[Rick Mullin]

Thanks Glen,

It hadn't occurred to me that the North vs South might play into a reading hinged on the current national divide through an evocation of the previous one. That isn't too much of a distraction from my (intended?) reading of the poem. I like how the last line is coming across to you. It might be the most open to interpretation in the poem, right when a reader might want things to click shut objectively and handily. My apologies to that reader! I'm glad you find the images to be vivid.

I've been writing 15 line "sonnets" for a long time now. I'm not overly concerned with whether they would be called sonnets. Technically, I suppose, they wouldn't be.


Thanks Carl,

Yes, the lines are very loose, but I think the rhythm is maintained. I'm glad it works for you when read naturally. While it might not be a sonnet, I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that it's blank verse! ~,:^)

I do welcome the ambiguity in the last line. I find it ambiguous, but manage to feel a meaning, if that makes sense. Lovely but puzzling ain't a bad way out of a poem, I'd say.

Hi Paula,

Thanks and welcome to the club, Paula.

You Googled the stadium rays! I'm kind of glad it checks out, but I really wish I'd made them up.

Glad you like line 14, which would be the closer of a doctrinaire sonnet (though I'd have to change some other things to make this really doctrinaire). As I mentioned to Carl, I'm comfortable with this poem as blank verse, though much of it is metrically loose. I do get five stressed beats in the line:

The SUN sets CITrus ORange over TAMpa BAY

In any case, I wouldn't go for the archaic "o'er", because that would make it more of a doctrinaire sonnet ~,:^)

I can see how the "annoyingly interesting" line can be a problem. I toyed with "dangerously interesting", but that just wasn't true to the mood.

Thanks a lot for your response.

Thanks again folks. It seems to be getting across that the baseball game is a metaphor. It's the only sport I am in the least bit interested in watching, though I rarely watch games. Not to be coy, I'll say that my intent (what I'm getting out of it) is a poem that describes certain aspects of aging.

Rick