VEGANGELICA

Hi, Schizotypic,
After reading your community center thread posts about the songwriting section, I looked up your poetry posts and would like to comment on "His Terminal Monomania." First, however, I noticed you appear to have several separate threads rather than one main poetry collection in the Songwriting section. If you ask a moderator to merge them then s/he will probably do so. All your poetry posts would then be in one section, which would make it easier to analyze them as a whole.

I read all the posts about "His Terminal Monomania" to understand your goals and the reactions people have had. I feel the topic of the poem (tracing the person's desire for lack of feeling, leading to drug use, leading to the decision to commit suicide) is strong and is presented in an original way, because it looks at a variety of factors leading up to this decision.

You wrote that you are interested in making the poem's meaning clearer, and several people commented on ways you might do this. I have the following suggestions:

There were two words I didn't understand at first (and had to look up on Wikipedia): "Monomania" (obsession with a single thought or emotional) and "Felo de se" (suicide). I feel "monomania" describes the feelings of the person in the poem very well, and the poem serves as a definition for monomania. However, my preference is for the poem to describe taking one's life more directly, without using "Felo de se," because for me Latin creates an unnecessary barrier to understanding the poem.

You also used the French word "milieu" to refer to the person's social/cultural environment. That's a lot of different languages (English, French, and Latin) in two short lines...not that this is wrong, but the words themselves start to distract from the poem's meaning, I feel.

One other comment about "milieu": "milieu" is a very soft-sounding word, as is "Felo de se"--they seem very removed from the harshness of suicide. This may actually help the poem create a sense of distance from reality. I don't know if this was intentional, but as I read the poem I was aware that the feeling of the poem might be very different if you had used more straight-forward language.

When I read "A content comatose" I first read "content" as if you were saying "the content of a book"...so I got momentarily confused by the fact that "content" has two meanings: feeling contentment (which is what you mean) vs. the contents of something. Perhaps you could use, "A comatose contentment" instead of "a content comatose" because "contentment" has just one meaning?

When you wrote, "Searching for cause," I would recommend, "Searching for the cause" or "Searching for a cause," to make sure that the word "cause" relates strongly to his search for the cause of his desire for contentment through a comatose existence. Currently, "Searching for cause" could be interpreted as searching for the cause of the universe/existence or some other event.

You asked about the appropriate grammar for
Since "his closer allies" and "his beautiful value" are plural, they should be matched with a plural verb (fade), as in "they fade and atrophy" rather than "they fades and atrophies":

Perhaps "his beautiful inner value" might clarify that you are talking about his sense of self-worth?

I like the following stanza very much because it is conceptually interesting: you almost turn abstract concepts (desire and decay) into physical entities. They ("desire" and "decay") remind me of vultures picking at his living corpse, copulating in the process to make more vultures, and refusing to stop eating him.

I feel that in your final stanza it would be good to consider (as an earlier posting person said) the tense of the verbs you are using throughout the poem.

Here you use "had lost," which is the past perfect tense, while earlier in the poem you use present simple and present progressive (I had to look up "English Verb Tenses" online to remind myself what those all are). I feel that the shifting verb tense can be an effective tool to get the reader to shift the frame of reference within time, but you may wish to make sure the shifting is what you intend. For example, if you write "the world has lost / His carnal remains," then the impact (to me) seems stronger because "has lost" is in present time, whereas "had lost" is farther removed in the past.

One final comment (I can't remember if someone else commented on this): when he dies the world actually is *left* with his carnal remains (the body, etc., stay firmly on earth). Gone or lost is his sentience. Would you perhaps consider writing:

...or you could say "The world retains," if you wished to go the rhyming route...which is probably out of character with the rest of the poem!


I hope this helps!

--Erica