Wehr lists anatomical English equivalents for Arabic noun ṣadr, plural ṣudūr, as: chest, bust, breast, bosom. (Heart is an outlier, clearly metaphorical.) At a tender age I heard my grandmother refer to ladies’ “bosoms.” Context nudged me to associate “bosom” with “chest.” In time I internalized bosoms as equivalent to “breasts.” (“Bust” had to wait til college.) There are male corollaries. We don’t think of ourselves as sporting breasts or bosoms, yet when a man gets something off his chest, he also unburdens his breast, unbosoms himself,* and spills his heart. Here goes:

I tend to enthuse (perhaps too readily) over verse in which I divine the rudiments of cohesion without speculative leaps. It’s the reflexive act of intuiting discernible relationships obtaining among the nouns, verbs and particles of communicative discourse that draws me in. Nothing need “make sense” in any familiar way — poetry cohabits with strategic ambiguity. I don’t clamor for facile accommodation. Be novel! Be spicy! Be intricate! Be arbitrary? The words must somehow cohere. 

A percentage of contemporary verse comes across, for me, as stunted by opacity. A poem’s first impression is a singular gateway for engagement. Make it count, Poet. I know a poem worth its salt benefits from more than one reading. Let it be motivated, not desperate.

The Poet may fall back on loftiness: Frankly, JMN, I don’t give a damn what you “divine” in my writings. I’m an artist. I write and publish poems in order to express myself, not titillate you. 

It’s a viewpoint, and I respect it. You can see the challenge it affords the uncompromising reader.

*Note: I needed the Oxford comma.

(c) JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved