[Carl Copeland]

John recently made a plea for us all to “stop trying to understand and instead look and touch and reveal.” Without questioning the wisdom of that, I just can’t do it with your poems, Cameron. They always seem so dense with thought that staying on the surface is like taking the easy money and leaving what’s behind the curtain. In this poem, for example, there’s something about no-self: the no-thing being rained on and the nothing to which Lear was reduced on the heath. There are flashes of I-consciousness in the darkness (blindness). And there’s a call for the Fool to return after the storm, as he never did in the play, and for a name to fill the silence (give things their name after the Flood).

But while I’m trying to make sense of all that, this is the first poem of yours I’ve read that keeps me jazzed with a lively meter. Anapests, no less! A guilty pleasure of mine is chanting, and you make it so easy that I have to point out two places where I ran into trouble:

S2L1 — You’re either stressing “amicably” on the second syllable or you’re stretching the expected two anapests into three iambs. An amphibrachic “that’s ami-” seems unlikely. At any rate, it’s hard changing gears for two or three feet when the going is smooth for lines and lines on either side.

S4L3 — Have you gotten away here with three consecutive unstressed syllables (“he were not”)? If so, it’s a coup. That’s how I’d naturally say it, but there’s a school of thought that claims it’s impossible in metered verse.

Enough of that. I’ll now get back to digging below the surface—like a tick into an ear, as Mayakovsky put it.