Your Other Men


I hate your other men; I hate them all:
Employer, counselor, priest; and those you call
Your friends; and men on television; other
Men you chance to meet; I hate your brother;
I hate the man you think I am; and worst
(By far the worst!), the man who knew you first,
Him with his Sunday morning beer and eggs,
Ogling his little girl’s unguarded legs,
The first to breathe his filth into your ears,
Stalker through the endless nights of years,
Yanking the curtain to one side to watch,
Shameless, exposed and plowed, fingering his crotch,
Or lunging out to stop you in the hall––
Him I hate enough to hate them all.

What on earth can be said about this sonnet?
Terrifying emotions and judgments executed with
syllables that ring like hammer blows, yet finding time for brilliant-yet-awful puns like "plowed." I’m still
recovering from the brilliance of the thing—especially its
amazing turn on its author at the end. I cannot
imagine another set of choices that would embody
and convey the power of these lines. It is a sonnet
that seals off and closes out all other ways of doing
what it does. To call it strong is almost
to insult it. My favorite of the entire Sonnet-off . . . but
I could definitely use a scotch after the experience.

Hm? Does the sonnet turn on its author at the end? Sure, not an unreasonable conjecture, but I read L5-6 to the effect that the poem's ego and the woman's father are two different persons.

But it's a strong poem none the less, though not my favourite among the nine (since Tim asked us to pick a favourite).

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

This is my personal favorite too. I wouldn't have seen the possibility of father as narrator if not for Len's comment, and I still am not convinced, but the fact that the possibility exists adds another dimension, making the poem all the more compelling.

Carol

I read it as Svein does, that the husband or lover is meditating on himself and the woman's father.

Yikes, guys--it's Tim's reading I meant by my comment. I assumed that the speaker is NOT the father, but that he has some pretty harsh things to say about himself. That's all I meant--that he feels complicit somehow, dirtied somehow, by the father's crimes.

Here's a sonnet that is really stronger for being composed of couplets, although I can't say exactly why that rhyme scheme seems so powerful here.
I love the line "I hate the man you think I am." It is telling enough when we first come to it, and it takes on resonance as the poem continues.
RPW

Richard, one reason it works is the repetition of the opening rhyme and rhyme word at the end. The other is that it's just hammer and tongs powerful.

I actually think it IS the father speaking. Full of self-loathing and yet, unable to stop thinking about other men doing the very thing he loathed....So many people tend to put their own worse tendencies unto others. What WE think is what we believe everyone else is thinking. I would think that perhaps a man who desired a woman carnally (Lord, what an old-fashioned word) tends to think that ALL men think in the same sick-carnal fashion about that woman or about women in general.
I'll be interested to see who the author of this is and what he/she meant. Hopefully we'll find out.
Great poem.

Lo

Here is a hint:
This poem is in one of the Wilbur award books.

I thought I remembered seeing this in print somewhere, but I could be imagining things. Whatever - it's good to read it again. It literally makes the back of my scalp tingle.