Fluorescence

Oh my gosh was Fluorescence difficult to keep my attention on. Many of the poems use extremely repetitive language which is both hard to keep straight and rather boring. On page 11 Dick writes, “I want to begin at the beginning the beginning of begin and just begin…” By the end of that short sentence my mind was screaming “JUST GET ON WITH IT!”. On the next page Dick uses another technique that quickly looses my attention. Her sentences seem incomplete (and by traditional grammar rules, they are). She ends one sentence with a blank line. Another ends with the word ‘in” without any punctuation. These are a couple reasons, and examples, of why I found Fluorescence very difficult to read.

Next I would like to point out the title itself. Fluorescence as a word has a few definitions. It can mean the emission of radiation, especially of visible light, by a substance during exposure to external radiation, as light or x-rays, or the property possessed by a substance capable of such emission or the radiation so produced (thank you Dictionary.com). This ends up being consistent with many of the titles of the pieces inside. A couple of poem titles are Anatomy, Ellipses, and Rain. At least to me, these are all related. Dick doesn’t title the book Fluorescence and then title her poems, Zombie, Suicide, and so on. They’re mostly organic in nature.

Page 40 drove me nuts. To be exact, page 41 drove me nuts despite it not being numbered. I did not understand why there was a blank page in the middle of the book with a random two tone bar at the top. To me, I saw no relation to the section (or poem) titled Four. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this poem also does not have a solid ending like the poem I mentioned in my first paragraph.