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• 1 Don as "Tauno" // Apr 23, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  On: Doctor Charles Frederickson’s Poem: “Spin Cycle.”

  In the first four lines of the poem, the reader becomes aware that the surface of our world is covered predominately by water or oceans but next by land.

  In the way humans have “spit and polish”ed our Industrialization, we have stripped the veneer or the skin off of the natural grain, off of the natural earth.

  The skinless earth becomes the subject for the infections of reprisal.

  In the second stanza, the broadest possibility presents itself in the first line: “…Spitfire core molten anima meltdown….” repeating the “spit” of the first four lines but qualifying the dirtiest product of the human body, spit, with a destructive quality of intense heat, fire.

  But this abstract line is concreted by the vision of a Breakfast, really gone astray as if hungry times might be a coming.

  The third four lines diagnosis the outcomes of the reprisal. But these diagnoses are coached in abstracts–no way near as explicit as that Breakfast in the preceding stanza.

  In the fourth stanza the poet presents the destruction of vineyards in which “…Soothing wrinkles, soothing battle scars…” the ambiguity of which suggests on one hand elders giving “caras” [care and concern] to the battle weary, but also suggests merely one form of wear-and-tear showing up as another sign of wear-and-tear.

  The vineyard also evokes the Biblical phrase, “Our vines have tender grapes…” This phrase dies as do the grape and the vine in the poem.

  In the fifth stanza, the reprisal is named: “…Climate change….” And yet the tense of its appearance is the continuing present of the implied verb “to be” continued by a gerund: “…Climate change shattering glass greenhouses…”

  The whole stanza replaces the popular, inaccurate phrase “green house effect” with the more truthfully descriptive ” …Climate Change,” and then lists imaged instance upon imaged instance of the changes.

  In the sixth four-line cluster, the poem begins to come to an end with a signature back to the poem’s first lines with the “skin-veneer” referent in: “…Nothing remains behind the thin skinned masque…”

  But the third line lights the fuse of the poem’s end with the at-least doubled meaning application in the phrase: “…Bipolar pointless compass run amok….” with it’s evocation of “Bipolar” psychosis as in “Mania to Depression” and it’s more obvious meaning of the North/South Poles with their magnetic truth for all compasses?

  The “stinger” line: “…Desperate humanimal instinct leaking out…” explodes with insight. The fusion of “human” with “animal” into “humanimal” with its “…instinct leaking out….” fires insight shrapnel into the reader’s imagination: a mask of a face bleeding in sympathy with the rest of the natural world from the reprisal of climate change.

  The Humor of the title of the poem can now be appreciated: Spin Cycle of the world as its revolves from day into night, from one position in its orbit around the Sun to the next with the lowly image of someone cleaning ones laundry in either a washing machine or in, what irony, a spin drier.

  The finality of the message of “Spin Cycle” is inevitable self-destruction? I, for one, fear so.

  I was especially pleased by the concrete images in the Breakfast gone astray stanza and hoped that more of this concrete imagery would have been used in conjunction with the more abstract words.

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