Original poem reprinted online here: "No-Motion Replay" by Dobby Gibson
Originally read: January 19, 2013
More information about the Poet: Dobby Gibson
Past me wrote this at the first stanza, "seems like a better end stanza." However, the poem is cyclical in it's imagery. And I think that I knew why I wrote that about the first stanza. I felt this line, "it's no accident if it has a cause" is such a great strong line. However, the line is for the first stanza is to critique or amend the thoughts and connotations of the last stanza.
But then in the second stanza shifts dramatically. The speaker addresses a "you" the images changes from something nature like to a more religious imagery intertwined with stacking metaphors of prison and money.
and the last three lines pose a rhetorical question:
Between never and soon
you found a place you can trust,
sacrificing something, but what?
So at this point I feel the "you" is directed to the speaker since the incidents and thoughts are too specific but strangely broad because the ideas are defined through a back and forth between a strong image versus a strong comparison. Yet, at this point of the poem, the poem brings in two big ideas to questions -- what is perceived as chaos might have a cause and therefore not an accident. and where and what does one sacrifice to find a place one can trust in a shifting chaos.
Those are the questions in the poem then the bottom half of the poem "answers" the rhetorical question posed in regular form(ab, ab), but the images and the rhetoric in the poem. In the third stanza the focus is in the first line, "Once there were pleasure you felt / you were pointed toward" -- ("pleasure" something positive if one can define an accident [serendipity] and see a cause in it).
Then the last lines focus on age but "answers" the second question, "your memory undependable but long enough / to send you home still growing older, still dry" Indeed, the "safe place" is in the mind but it's also a sacrifice at the same time -- the safety of the mind in a chaotic world leads one to be "dry" or rather too safe. It's a "No-Motion Replay" physically to live in the mind where "pleasure" and "purpose" can be continued to be remembered; but in physically the dreamer is "dry" in the negative connotation -- unfruitful but safe in the stagnation.
Originally read: January 19, 2013
More information about the Poet: Dobby Gibson
But then in the second stanza shifts dramatically. The speaker addresses a "you" the images changes from something nature like to a more religious imagery intertwined with stacking metaphors of prison and money.
and the last three lines pose a rhetorical question:
Between never and soon
you found a place you can trust,
sacrificing something, but what?
So at this point I feel the "you" is directed to the speaker since the incidents and thoughts are too specific but strangely broad because the ideas are defined through a back and forth between a strong image versus a strong comparison. Yet, at this point of the poem, the poem brings in two big ideas to questions -- what is perceived as chaos might have a cause and therefore not an accident. and where and what does one sacrifice to find a place one can trust in a shifting chaos.
Those are the questions in the poem then the bottom half of the poem "answers" the rhetorical question posed in regular form(ab, ab), but the images and the rhetoric in the poem. In the third stanza the focus is in the first line, "Once there were pleasure you felt / you were pointed toward" -- ("pleasure" something positive if one can define an accident [serendipity] and see a cause in it).
Then the last lines focus on age but "answers" the second question, "your memory undependable but long enough / to send you home still growing older, still dry" Indeed, the "safe place" is in the mind but it's also a sacrifice at the same time -- the safety of the mind in a chaotic world leads one to be "dry" or rather too safe. It's a "No-Motion Replay" physically to live in the mind where "pleasure" and "purpose" can be continued to be remembered; but in physically the dreamer is "dry" in the negative connotation -- unfruitful but safe in the stagnation.
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