Meeting a poet in New York at night
 

.
.
.
Rev.1

..........For Josh

You're not a god: I think you gave up drinking
but not the city, which you still allow
to drown you in. You talk: as if you're sinking,
I hold your arm. Is it me, or Pentheus now

stumbling after his guide, girlish & blind
with seeing? Still, like him I half resist
listening, since if I listen then I'd find
myself starting to see like you: the fixed

& washed-up clarity of the drowned. You're brave,
more brave than me, with the city's needle-veined
Bacchae who've also learnt not to believe
in Presidents, or free will. Josh, who'd go sane

under the billboards' hectic mania?
or go cold turkey to the siren light?
You are the mask of my insomnia
noting each entropy, each half-life of night:

the blast shadows of bars that haunt us with
absence's red taste. There is no God
you say, who'd give us choice; but still it's this
old work (who'd pay?) that's chosen you: to hold

these ghosts atomed inside you from decay
as what night builds annihilates by day.

***
You're not a god: I think you gave up drinking.
But not the city, which you still allow
to drown you in. You talk: as if you're sinking,
I hold your arm. Is it me or Pentheus now

stumbling after his guide, girlish & blind
with seeing? Still, like him I half resist
listening, since if I listen then I'd find
myself starting to see like you: with the fixed

& washed-up clarity of the drowned. You're brav-
er than me with this city's needle-veined
Bacchae who've also learnt not to believe
in Presidents or free will. Josh: who'd go sane

beneath the billboards' on-off mania?
or go cold turkey to the siren light?
You are the mask of my insomnia
noting each entropy, each half-life of night:

the blast shadows of bars that haunt you with
absence's red taste. There is no god
you say, to give us choice, but still it's this
old work (who'd pay?) that's chosen you: to hold

these ghosts atomed inside you from decay,
as what night builds annihilates by day.
.
.
.

Cameron, this time I’m in luck. I reread “The Bacchae” only a couple months ago. Easily one of the most bizarre and fascinating works in world literature.

You're not a god: I think you gave up drinking.
But not the city, which you still allow
to drown you in. You talk: as if you're sinking,
I hold your arm. Is it me or Pentheus now

In other words, you can’t be the god of wine, because you’ve stopped drinking, but the city hasn’t stopped drinking, and you allow it to drown you.

If you want the “which” clause to be conventionally grammatical, you need to lose “in” or add “it” at the end. (De-relativized, it’s “You still allow the city to drown you in.”) If it’s language play, then “drown in” sounds like a phrasal verb, “drown you in” becoming similar to “draw you in.”

stumbling after his guide, girlish & blind
with seeing? Still, like him I half resist
listening, since if I listen then I'd find
myself starting to see like you: with the fixed

It’s grammatically unclear who’s “girlish & blind” and resists listening, but while Dionysus and Pentheus in his getup are both “girlish,” only the latter is unseeing and unlistening. The N, like Pentheus (though probably not in drag), is being led into the drunken, stoned Bacchic revels of the city—potentially to his destruction.

& washed-up clarity of the drowned. You're brav-
er than me with this city's needle-veined
Bacchae who've also learnt not to believe
in Presidents or free will. Josh: who'd go sane

I get tet in L2 unless I stress “this,” which seems unnatural, and the line then scans as anapest + iamb + trochee + trochee + “veined.” Tet’s easier, and I’m fine with the odd short or long line, so forget I said anything.

If you’re addressing Josh, please use a comma, but Clarkean colonic philosophy suggests that you may be doing something else altogether.

beneath the billboards' on-off mania?
or go cold turkey to the siren light?
You are the mask of my insomnia
noting each entropy, each half-life of night:

With “You are the mask,” you move into different territory that I’m still trying to map.

the blast shadows of bars that haunt you with
absence's red taste. There is no god
you say, to give us choice, but still it's this
old work (who'd pay?) that's chosen you: to hold

“Red taste” sounds like the “red breath” of Zenkevich and Mandelstam. I found a great answer on the web to the question “What does the color red taste like?”—“Something like pink, only harsher.”

With “half-life,” “blast shadows” and decaying atoms, the dangers of drugs and alcohol shift toward nuclear annihilation and, with “entropy,” toward the heat death of the universe. It’s Josh, with his poetry, who is holding off the end:

these ghosts atomed inside you from decay,
as what night builds annihilates by day.

I suppose you mean “is annihilated.” I don’t find a suitable intransitive sense, so “annihilates by day” has to be understood as “destroys by day.”

BTW, Terence Stamp played a stunning Dionysus, but sadly only in key scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge4ynDhFVsg.

Isn't "abscence's red taste" just figuration around wine withdrawal?

The title drew me here.

I can't follow "the city, which you still allow/to drown you in," which would probably put me [grammar stickler] off at the opening of any poem, but particularly one about a poet.

(Among several ways of making sense of the phrase (depending on what is meant), the simplest would be to drop the "in.")

FWIW.

Hi Cameron,

Some thoughts. Feel free to disregard etc...

I don't mind "drown you in". I read it that the addressee has given up drinking but hasn't given up the city, the scene of the revels. He is allowing the city to "drown (him) in", like draw you in or suck you in. Yes, it's grammatically odd but it felt on the right side of creative use of language. I wonder if you need the full stop at the end of L1. As a complete unit of sense, L1 is quite confusing in terms of the relationship between the two statements at either side of the colon. Obviously, if the first line were "You're not Bacchus. I think you gave up drinking" that would be different. Anyway, might this work? (assuming I'm right about your sense, here)

"You're not a god: I think you gave up drinking
but not the city, which you still allow
to drown you in."

I really like the image here: "as if you're sinking,/ I hold your arm".

Pentheus was dressed as a woman when Bacchus led him, wasn’t he. But even if I hadn't just found that out via t’internet, it feels clear enough to me that it's the speaker who is "girlish and blind".

I wonder if L4 here is a little metrically busy. You have the substitution at "starting" then an anapaest on "with the". Could the colon do the work of the word "with", like this?

"myself starting to see like you: the fixed // & washed-up clarity of the drowned."

I'm not a fan of breaking "brav/er" like that. You've done it before and I've seen the point but here it looks a little bit ugly to me and I don't really see the necessity. Could it not be just "brave" then a change to the next line? The next line feels a little short anyway, like I could read it as tet.* Something like:

& washed-up clarity of the drowned. You're brave –
more brave than me with this city's needle-veined


I wonder if "go" sounds a little dull after the previous stanza's "go sane". Two "gos" in quick succession. What about "sweat cold turkey", (or something different, anyway)

I love this ending. The old work is, I think, poetry. I gave up drinking about six years ago and I was worried that it would mean I wouldn't be able to write. So much of my poetry had involved drinking, both in content and as fuel. I still love pubs and revelry, the romance of it. I relate, I think, to this.

Anyway, I like this poem a lot, Cameron. A nocturnal meander with an intriguing, somewhat sad, new friend, is what it feels like. I'm happy to do the googling to expand my classics knowledge when the poem is so intriguing. But, doesn't Pentheus get torn limb from limb at the end of this little excursion? Yikes.

Mark

* I see now that Carl makes the same observation.

Hi WT,


I often get the feeling that the extended myth conceit has a prophylactic effect on a poem. I worried by the end of the second stanza here, but you turn the whole out nicely, using the myth to very good effect.



I want back all the time I spent trying to like:

which you still allow
to drown you in.

It's so awkwardly ungrammatical that I don't think it's possible to land any kind of special effect with it.

And the "brave- / er" break seems to me a spoof on rhyming (or slant rhyming) that might work in a humorous poem. I think you can just go with the unbroken braver at the end of that line, because, yes, you hear the slant rhyme. It's no joke.

I love the ending.

I know Josh and have discussed drinking and God with him. We don't always agree, but I really like him and he's a very good poet. Yours is an interesting poem other than for the minor personal taste nits mentioned.

Rick

Revision posted
 

Thank you Rick, Mark, Yves, Carl, and Max.
Yves: that is indeed one way of interpreting the phrase: though synaesthesia is another, more personal version. Let the meaning creep in.
Max (and Rick and Carl) yes, I am interested in how much the use of "drown" as a verb would be noticeable. I am not willing to give it up, quite yet, but I would be interesting in any other comments on it: for and against. Sometimes it is good to have a prosecution and a defence. The poet is a jury and the defendant: the the witness.
Mark: what a wonderful critique...you are dangerous: you are beginning to make them your trade-mark. I have taken your suggestions. I do quite like the force of the two "go's" but I'll keep considering it.
Carl: I am not sure what the insonia line has that makes it so impossible? I've taken some of your suggestions—thank you, you are ever punctual with your curious expeditions into my land.

I was in two minds about the Bacchae here. It seems to have been accepted with embraces: I still wonder a little though. But there is something in the city that has that bacchic fire which made it seem so appropriate. Rick I am glad we have more matual friends.

Cameron, do you have synethesia? If not, then the meaning of "red" would have to be derived from association of red things (how do you think meaning is derived?), and if the red thing is not wine, then, at that point, the reader is making up their own poetry. I doubt there are many folk (Helen Keller and Evelyn Glennie who are probably in excess of 1 in a million talents) that can do the real time calculations to actually cross-relate senses (this can be tested): which of the infinite shades of red are we talking about? Do people interpret synethesia as some kind of heightened sensory perception, heightened cognition, something desirable and advanced? Are there not better way to use your senses? Heck, is it even the best way to associate between different senses?

Yves: yes.
It's not an intellectual mannerism. It is a physical experience.
Red: colour-wise: scarlet, a sickly-bright absence. But that is too many syllables.
As to poetry: as you have already demonstrated, there are interpretations outside of synethesiia, and inside: the poem delivers the reader extremely direct poetry, and therefore, there may be allowed moments where they can make their own. Still, that is not a great problem anyhow, if you object, as the description is not to provide its own non-synethesic interpretation. If the poem leads to the reader confusing ("deranging") their senses: I have no real complaints.

Impossible? I’d say it’s more than possible, even probable. What could I have said?

Hi WT,

"drown" is not a problem. "in" is a problem.

Which you still allow to drown you.


RM

First, I read "drown you in" as "drown" being a force the city has, similar to how the city "pulls you in." Drowning as an active force, almost a temptation the way alcohol is a temptation. The way Dionysus' revenge metaphorically drowned the women of Thebes. Maybe I see that because I know quite a bit about the drowning properties of drink and drinking cities. Places that are so associated with drinking and drugging it become an indivisible part of the experience--a triad. That's my take, FWIW.

The narrator is afraid he will become like Pentheus, down to being dressed as a woman and losing his senses. When the poem turns to the present and where I assume is New York--I don't know Josh--and makes statements about the insanity of the U.S. that I certainly agree with I'm not sure the metaphor--comparison--holds up as well as it should. Maybe I'm too deep in the corrosive insanity of what is going on to see it as a drunken orgy. It's more Hitchcock than Euripides. The bizarre Christians who know nothing about Christianity, etc. may seem wild in a media way when they are essentially steely-eyed sociopaths. I'm not sure the comparison to Thebes connects. As for the discussion of free will, maybe we need more if you want to keep it.

As usual, I haven't added to the helpful line and word critiques as much as the others. They do a great job. All I can do is read and let my mind go blab blab blab and hope something helpful arises. I don't know if this is helpful. Overall, all of your poems have a specific genius, and some, as with all of us, work better than others. Perhaps this needs less compression. You have a city and a strong myth and then centuries of the wild destructive other-worldly magic of wine to use. Maybe it's a good one to go on longer--Blake, Whitman, Milton . . . .

Hope this helps

The poem's title drew me in, but I'm not picking up too much meeting a poet in New York at night. The title is atmospheric, and to me hints at an atmospheric poem, but much of the language you used seemed to obscure, not elucidate the atmosphere.

It's an interesting poem, just maybe at odds with the title.

Thinking a little more on this, what about Meeting a poet in New York.

Adding 'at night' seems to put special emphasis on nighttime, which the reader might be expecting in the poem, but this poem strikes me as a meeting of two minds, with a few flashes of night. Why not let the nighttime aspect be implied, and let the poem be about you and the other poet?

As usual, Cameron, I read this poem as a part of your work as a whole, a work which seems always to be initiating me into your world where things are not 'seen' in the usual way, where they are un-seen, or seen with senses other than the eyes. Here the emphasis is given to listening, for the poet is talking as you two are walking through the city, a city that you (and thus we) hear more than see. I can, as I read, hear (and feel) the blasts of desperate merriment spilling out through the doors of bars passed by, a background accompaniment to the voices of poetic colloquy. I remember long walks of my own through the city, solitary walks, where the revelry of strangers seemed so different from that of my own neighborhood with its own close circle of inebriates, the strange distance I felt as if my eyes were closing to it, transforming it to blasts and shadows. I love the fact that though you admire the poet, yet you are obsessively intent on holding onto your own hard-won modes of perception; that you stay cognizant of the fact that one can be "blind with seeing"; that you resist "starting to see like you". In a way we are all blinded to any world other than our own and, more poignantly than most, a poet sends his words out like seeing-eye-guides to navigate the larger world and to bring messages from his or her own. Here to be blind or to be drowned are overlapping states, each with its own "washed-up clarity" whose lonely tenuousness is what creates the tension of affection shared by all wanderers who feel their way through a world too large not to include them as night and day trade places ad infinitum. I too know of Josh, more distantly, I think he is a fine poet, but can imagine myself resisting him as well (though we have never shared moments as intimate as these).

The drunkenness that plays out both through biography and myth here, well it introduces a complex state for me—as I used to embrace alcoholism with all my strength of soul, but have fallen far away from drinking. Ditto the somewhat daunting specter of this city, an apparition I was once willingly, even wantonly, possessed by, but one that I now avoid. I have always held it a matter of principal not to summarily reject anything that was once of passionate value to me, and thus, in a way (my own way) "to hold / these ghosts atomed inside" me "from decay".

The poem walks a fine line, balanced between blindnesses.
Perhaps it is its ability to un-see that makes its affectionate tribute so clear-eyed.
My own eye thanks your eye for it.

Nemo

Thank you Rick, Carl, Nemo, John, and Nick.

Nick: I am not sure we are in accord that the poem isn't atmospheric. You want a more studiedly nocturnal disposition? (We cannot all be Trakl.) Night is a sensation for me, a thickness: and I must think whether your words indicate that I should bring that sensation into the poem more fully. As John says: it may need more space: another stanza.
Rick: I talked with several other people. I think the main problem with the phrase is not quite "in" per sé: but rather the muddled grammatical relation of subject and object: who is passive, who is behind the action: addressee or city. I think a better phrase is lurking behind this one: and I will wait to let it come out.

John and Nemo: these are wonderful critiques. Thank you so very much! John: i did not mean the Bacchae to be a comment on wider American politics: the "presidents" were a passing reference pulled into the poem's forcefield: and briefly held, I'm not quite pleased with them: I think again there is something better. I may have posted this too early. — Or maybe not. It needs to grow a little: and that will take time.
Nemo: you are breathtakingly eloquent. Yes to all you say: I RELATE. The poem needs work: but for now while I let it grow, I will leave it like this.
Carl: I meant your attempted mapping of my "You are the mask" realm.

Thank you again, all!

[Sorry, wrong poem! Over to the Nocturama.]

From my perspective, the basic premise is good. The idea of meeting a poet in NY at night, and reflecting on the poet’s identity and how it works with both the narrator’s burgeoning sense of self-conception and their growing understanding of how place and love-of-place might affect poetry-as-self is great.

The metaphor also works.

You’ve also got some good lines. But I think you have weak lines, too. I won’t do a line by line as that would be deeply annoying but an example would be S3 line 4, which is a strong linebreak but perhaps not working in the specific context. Do you need the ‘Josh, who’d’ and the specificity of the dialogue or would it be stronger asking who would go sane, throwing us (readers) into that conundrum of city?

I think S4 is also a little over-written. Sometimes less is more.

For me, for this, I’d cull, be brutal. It starts well, I think, but then there’s a sense (from my perspective) of you padding out the lines, walking around them to fit a pattern that no longer serves the poem. I love ‘blast shadows’ and ‘absence’s red taste’ and the hint of gothic melodrama, but at the end of the poem I feel the form weakens this, not adds to it.

There are some gorgeous descriptive spaces, like ‘needle-veined/Bacchae’, which I adore. Also I like the idea of sobriety as a kind of apocalypse, which is interesting and, when framed in terms of the greek myth, those skeins which link past to present, done well. It makes me think of similar paradigms, also makes me feel, as a reader, that nice 'plus ça change' which works nicely with the semi-fatality you seem to express in the poem. But this, though it works, still isn't philosophically entirely cohesive to me.

The premise is clear, the metaphor is clear (ish) but I wonder, what is your overarching intention/concept - the core thing you wish to communicate with this?

I hope that this is helpful

Sarah-Jane

Hi Cameron, there has much heavy lifting by many here. There is little further I can add. I generally concur with nits given but as usual with your work you have some striking images.