levelheaded: (soured)

The first half of the poem builds toward a particular, creepy atmosphere. There’s mention of a “massacre,” “flesh that hives,” “roaches” pulled from a mouth. It’s all a bit like the tape in The Ring that’s supposed to kill you if you watch it. It’s clear something awful is going on, but it’s not clear what it is.

Part of these atmospherics comes from the poem’s stylized punctuation (or lack of). Our reading is directed by the spacing between words. Sometimes the spaces make clear we should pause. Sometimes two words are pushed together – “intowers,” “insideme,” “intothere,” “roundgloss” – into jarring portmanteaux. This technique manipulates how we pace our reading. Take the first couple lines: “cold growth appears   centers   rips / through time.”  It’s clear that if we pause after the first phrase – “cold growth appears” – we can treat “centers” and “rips” as verbs that apply to the “growth.”

The “growth” in this first line is important. It acknowledges an origin, and it seems coupled with the “warm pink life” we see later. The second half of the poem, after the “warm pink life,” eschews some of the creepier images for repetitions of  “water” and “weight” and “mouth.” But if the poem gets less sinister, it also gets more mysterious. It’s tough to say how “colors collide inthere   some what want / some hard handle   mouth mouth mouth” should direct us. These lines are a further dissolution of the speaker’s already fragmented emotional state. But some of the language – “growth,” “hot hot noises,” “warm pink life,” “insideme,” “you” – points to sex and its effect, pregnancy.

The poem doesn’t allow for a complete point A to point B understanding. It is built around something specific, but that something is kept shrouded. That said, the title is one of the more instructive parts of the poem. First, the word “soured” implies a time when things were not sour. This tells us the speaker’s attitudes are dynamic, that at some point somewhere, things may have gone from good to bad. Second, there are the conspicuous parentheses. On one hand, they draw attention to the title. On another, they establish the souring as a grammatical parenthetical –as if the whole poem and its souring are supplemental to another more complete idea of things.

– The Editors