at the end, unless you were completely eschewing punctuation, in which case lose even the capital "C"?

Ian

Thanks for the tips Ian.