Something that immediately struck me as daunting with “Afternoon” was the size and scope of the piece. My first trial run began with a browsing of the instructions and a headlong dive into a word maze that only grew lengthier and lengthier. Overtime I decided to focus on a few key words in every segment to see if I could find any correlations. The word and its variants I chose was “she.”
What I found were pages of developing love, deep love and lost love. I noticed that with many pages, similar words such as “she,” “her,” “woman,” waitress” or even specifc female names would still lead to the same page thereafter. Oftentimes I would stumble onto poems, two of which I jotted down for memory were “Pieces” by Robert Creeley and “The Ivy Crown” by William Carlos Williams. As one can guess from the titles alone, the first poem appeared after I followed a long train of lost love memories, and the second appeared while the author seemed in the admist of deep, abiding love.
Which, strangely enough, is why “Ivy Crown” struck me as so odd. It mocked romance and likened love to “business.” The poem is stated as follows:
Romance has no part in it
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills
we transform
to live together
(There was additional formatting to this piece in the form of extra spaces, the visual result was cascanding text that skewed to the right. Unfortunately, I can’t mimic the formatting in the same fashion here.)
Overall, this poem still refers to the quinessential “happy ending” that love is often fictionalized to lead, but not without a great deal of bargaining. What I found in the author, or narrator, of this piece was a gravely, jaded outlook on love and life, and perhaps this poem was a foreshadowing of what was to come, or a hint that the author’s deep love was not as deep and abiding as originally thought. Love is blind.
After following a stream of lost love memories, the other poem I came across is as follows, titled “Pieces”:
or happening
is an event only
for the observer?
No one
there. Everyone
here.
Here is all there is
but there seems so
insistently across the way
(Similar formatting was also presented in this poem as was in the previous.)
This poem is far more abstract than its counterpart. The beginning itself seems to be a fragment that originally began with an internal thought. In addition, the line breaks seem to hint at a hesitancy of thought, or perhaps emotional breaks in between. Overall, this strange, disjointed poem can be likened to the loss and disconnection someone can feel after a close relationship is severed and gone – something that the author at many times seems to feel.
It should be noted that, as dedicated as my search was through the paths of “she” and all its counterparts, the information was rarely presented in a chronological fashion. Many times I would stumble on pieces where the author was reminiscing about lost love long before I would later uncover a piece about being in love. Truthfully, I found “Pieces” first, long before I realized another poem existed in the text. I find myself currently wondering if I could have found more, since the possibilities in “Afternoon” seemed endless. All this can be attributed to the medium itself, and its multilinear presentation so dependent on its reader’s choice, and what words strike a reader’s fancy.
Altogether, this was a fun exploration, despite the confusion it sometimes created. But as I have discovered in this class while exploring textual mediums, it is best to continue forgaging through the disjointed pieces, so eventually you can grasp the overall design of its kaleidoscope.