Today's poem

Chimeras by Brian Sneeden (Issue July/August 2024, Poetry Magazine)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/162831/chimeras?query=M

Charming. So charming. So I can’t help saying my impressions. This unrhymed tercet poem is meticulously crafted: metaphor and pronoun. Full of paternal love to poet's daughter. While reading the poem, these spooky pictures come up to my mind: a video clip of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Edgar Allan Poe’s works. The poem is well-structured by enchasing his daughter’s free imaginations. Love and wit with gothic elements (“Chimeras”, “the moon”, “the Wolf Singer”). In the beginning stanza, a reader can be confused with the line “She plants the vertebrae of  her enemies”, however, the third line allows the reader to figure out she is a small kid. The phrase “her enemies” might seem the poor common sense of adults that kills gorgeous imagination of children. The mysterious “the Wolf Singer” might be a coined one made by him or her and the wolf here (maybe, werewolf) is a typical shape-shifter in European folklore, though a fox might correspond to it in Japan. In this sense, the poem succeeds in surprising the reader and attracts the reader into the poem with allurement and effects of poetry itself. Further, the transition of pronoun exhibits a relationship or distance therebetween. At the first step, the poet himself is ‘I’ and his daughter is ‘she’. However, in the third stanza, she is changed to ‘I’, her father is ‘you’, and she is thus a speaker. In the last stanza, the term “we” appears. The reader can feel a strong connection between the poet and his daughter with multiple perspective on their relationship. The distance therebetween expresses his fatherhood love to her. A joy that not only his daughter but also himself is a chimera, father and daughter, both of them are chimeras! Moreover, with the meter pattern in the final stanza, the poem is more powerful. Repetitive usage of the term “seed” has splendid ambiguity.

     Brian Sneeden is a poet and translator who is teaching creative writing at my MMU. I want to have a chance for a workshop with him.