Jim,
Quote:
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You should be pleased to know that everyone likes what you are doing.
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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.