Notes on “Sepia Life” by Ken Holland
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By Will Sheets
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New York City is not just the setting of Ken Holland’s "Sepia Life," but the lifeblood of it, an animating force that comes alive through the poem’s carefully constructed allusions. The city of "Sepia Life" is a two-fold entity, at once a utopian coalescence of illustrious literary minds and a wasteland of hard angles, cold metal, “streetlights eating / their own illumination.” Anyone who has spent time in NYC knows these two contrasting sides of the city exist simultaneously. The genius of Holland’s piece stems from a true understanding of this dichotomy, as the poem doesn’t ask the reader to favor one side of the city above the other. Instead, by linking these two faces of NYC through the city’s geography, Holland presents his readers with a complex metropolitan image of a unique urban landscape, one that can be home to “Melville, Hemingway, Kerouac,” and the unnamed speaker of Holland's poem, a poem that, much like the city it features, is brimming with creativity and character, pain and compassion, and, drifting “through brick / and glass” and between every stanza, beautiful music.
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Notes on “Sepia Life” by Ken Holland
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Our team found much to admire in this well-handled poem, and we love New York scenes. We appreciated the organic, unforced refrain of references and allusions. Lines like "his face the color / of gothic towers," and the musicality and movement of the last five lines, are especially beautiful. The poem's transitions between stanzas are smooth, giving everything its proper place. The figures of famous literary figures appear like spirits around the speaker, "caught upon time." Parts of the poem make me think to be more aware of the chokehold that hyperindividualism has on American culture, our "nearest shelters / shut for the night"; "the streetlights eating / their own illumination." However unique a figure may be, they can still become lost within the iconic populousness of NYC — its chaotic, historical, loud, and magical beauty, and its inherent challenges.
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