This poem bristles with a kind of simple, almost childish, logic. It's like an exercise in the the Hedgehog vs. the Fox principle -- the poem does one thing, it expresses one idea, simply, directly and sharply like the quill of a hedgehog. Well done!
I debated posting this one. Fretted over it. Asked myself if it did enough. It's certainly minimalist. What is poetry if not minimalism? Thank you for appreciating it. And yet I felt it achieved something poetic in the end. I'm a big fan of the deceptively simple. The prosaic with a twist. To me the twist is in the last word 'it'. When I arrived at that word I thought to myself, yes, it is now a poem. And that's because the 'it' opens the door to all kinds of questions about the entire poem. It seems to be about one thing ie. the definition of 'work' and then the last word puts that into question. What is ruined by money? The poem itself, because it now had a monetary 'purpose'? The experience of the poet writing it? The reader? And what does that tell us about the nature of art? The meaning of work and how we live our lives? As the song goes 'money changes everything'. Thanks again for being a sensitive thoughtful reader. Cheque is in the mail. LOL
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This poem bristles with a kind of simple, almost childish, logic. It's like an exercise in the the Hedgehog vs. the Fox principle -- the poem does one thing, it expresses one idea, simply, directly and sharply like the quill of a hedgehog. Well done!
I debated posting this one. Fretted over it. Asked myself if it did enough. It's certainly minimalist. What is poetry if not minimalism? Thank you for appreciating it. And yet I felt it achieved something poetic in the end. I'm a big fan of the deceptively simple. The prosaic with a twist. To me the twist is in the last word 'it'. When I arrived at that word I thought to myself, yes, it is now a poem. And that's because the 'it' opens the door to all kinds of questions about the entire poem. It seems to be about one thing ie. the definition of 'work' and then the last word puts that into question. What is ruined by money? The poem itself, because it now had a monetary 'purpose'? The experience of the poet writing it? The reader? And what does that tell us about the nature of art? The meaning of work and how we live our lives? As the song goes 'money changes everything'. Thanks again for being a sensitive thoughtful reader. Cheque is in the mail. LOL
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