[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

I chose the verb tenses to convey that the poem occurs at the moment the party ends. Using Alexa’s suggestion, “My birthday celebration’s come again” implies “and here it is.”

To me, “My birthday celebration came again” sounds more like something you’d say the next day than while you’re still at the party. So we hear the present perfect a little differently. That’s interesting.

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

… the two biggest challenges in this poem. The first is to avoid sounding whiny …

For me, you defused the potential “whininess” by accusing yourself up-front of “self-pity.” But that’s also what Alexandra and many of us here call “telly,” so you’re in a double bind.

Roger has a point about “fading spirits.” I understood that your good spirits were fading and you were mentally withdrawing from your guests, but the condensation is a little murky.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Beautifully rendered, Glenn. Yes, you'll be at home here.
Though the tone is sombre there is no self-pity, no wallowing. Just tenderness. I'd say it's sobering but there is a glow to it that backlights the poem to be Yeats-like in its brooding.

The few edits you've made have fine-tuned what was already in tune. Great work doing that! The final six lines bring a fresh sheen to an old trope. It's like you've taken an old piece of furniture and made it look new again.

It's great to have you here. There's an adventure to be had here that is made better by new voices speaking.

.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Glenn,

Welcome to the Sphere and all that!

I think the last four lines of this sonnet are quite good and that the final sentence, particularly, has a genuine blunt poignancy. But I do feel that everything leading up to it, while competently rhymed and metred, falls a bit flat. It fills a lot of space with things that are quite general and prosaic. The first six lines are a very generic description of a party and the following four seems to me a list of undefined mopey clichés.

I wonder if you could come at this in more specific terms. The scene setting of "we're at the end of a birthday party" could be sketched in two lines, leaving you room to perhaps focus on a specific encounter or conversation with a friend at the party, which would give your great ending more weight. In terms of craft, you clearly know what goes where when it comes to the mechanics of metred verse, but in terms of content and depth this feels like a first draft. To me at least.

[Tony Barnstone]

Hello Glenn, like the others I enjoyed the poem, and I’m impressed by the metrical elegance of it. I don’t have much to worry about with the meter, so my comments will be more about its effect of this as a poem. You make a persuasive, interesting argument with a terrific end. However, I often wish the language had more surprise to it.

For Example, in “ Self-pity binds my heart and stills my tongue” I would be more interested if the verbs were more surprising. Reversing them? Stills my heart and binds my tongue? Or perhaps those are also often used?

The adjective noun combination of “bitter taste” has the same issue for me.

Regrets and unsaid words catch in my throat… here I feel that ~regrets and the unsaid words do the same work. Why not drop the regrets and use the extra foot to turn the unsaid words into a more visceral metaphor? Unsaid words are [….] caught in my throat.

In general, I would like the specifics to be more specific, less general: Rituals, cake, gifts, champagne, table, restaurant, and so on. I would like to see such moments written more from inside the body than inside the conceptualizing mind.

To Go back to the moment I discussed before, here:

Self-pity binds my heart and stills my tongue.
Regrets and unsaid words catch in my throat.

…I would rather you don’t name the abstract emotions of self pity or regret and instead just describe the heart, tongue, and throat in crisis. E.L. Doctorow famously writes that “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” Can you describe the throat, tongue, heart in such a way that we feel self-pity, and regret? Naming emotions in the abstract is like walking in a rainstorm with a raincoat, umbrella, and galoshes.

The potential is here to break the reader’s heart. Everything it needs is here in your poem to make that happen, but needs to be activated, dramatized, embodied, to my taste, at least!

Your last line is so terrific that it raises the bar, and asks the rest of the poem to do the same level of emotional work.

My best to you, and thank you for your poem! It was very much enjoyed. I hope these comments are not out of line and are of some use..

[Glenn Wright]

Thanks for the insights, Tony. I was thinking about Alexa’s comment that the poem was “telly” (as opposed, I suppose, to “showy?”) and was trying to find a way around the speaker simply offering expository self-analysis. Your comments and Mark’s comment about the need for specificity made me realize that I could gain a little extra room by collapsing the redundancies in S2L1-2 and focus on presenting what the speaker was feeling instead of trying to analyze it. I decided that the speaker’s admittedly uncalled-for taciturnity felt like an exhausted heaviness, so I went with that. The mention of guilt prevents, I hope, a descent into bathos and self-indulgence. It also foreshadows his admission of dishonesty in the last line and the word “lie” does double duty, signifying languor and prevarication. It feels tighter and maybe less telly. Let me know what you think.

[Alexandra Baez]

Glenn,

I wonder if the problem with “reserved” is that it is etymologically too close to “observed.”

Yes, I got to thinking that that was part of it—plus, they’re both two syllables. But here’s another thing—it’s at quite a distance from the helping verbs pair that is intended to go with it, i.e., “have been” of L2. As a result, it almost feels like something’s missing from L4, and it even keeps making me feel like it’s an inversion, although obviously it isn’t. This lack of helping verbs in proximity exacerbates the feeling of passive remove that I mentioned before.

Your latest revisions feel to me superficial, still loath to dive into that wonderful quality that Mark and Tony were invoking, “moments written more from inside the body than inside the conceptualizing mind.” You’re still “offering expository self-analysis,” just subbing in new adjectives and verbs. You haven’t yet included any greater specificities about the scene outside the narrator’s head, whether objects or actions or both.

It takes a lot of self-abandon for a poet to make the kind of shift that some of us who’ve commented are envisioning; it becomes more fundamentally an effort of psychology than one of writing, in fact. Would you be willing to profoundly change any of this poem’s lines that could be improved by so doing? Would you, indeed, be willing to see the whole poem in a new light? Or could you entertain at least trying to do so for a moment as an experiment and seeing where it leads you (knowing that you can always return to the safe mooring of where you’ve been)?

[Glenn Wright]

I sort of see what you’re inviting me to do, Alexa. The problem with providing specifics is that that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes poems “telly,” isn’t it? Part of what I’m trying to show is the speaker’s own lack of certainty about why his birthday party depressed him. To some degree, it’s the banality of the rituals, but he knows enough to feel guilty for his ingratitude to his friends. He knows it’s the repetitive futility of his long, undistinguished life.
It’s also his inability to share himself honestly with the people who seem to care about him. I want the reader to do the work of hypothesizing an explanation. For example, where is Mrs. Speaker? Is he a widower? a bachelor? Is his wife at home entertaining Blazes Boylan? Is he unable to be honest with his friends and maybe himself about his sexuality? What’s preventing him from enjoying the company of his friends, (who seem, perhaps, a little eager to get out of there)?
I don’t think I want to force an interpretation. The speaker’s last line shows that he’s about ten seconds from realizing that he has never let himself know himself, and his fear that perhaps there really is not much to know.

[Jim Moonan]

.
I'm just now comparing the congruity of the title with the poem itself. It is certainly congruent. But does it add to it? It would be nice if it did, I think.

I find the matter-of-factness of the final sentence of the poem to be a sudden and stunning arrival of self-awareness, of revelation as the curtain drops. The title might be hiding in there somewhere : )

.

[Carl Copeland]

Another thought about the opening line: What would you think about something like “Another birthday’s winding down again”? Then we could agree on the tense, and you could dispense with “celebration,” which is clear from the following lines in any event. Speaking of birthday depression, my friends once threw a little birthday party for me and neglected to invite the guest of honor. They told me later how good everything was.

[Tony Barnstone]

Hi Glenn,

I won't push, but just observe that "The problem with providing specifics is that that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes poems 'telly,' isn’t it?" misses the point. You want the readers to do the work, you say, but then you do the work for them by naming the theme, the emotions, the psychology instead of allowing them to emerge and reveal themselves in the reading process.

Regardless, there are many ways to write a poem, and this way can work if the energy comes in with wit and rhetoric and linguistic panache, and thus the other leg of my critique: can you challenge your power words, nouns, verbs, adjectives to up your game in this respect? Look to renew your adj/noun combos: guilty heart...leaden tongue ...unsaid words ... bitter taste ... fading spirits.

Thinking about the poem a bit more, I realized that it is one that rarely uses the senses--no colors, no tastes except for the "bitter" taste which is a dead metaphor and so which like old tea loses its visceral flavor, and so on. What does ennui smell like? What does self-deception taste like? There might be some energy to be found by rooting your abstractions in sensory experience. David Jauss's article (https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/2842/whos_afraid_of_the_big_bad_abstraction_modes_of_co nveying_emotion) is the go-to one for exploring this technique, tho' it is behind the AWP paywall.

In any case, the poem is worth working on--again, such a terrific ending demands it, I should say! My best to you, Tony