The Chop Shop

echolalia: 1.Psychiatry. The immediate and involuntary repetition of words or phrases just spoken by others, often a symptom of autism or some types of schizophrenia.
2.An infant's repetition of the sounds made by others, a normal occurrence in childhood development.

Either way, Amber, this is brilliant. You took an objective correlative from The Great Gatsby, turned "The Sound" , alluding to the Jazz Age, or sounds from the '20's, to represent loneliness, and/or took the image of alcohol to become the objective correlative of isolation, and structured it into a sonnet's world. Wow.

There are so many dazzling images here that I cannot name them all. "Soundless bays" just seems to work for me; and I did have a hard time with some of your awkward line breaks, but they all seem to fit to me. Line 3, "Motor", fits the rhyme scheme; Line 10's "moment-ary" threw me off for a while, but I like the feeling of "antici-

-pation" it gives us, as if the moment has just gone. Also the "echolalia" is probably my favorite, especially since the repetition of sounds, either from a baby or from someone going crazy, gives us so much to work with.

The implied metaphor of Jazz in "tin-dripping silver scales" is lovely.

I absolutely love the "foaming cataract layer" in line 4, and all the water imagery reminds me of Gatsby's final resting place, and the ending of the movie "Sunset Blvd".

I only have one complaint: the directness of certain images, such as the "grows into significance" in part 2 lines 6-7, which seems already encoded into your piece. Also, the "indifferent person" seems contrived to me in part 1, line 14. Finally, the last line in the poem, "endowed with uncertainty", irks me with its alliterative feel (down with alliteration!) and obviousness. Just little, bitchy things from me.

Aside from that, I really, truly wish I could have taken the Hemingway/Fitzgerald class, now after I have read this. It seems to have taken a profound effect on you, Amber, and Amanda as well. Welcome back.

the thing about this title, other than it awesomeness, is that it puts me in mind of how the poem sounds, when i read it. the way my mouth moves to form the syllables. oh yeah....

thats nice.i like that it is broken into parts. i can chew part of it, enjoy it and enven reread before moving on. i like how it breaks it up for savoring. the mixing and blending of senses is good too. we are given the title, then we dive into water that we are told it is sunlit, so we can imagine it is warm, and probably dusk. (man i want to go swimming)

well if everything starts getting this awesome we are all in trouble.

Garden's echo-
lalia swoons

man that is a good line break.

complaints. lots of hyphenated emnjambment. seems gimicky when done so much. there are a few that are top notch, a few that are unnecessary.

all in all. not bad!

l. 7-8 - excellent! personification and metonymy rolled into one!

I think I see some problems with tense. You start with "Dive" in a kind of imperative present and then some past tense sneaks in l. 5-6. Or does it? I can't really tell what it is, maybe just word choice, but there is something a little off in the rhythm there. And when you get to "Orchestra begins again," you have a fragment that feels, um, uh. . . fragmented.

Part 2 is absolutely wonderful in its imagery. The hyphenated line breaks work really well here (unlike the ones in part 1, they seem a little arbitrary). Part 2 is so great, I wonder if part 1 is just a warm up. At the end the word choice is perfect, hence The Chop Shop's new tag line.