Susan, I’m glad you “did pick up the symbolism of the accumulation of details and slowing of the narrative about the eddying pocket.” That’s probably as good as I could hope for from any reader with a distaste for extended description (which seems to be most if not all in the current crowd). And thanks for elucidating your objection to the anapest in the title—that makes sense. I don’t have an objection per se to making the title strictly iambic, so if I can find a way to do so without being redundant, I will.

I noticed that "off/eye" don't rhyme, and it occurred to me that if you moved "you" to the rhyme position in place of "off," you would have a "you/eye" that would evoke the "you" and "I" of the poem.

I see. That's an interesting observation about the parallel to "you" and "I," which I hadn't noticed. So were you perceiving “you” and “eye” as an off rhyme? My off rhyme in S1 is supposed to be “away” and “eye." As I’d explained to Andrew, my rhyme scheme for the original version's first three stanzas, of which the first two stand in the revision, was

AB(A off-rhyme)A--(S1)
ABC(A off-rhyme)A--(S2, except last line; C's added here for a sense of diversion and entrapment)
AB(A off-rhyme)A--(last line of S2 and all of S3)

I do think I prefer your second to last line to the ones I've tried, so thank you for that!

Jim, I appreciate your careful introspection about your reactions to my and Susan’s versions, respectively. Your explanation nails, I think, why and how you liked each and in so doing, it satisfies my curiosity about the seeming contradiction between those two responses. Thank you, and for the accompanying additional heaps of bolstering praise!

Carl, hi and good to see you again and I’m looking forward to commenting on your new poem, which I’ve long hoped for!

Oh my gosh! I admit that your initial reading is too winceworthy to be much fun for me, since before I revised my title to the current one, other readers’ minds had likely gone in similar directions.

Oh! You know, I guess I hadn’t consciously noticed that. Maybe the meter had subconsciously steered me into omitting an "if" after "as." But the resulting confusion is unnecessary and easily fixed. Done, and thanks!

Oh! Yes! Thank you!

Hmm, I’ll consider it, but the current phrasing did seem an accurate representation of the reality upon which this poem was based. The emphatic nature of the declarations in question was what made them more impressively ironic than bittersweet, later on.

It was somewhat more developed before I omitted the former S3, but in either version, off rhymes are a key part of the equation. I like to think that you absorbed them, if only subconsciously, along with the obvious, full rhymes. :)

You mean in its last sentence? I don’t know. I pick up influences all over! Thank you for entering the “right frame of mind to get into” the poem, however consciously or subconsciously that came about. And I’m glad you were able to enjoy the poem.

I hear it as a cheer breaking into a quiet poem. You’ve further emphasized the contrast with line spaces, so I can tell it’s deliberate, and the trueness of it is all that matters.

“Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Hello Alexandra,

General comments:

I think it is a good that you can attempt to describe in detail and expand your thoughts, although modern tastes and attention spans may not be receptive, and there is a question of whether the effect is as appropriate as it can be (it can sometimes come across as belabouring a point, or not trusting the reader to make necessary inferences, or trying to hard to evoke an emotional response, or hint at depths beyond what the poem can support).

In the second stanza of the original, the construction starting with "as if" reminds me of the patterning a Homeric simile, which is a device I have been meaning use for some time.

A useful exercise is to go against natural tendencies, and try to write as compressed and simultaneously as evocative poem as possible, just to see if you are making a choice or following rhetorical habits.

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(Comment moved to Carl's Christmas Haunts where it belongs :o )

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Carl,

Are you sure? It didn’t seem to be all that mattered when you made your last comment. But here’s hoping!

“Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Ah, yes. It’s entirely possible that my line was unwittingly influenced by this poem. Although I have to admit, the influence that I was consciously aware of was Prince’s song “The Beautiful Ones,” with its lines, “The beautiful ones, they hurt you every time,” “The beautiful ones always smash the picture, always, every time,” and “The beautiful ones, you’ll always seem to lose.”

Yves, hi! It sounds like you’re carefully hedging your reaction to my compression/release experiment. ��I appreciate the generosity of your balanced outlook.

Thanks for alerting me to the term Homeric simile--I remember having encountered these in the Odyssey and Iliad (though it was a long, long time ago). They made quite an impression, but I’d not been aware of the term.

It’s funny, but this technique of carrying on in detail with one train of thought past the expected stopping point actually started for me (in poetry) as a conscious experiment. I think this is only the second time I’ve done this, and that the first time was in the original version of my poem “Catch,” which I posted here a while back. I’ve been wondering if any readers have noticed the similarities (in approach, theme, and overall narrative arc) between these two poems:

Catch (original version)

I pulled up from a wandering stream, my mind,
a pebble—yes, a thought—and held it, palm
outstretched. I turned it round and passed my thumb

across it, searching in its folds to find
some semblance of that slurry which denied
so many of my bids to catch some slip

of solid matter from it. Dragging dip
of arms most often yielded something shy
of definition—cool and dribbling wet.

But then—this oddment, tumbled out of dreams
or sleights of hand where fluids shift to forms
as solids flux, more fluid than they seem.

A mere scintilla, sloped and strangely born—
what more could all my days of floundering bring?

It seemed at home in my uncertain hand,
this backward answer to my questioning,
this bastard child of swish and swirling sand.

Readers had the same types of complaints about the run-on sections of both poems!

Anyway, I heartily agree with you that it’s great to experiment with writing in ways that are the opposite of one’s natural inclinations or experience. Super-compression has never come that naturally to me, so I have, in fact, done a few experiments with it lately.

Jim, it looks like you meant to post this comment on Carl’s thread!