The "Keeper"
 

Revision

If I’m an Eddying Pocket in a Stream


You’re like a leaf—you simply slipped away.
The current always meant to take you off—
you, little twirling thing that caught my eye,
as I caught yours. Life’s restive things don’t stay.

They’ll ornament the place they’ve paused awhile
and won’t get too attached—but just get stuck
as if near weirs of twiglets in a dip
at stream’s edge where loose clutter stalls, awhirl,
and then starts clumping up, a floating pile
of flotsam from the lettings-go of fall.

“Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool.

And then you slid between my twiglet-tips
back to the streamlet ripples scurrying south . . .
I sank into the silt beneath my mouth
but tasted your remainders on my lips.


Revisions
S1 L1: period at end was colon
S2 L2: first letter was lower case
S2 L3: added "if" after "as"
S2 L4: added comma at end
S1 L3: added comma after "eye"
S1 L4: removed parentheses around "as I caught yours," and period at end was semicolon
S2 L3: "clutter" was "matter"
S2 L7: tried merging with S2, then went back to having it as a separate line
Removed former S3:
I’d peered at you, a glinting slip of amber
corralled by my involuntary pull,
a standout in this season’s soggy haul.
S4 L3: Was "I sank into the bottoms of my mouth"; "bottoms" was "barrel"


Original

The “Keeper”


You’re like a leaf—you simply slipped away:
the current always meant to take you off—
you, little twirling thing that caught my eye
(as I caught yours.) Life’s restive things don’t stay;

they’ll ornament the place they’ve paused awhile
and won’t get too attached—but just get stuck
as in a weir of twiglets in a dip
at stream’s edge where loose matter stalls, awhirl
and then starts clumping up, a floating pile
of flotsam from the lettings-go of fall.

I’d peered at you, a glinting slip of amber
corralled by my involuntary pull,
a standout in this season’s soggy haul.

“Forever yours!” you cried inside my palm.

And then you slid between my twiglet-tips
back to the streamlet ripples scurrying south . . .
I sank into the barrel of my mouth
but tasted your remainders on my lips.

Alexandra,

"Keeper" reminds me of fishing and Jim's sonnet, but I'm puzzling over who is fishing for what and is self-consuming. Will continue noodling.

Ralph, oh dear, I never imagined that that would be unclear. Putting Jim's poem out of your mind while reading this one should help.

Alexandra, I enjoy the lush and graceful sounds in this poem, and the conceit is interesting. My feeling is that you could end stanza 2 after “matter stalls” (is there a more specific word than “matter”? not sure, but I wondered that). The rest of that sentence seems unnecessarily piled-on, since the image was clear to me already at line 8. Then, an added line to open the new stanza would clarify the move to the next image, the one of the N picking up the leaf. Without that added detail, it’s easy to think that the N is looking at the leaf while it’s still in the backed-up loose matter.

The poem’s closing image is fascinating but I am not sure I get what has happened. The leaf has continued on downstream, but why does the N sink, and in what way does the mouth’s being compared to a barrel relate to the poem’s conceit? Also, I am not understanding the move to the sensation of taste, since up to this point the leaf has been seen and felt with the hands, not tasted. I’m sure you have something specific in mind here, but the connection is not coming through for me.

Good luck with the poem.

Andrew

Andrew, thanks for your detailed observations. While I had been hopeful that my metaphor of the n as the dip in the stream where the leaf gets caught would come through despite my use of a metaphorical “palm,” it’s obvious to me now (both from your and Ralph's comments and my own fresh eyes) that that’s too much of a stretch. I had hoped that the preceding “corralled by my involuntary pull” and the following “twiglet-tips” rather than “fingertips” would make the n-as-stream-pool metaphor clear. (The center of the stream eddy was meant to represent the n’s “mouth," i.e., her receptivity and voice, and the mouth's "barrel," the inner limits of her connection to the world, to which she retreats once this connection has failed her, the “lips” her senses and most direct connection to the outer world.) But it’s such an odd metaphor that I think if it has any chance of working, it has to be made much more explicit.

Originally, my last two stanzas had explicitly presented the n as a regular human plucking the leaf from the stream, just as you suggest, but then I questioned how good sense it made metaphorically for the leaf/lover to be caught by some intermediary force, the stream, and then collected from it by the n. It seemed more true to experience that the n must be the stream-hole itself. Besides, it seemed imbalanced--too superior on the part of the n--to present herself as a human while presenting her lover as a mere fallen leaf.

I see now how “in a weir of twiglets in a dip” makes it sound like the leaves, etc. are getting stuck in twigs themselves, rather than my intended meaning--that they’re getting stuck in water that has gotten blocked from the flow of the stream by a sort of inadvertent natural mini-dam of fallen twigs. With the latter meaning in mind, the first three lines and the last two are actually trying to describe two different parts of a process: 1) the leaves, etc. get caught in a sequestered countercurrent of water and then 2) gradually, they become more locked in as they become enmeshed with each other and newly-fallen matter. I liked the run-on sentence here because it I thought it captured that sense of increasing entrapment from liquid to solid. And not that it’s sacrosanct, but I had a particular rhyme scheme going on in the first three stanzas:

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've wondered that, too—but I haven’t thought of one yet! Do let me know if one strikes you.

I appreciate your thoughts, Andrew . . . I’ll ponder them and see where it takes me. [Update--do the changes in my revision help? Can I get away with "mouth" and "lips" now? Or maybe something else would still be better?]

Hi Alexandra. How would it be if you simply lost lines 5-10? I'm not saying the poem would be done then - there'd still be a little bit of work to do on the last eight lines (especially the last two, for me) - but I think you'd be a good deal further forward.

Alternatively, for what it's worth, I think lines 1-4 are a great little poem in themselves.

Cheers

David

Alexandra,

It’s much clearer now and well worth the effort! Flotsam or debris or refuse in place of matter? I prefer flotsam.

David, well, it's true that if I removed Ls 5-10, the poem would still cohere pretty well (even sonically, I guess, despite losing the rhyme scheme that I'd described to Andrew). Maybe I'm just too attached, but I like the metaphorical texture and the visceral feeling (I hope) of this description of the process of the leaf slowly getting trapped in the pool--I think it gives a reader more of a sense of the time span involved in the relationship. And Ls 1-4 alone, while they may make a nice self-contained enough mini-poem, just don't say all that I wish to say. Particularly, I think it's important to emphasize the jarring irony that the "leaf" thought it was going to stay forever. Without this element, I think the theme risks being too commonplace.

What in the last eight lines do you think needs work? I'm guessing that in the couplet, you think that the mouth and lips allusions are not as clear as they need to be.

Ralph, I'm thrilled that my few little tweaks have made such a difference for you. I do prefer the word "flotsam," too, but I've already used it two lines down from "matter," and I think that this order sounds better than the reverse. "Debris" would break meter, and I don't like the idea of it or "refuse" because they carry the implication that the n thinks her lover was trash. I'm looking for that perfect "duff"-like nature term. [Update: maybe "clutter"?]

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This feels absolutely positively lit with metaphorical language and imagery. You are lucky to have captured it. The subject you have seized upon is such a transitory thing and you have found the language to personify it to be full of possibilities and glimpses of something profound that I can't quite put my finger on. It's like you've succeeded in getting every thought/word on the tip of your tongue to spill onto the page. I get the sense that the N is literally writing the poem as she peers at the subject closeup, as if her feet are nearly in the water as she crouches down close to get a good look, all the while taking notes to make a poem from it.

Notes:

• I love the rhythmic twirl of the rhyme.

• There are some gorgeously expressed images, like:

I sank into the barrel of my mouth

• The sonics in the final stanza are completely aligned to the moving water and are song-like.

• My only "critical" thoughts have to do with the lineation of the poem — But to tinker with that is to disrupt the metrical, so I can only say what I think might be more distinctive lineations if this were free verse. For example, this line:

"(as I caught yours). Life’s restive things don’t stay;"

would be better divided, to my ear and eye; like this:

"(as I caught yours)
Life’s restive things don’t stay;"

• I love the word "restive" and wonder if that might make a good title?

• I would also consider bringing the line “Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool." into S3 rather than making it stand alone.

It's a beautifully rendered poetic assimilation of the minutia that makes up life. I feel lucky to have found a poem that captures what you have captured here.

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I do love the general mood and the insights into impermanence of the poem, Alexandra, but by the end I am quite exhausted by the obsessiveness with which you explore the initially striking image. I am not sure that what you say in the second half of the poem hasn't already been said in the first. Yet even in the first stanza you use so many different punctuation marks (colon, em-dash, parentheses, semicolon) that my head begins to spin, begins to focus on your earnestness in getting your point across, on your control of your material—rather than on the material, the image, itself. The varying stanza lengths that come later just add to my feeling of congestion. There seems just too much for me to think about, which interferes with what the poem wants me to see and feel. I suppose this is an annoyingly vague critique, but it is an honest approximation of my experience when reading. And I realize I may often be guilty of the same complex pile-on in my own writing. But I believe there is a less rational way through such thickets, and that involves a loosening of one's grip on one's material. For me, there is a powerful poem hidden in here, but it is obscured by all your hard work.

Nemo

Yes, I can't help feeling here that there is something like gaudiness: like over-explanation that becomes so thick it gets wispy. In a way, I want the poem to be starker, to have lines of evocation standing in sharp relation to each other:

If I’m an Eddying Pocket in a Stream
you're like a leaf—you simply slipped away:

“Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool.

And then you slid between my twiglet-tips
back to the streamlet ripples scurrying south . . .
I sank into the barrel of my mouth
but tasted your remainders on my lips.

What I think I miss in your poems is something fragmentary: elusive: silence, really. I wish you let the breaks, the gaps between the moments in, to let the reader's imagination work, instead of feeding them up with detail. Maybe it's that element that made some of your poems always feel a little "quaint", somehow: not quite in the same universe as where I live: which feels harder, crueler, and lmch more fragmentary than the universe in your language.

Hope this helps.

Hi Alexandra.

Funnily enough, I don't get that irony from lines 5-10 anyway, despite rereading it several times. (That could just be me being thick.) That would be an important element, I agree. (I do see it here:'“Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool.')

Yes, that's exactly it. And the twiglets are a slight problem too, for a British reader ...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twiglets ... but that's a purely parochial problem that you needn't trouble yourself about.

Good luck with any amendments you decide to make.

Cheers

David

Jim, wow! It appears that you’re an ideal reader for me. I’m glad you got the sense of tantalizing glimpses of something profound. I felt them while thinking and writing about this, too.

It’s funny that you’re presenting this as a positive whereas it’s exactly what some others have bemoaned!

I wasn’t “on site” at the metaphorical stream, but I’m glad it feels that way. I take regular walks around streams and they've imprinted themselves in my memory. Also, I’m so pleased you responded to the sonics—as you know, this is a pet element for me.

Actually, I don’t see lineation tinkering as necessarily disrupting the meter. For example, I wound up breaking up a line, between stanzas even, in my last post, but by the time I hit that line as a (admittedly primed) reader, I’d become accustomed enough to the meter of the poem to continue following it through the break. (I never got any feedback from others on this experiment of mine, so of course I’m not sure whether they would feel the same, or if they’d think that there was a gain in clarity by this line break, and if so, if it was worth the visual jolt. And visual joltingness would naturally be a concern in this poem, too, if I tried to relineate it as you suggest.) Anyway, heck, I’ll try some relineation here and see what it feels like.

“Restive” as a title? Well, it became apparent from earlier comments that without that title, people weren’t clear who the n was in the poem—that she was a metaphorical stream pocket. I guess I could make the current title the first line of the poem, but that would mess up my rhyme scheme (though no one seems to care about it but me [and possibly you?]). I also hate titles that are telly and that don’t say anything that isn’t said in the poem proper. I do love the word “restive,” though, and the nuanced distinctions that it has from “restless.” The former was the perfect fit for the subject in this case.

I could consider this. I thought that this was a key point, and a jarring turn, in the poem, which is why I had it standing alone.

Nemo, I’m glad that at least you’ve gotten something of what I was trying to put across here. I do tend to get obsessive; testimony to this is the fact that I’d thought I was already being tremendously succinct in this poem except for S2! I do tend to be a punctuation nut, too, always wanting to choose the most apt mark for every situation--but yes, that can get in the way of the bigger picture at times. Your feedback on the poem’s stumbling blocks is interesting and worth contemplating--not annoyingly vague at all. You’ve given me plenty of specifics and I understand exactly what you’re driving at. I was really nervous about being looser than I was because I perceived the danger of ideas getting lost in translation to metaphor (which did happen in my original, despite my efforts). But I guess that once a poet has gotten all tight everywhere, then he or she can better perceive where it’s safe to loosen up a bit. I’m gratified that you see something powerful in here. I’ll “not-work” to bring it out more. ;)

Cameron, yes, I know that you always tend to have similar problems with my poems. I’m glad to see demonstrated what you’d perceive as a more effective version of my poem, but I must say that it leaves me barren, both in terms of content and of style.

Still, I really appreciate your articulation, in general terms too, of what you find lacking in my poems. I can see the value of the understatement you crave and in fact, I consciously went after it in this poem and even think I achieved it at various points. (And Jim did mention "glimpses of something profound.") Still, I tend to miss in your poems the opposite of what you miss in mine! The universe in my language is, of course, reflective of the larger universe of my worldview. And it’s hard for me to aspire to one that’s “harder, crueler, and much more fragmentary” than the one I already have. Nonetheless, I will seek any ways that, without a sense of compromise, I might bring my poem closer to the ideals of you and others who’ve voiced a preference for more succinctness--even starkness.

David,

My comment that you quoted above refers to your second idea that I present Ls 1-4 alone as a complete poem. I agree that there’s none of said irony in Ls 5-10.

Oh, I hadn’t known about the Twiglets! Ack! But there must be other things than the ones I’ve mentioned in the couplet that you thought I should work on in the last eight lines, right?--otherwise you would have just specified a need for attention to those last two lines. Anyway, thanks for the luck—it looks like I’ll be needing it.

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Alexandra: "Jim, wow! It appears that you’re an ideal reader for me. I’m glad you got the sense of tantalizing glimpses of something profound. I felt them while thinking and writing about this, too.
It’s funny that you’re presenting this as a positive whereas it’s exactly what some others have bemoaned!"


Yes I noticed that… I hope that between my effusive reading and the others’ more measured critical reading you’ll find what you need. You should be pleased to know that everyone likes what you are doing. I don’t mean to soft-soap you into thinking it’s a perfect poem. It goes without saying that any poem posted here is done in hopes of making it better. I could start (or end) every crit I’ve ever made by saying “This could be better” or “Come back to it after letting it sit and see what needs attention.”

I know how lopsided I can sometimes be with praise. (For the record, I am considered by those close to me as being "critical" : )) I appreciate others who can provide a counterbalance to my praise-heavy comments. On the other hand... sometimes I can’t help but think, too, that some critters, as skilled as they are, make the mistake of re-imagining the poem to be in their own language/voice vs. the language/voice the poet has chosen. In this case, the voice I hear is the water talking. It speaks with a certain resignation; it is reaching for the outer limits of the imagination and wants to stitch it into something tangible (a leaf, a twig) for the reader to take away with them. It has a life of its own; it is wildly imaginative and, I think at least, transcendent in its passionate telling. (There I go again.)

I do think that poetic inspiration, our muse, oftentimes sits on the tip of the tongue hoping to be poetically expressed vs. being swallowed or spit out.

I want to repeat that the subject of the poem — that shape-shifting space within a stream of moving water that momentarily snags, gathers and ultimately relinquishes the leaf, the twig, etc.— is positively ripe with beauty.

Please don’t give up on this. (I know you won’t.) It is already so pleasing that I think the only thing you should be careful of is not to diminish/minimize it in any way. (There I go again : ))


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Alexandra, for me, the clutter of detail in the middle stanza stalls me and starts to get tedious. Here is a more streamlined version that occurred to me, with a few possible changes and a title whose rhythm seemed more appealing. These may just be due to differences of taste, so ignore them if you don't find them useful.

If I’m a Swirling Eddy in a Stream

You’re like a leaf—you simply slipped away.
The current always meant to take you—you,
the little twirling thing that caught my eye,
as I caught yours. Life’s restive things don’t stay,
just ornament the place they’ve paused awhile.

“Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool.
And then you slid between my twiglet-tips
back to the stream of ripples scurrying south . . .
I sank into the silt beneath my mouth
but tasted your remainders on my lips.

Susan

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Susan that's very good!
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Jim,

Well, I think the most optimistic representation that might still possibly be true would be that everybody who’s commented likes what I’m trying to do. (I suppose that’s what you mean, though.)

As I’ve told you before, I think that your heart-centered, intuitive voice is a valuable counterbalance to more dispassionate, cerebral crits. I agree that it’s very hard to crit incisively while allowing the poem its own voice, and that most of us probably give short shrift to the latter. So it’s nice to have at least one (unofficially) designated person to concentrate on that! Your comments to me suggest that you have correctly perceived the nature of the voice of this poem. But I wonder if you do not feel that important parts of that voice have been lost in Susan’s version.

No, I haven’t given up on this! Coming back now to my most recent revision after about two days, I’m actually quite pleased with it, except that I found myself wanting that “Forever yours!” line back on its own. (Sorry!) So in this case, I think what I need to give up on is pleasing the majority. I believe I’ve moved this poem about as far as I want to in the directions that some others want while still keeping it the poem that I want.

Susan, I’m afraid I love the clutter of detail in the second stanza; clutter is its entire point and I’m simply trying to embody clutter here. Perhaps there isn’t a way to do so without tiring some people, but personally, I’m carried along by the language here, how it evokes feeling (for me), and the symbolic drama of it all. What’s more, I believe that the entire rhythm of this poem, its narrative arc, depends on this build-up. There’s little drama in the leaf’s sudden disappearance if one has spent almost no time in its presence, in the struggle of that presence. What I’m trying to do here is create a compression/release effect like that which Frank Lloyd Wright often employed in his architecture. S2’s compression is not of the language, but of the reader by the language. Then, after the pivot of S3, S4’s relative speed and lack of detail can be fully experienced as a contrast, a release, rather than just as part of an unchanging baseline—at least that’s my intent.

What’s more, many of the sonic relationships with the end words have been stripped away in your version. Did you notice this? Did you think it doesn’t matter? In any case, you have some ideas I may like in S1's “you—you/the” (although there would be a sonic sacrifice with the end word there) and S4's “silt beneath.” I will think about these. On a nit note, it seems to me that all eddies are swirling, so that aspect of your title would be redundant, I think. I'm surprised that the anapest in my title apparently bothered you, of all people!

Protestations aside, thank you for showing me how you think this poem would work better.

Alexandra, as I said, different tastes produce different effects. I hoped you could find something useful in my version of what would fit my tastes better. I have a lack of patience with extended description, even though I did pick up the symbolism of the accumulation of details and slowing of the narrative about the eddying pocket. I don't mind anapests in iambic verse. Readers, however, don't necessarily expect titles to be metrical, so I thought if you made it more clearly metrical, they might notice that. 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 don't always have time to explain all of my suggestions, so I sometimes use show instead of tell to demonstrate the possibilities that occur to me.

Susan

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Susan, your rewrite struck a chord with me that I most always hear when I read your own work. I liked it almost as if it were a translation of the language/phrasing/detail of the original poem but put into your signature taste for a neat, everything-in-its-place symmetrical/metrical style of poetry that touches all the bases, clears the high bar of formal poetry and, in the process, strikes deep at the heart of a subject. It gets me every time.

But it is exactly that fact — that your version is more a translation — that now gives me pause…I don’t think that is the effect that Alexandra seeks (and that she is now fiercely protecting). Her language, meter, phrasing, etc. is so fluent and fluid and without constraint but still beautifully orchestrates the poem to be a symphony of sensations fueled by her imagination. To say it is inspired is an understatement. As you say, Alexandra, the “clutter” of the detail in the second stanza aligns very nicely with the whirl of the eddy and the slipping free from it that is the end.


Alexandra: "Your comments to me suggest that you have correctly perceived the nature of the voice of this poem. But I wonder if you do not feel that important parts of that voice have been lost in Susan’s version."

I know, I appeared to flip-flop a bit... I overlooked much of what I liked about the original including the dilution of the sonics in the last stanza of Susan's version. Sometimes I struggle to say exactly why I say something and it ends up coming out the wrong way. I am easily buffeted by beauty and look for it everywhere. As I said earlier, you use the language of water in this poem — and I dove right in.

I think I do like Susan’s tweak of the title, though: If I’m a Swirling Eddy in a Stream

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Alexandra, I’ve been caught in my own weir of twiglets (more thorny than yours), so I’m too late to be of much help. Just for fun, though, I’ll tell you how my bad habits get me into trouble. I started with your revision, but since I tend to ignore titles, I fell into all the old traps: assumed the N was a person, wondered why they were tasting leaves, even tried reading in a fish that was “like a leaf,” but a little raw fish didn’t seem very tasty either. (I love sushi, but still.) Your title makes all the difference.

I also get hung up in the flotsam of that run-on sentence, particularly the missing subject and verb promised by “as,” but I do see that the muddle works for you, and at some point I stop looking for the grammar and just go with the words. “The lettings-go of fall” is lovely, but shouldn’t there be a comma after “awhirl”?

The cry “Forever yours!” is awfully loud. Would you consider losing the exclamation point and going with a quieter verb: “said” or “pledged” or (with “in”) “whispered” or “murmured”?

Your rhyme scheme is too subtle for my ear, but I do get enough rhymes to keep me happy, so that’s not a nit.

A little Frost in L4? As with some of your other poems, I had to be in the right frame of mind to get into it, but once I was, I enjoyed it.

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!