Matt Posner's Blog: You've Been Schooled - Posts Tagged "kristen-stewart"

I am not going to make fun of Kristen Stewart. I understand literary aspirations very well. But let me try to explain what is right and wrong in her poem.

Kristen Stewart does have verbal talent, but she just hasn't refined her craft. This work reminds me of the overly serious and ultimately failed poetry in an undergraduate workshop. Like many novice poets, she feels that she needs to be ambiguous or unclear in order to be taken seriously, which is why she has created unclear expressions like "digital moonlight" and "abrasive organ pumps" and "pining erosion." I would advise her to look at the work of poets like Frost, who seem to be speaking clearly but sometimes mean the opposite of what they are saying. For example, "Good fences make good neighbors" is quoted as if Frost meant it, when arguably he meant the opposite ("people shouldn't erect emotional or social fences as much as they do"). Clarity of language, with subtlety of implication, will work much better for her.

I would also advise her not to create new words ("kismetly" is no good because you can only add -ly to an adjective, and kismet is a noun) and to avoid expressions that are unintentionally funny ("freedom pole" reads as a clumsy avoidance of directly saying "penis"). While I love alliteration, if it doesn't sound good in your mind's ear ("stare down sun snuck") then it should not exist. Another of her alliterations, "devil's not done digging" does sound good, although its meaning is profoundly unclear in context.


I can make an educated guess at what she means in certain places. In the last stanza, while her refusal to be grammatical is sadly obscurantist, I can form the interpretation that she is so emotionally invested in another person that she stares at the person ("my eyes") watching for any small gesture ("I'm drunk on your morsels") and feeling intoxicated by what little she can get. A "twitch hand drum salute" is kind of a morsel. As a person with the habit of drumming or tapping to deal with stress or boredom, I can actually recognize this as a somewhat more coherent element.

My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole

By Kristen Stewart

"I reared digital moonlight/
You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black/
Kismetly … ubiquitously crest fallen/
Thrown down to strafe your foothills/
…I’ll suck the bones pretty.

Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps/
Spray painted everything known to man/
Stream rushed through and all out into/
Something Whilst the crackling stare down sun snuck/
Through our windows boarded up/
He hit your flint face and it sparked.

And I bellowed and you parked/
We reached Marfa/
One honest day up on this freedom pole/
Devils not done digging/
He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle/
And this pining erosion is getting dust in/

My eyes/
And I’m drunk on your morsels/
And so I look down the line/
Your every twitch hand drum salute/
Salutes mine."