“Gray Isn’t a Black-and-White Proposition: Ivory Black Mixed With Phthalo Green Light (Vert Anglais Clair, Englisches Grün Hell, Verde Cromo Claro) Cut to Varying Values With Titanium White,” oil on watercolor paper, 24×30 in., (JMN 2025).
What the hell is going on in “The Gazing Ball”? I had to lock horns with Mitchell Glazier’s poem (Poetry, May 2025) and break it down robustly in order to reach a fragile accommodation. I’ve come to expect having to do this with much verse filtered through Poetry’s reading committee. My approach is to fall back on the godliness of syntax. If the writer respects language half as much as I do, chaos is dodged. If the writer doesn’t, we never met.
Fortunately, what scans as jabberwocky in “The Gazing Ball” does have structure once you look below the bizarro surfaces and cracked lines.
Consider the first 18 words of the poem:
Queenly swans nudge eternity figs
Yellow rose fire
Lit by a ghost breath
I’ve eaten you someplace before
[…]
Wrap your mind around the base assertion that “swans nudge figs.” An obvious-enough adjective describes the swans: “queenly.” A curious adjective describes the nudged figs: “eternity” A flagrant metaphor placed in apposition to those nudged figs further characterizes them: “yellow rose fire lit by a ghost breath.” (The reader must intuit a full stop here.) Figs whose hue is like the fire of a yellow rose — radiance blasted by a fastuous flower — is rather pretty. Go figure what kind of illumination “a ghost breath” casts upon that fire, but the expression’s metaphysicality gives it a certain staying power. In the next assertion, a speaker apostrophizes (talks to) the swan-nudged eternity figs: “I’ve eaten you someplace before.”
Let me go straight to paraphrase in order to save you and me time. Next, several unlikely subjects conjointly “nip” something and “curtsy” to something else. The subjects (actors, agents) are “venom,” “chops” (lamb? pork?), “novels” and “peacocks.” The venom is that of a “terrapin” (a freshwater turtle); the chops are “heart-shaped”; the novels are “beautiful [and] rare”; and the peacocks are “bedlam,” denoting uproar and confusion. The terrapin venom is making a mess on someone’s clothing, “sopping cream suits.” What these several creatures and objects functioning as subjects of the sentence engage in nipping are “limbs”; indeed, “nip limbs a-rosy” is what they do. Leaving them pink? The thing venom, chops, novels and peacocks curtsy to is “the apricot cross.”
Terrapin venom
Sopping cream suits
Heart-shaped chops
Beautiful, rare novels
Bedlam peacocks
Nip limbs a-rosy
Curtsy
The apricot cross
[…]
There’s more than half the poem yet to parse and construe. You take it from here (the link’s up top). Dozens of other new poems await my grappling and I’m out of time for this one. I’ll only remark that the “The Gazing Ball”’s last line is stated so baldly, in contradistinction to what precedes, that it fluoresces:
The poets who offed themselves
Have formed a small country
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Striking portrait, I can tell it was approached differently.
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Thank you for giving a look, OA. Your eye is appreciated.
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Agreed. Very striking. Impressive.
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Thank you, Josie.
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The Posing Orb
Elegant pigeons cough up moons
Plum-toast lacquer
Licked spinach
Of abandoned buffet
Chinchilla syrup
Chafing linen jodhpurs
Star-shaped bacon
Critically-acclaimed pamphlets
Hysteria flamingos
Peck at my MFA
Curtsy
The kumquat veil
Regret is a velvet
Hamster in a cul-de-sac
Of interns
Counting sparrows for credit
Nearby, the dog-walker limps
A sterling power drill
Glazing the gluten-free
Swine flan
Groom-shaped crudités
Quiver near the razor
Tiny artisanal
Thumb, vase
The tureen of fonts
Now the sorrel
I’m a bishop
Wrapped in faux-purple
Inflated glassware
Spangles the ethical gravel
Twin yarrow sonnets clang
In the trauma drawer
O gatekeeper may I submit?
O mate, pack it in right now.
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Whoa! Richly ripped, I must say! 🙂
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Da-Daist Tristan Tzara once “created” a “poem” public performance by pulling words out of a hat. If you put in some great random words that have no obvious relationship to each other we can all write this stuff. What I did was to go through a whole bunch of published poems and pick out a word from the fifth line of each. Add a few basic linking pronouns etc. give it a twirl et voila! Genuine gobbledegook.
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Ha-ha! Sounds like an AI intervention. Your methodology is sound. Dunno how art survived Duchamp’s urinal or poetry Dada. Wonder if it will survive Sam Altman? (Speaking of good names!)
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Interesante análisis.
Yo también puedo hacer verdaderos desastres con un “poema” con una metáfora, con un adjetivo.
No soy poeta, juego con el lenguaje como una neófita que intenta descubrir algo de belleza en ese juego. Nada más.
No obstante insisto en la importancia de tu análisis.
Un saludo y feliz finde, amigo.
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Your remark touches me deeply, confirming what I already suspected, that the tone of my “analysis” (you’re generous to call it that) was misleading, even harsh. I didn’t do justice to my subject, and I want to enlarge on the matter (briefly always!) in another post. Your own poetry excites me into translating it, which is my favorite form of engagement. Thank you for this nuanced and helpful comment. Feliz finde a ti, amiga.
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