[Deborah J. Shore]

Rick,

I just wanted to say--and this I do think is my own failing--your explanation of S2L1 never once occurred to me even though you feel satisfied that I must have read it back into S1. I was seeing "tomorrow" as still being in the future and so thought it a very odd construction. S2 really mostly left me floundering with where dissatisfaction was pointing. I still wonder if you have clarity about who made the promise, what the promise was, and who made the excuses. I say this because helping us see those elements of your vision more clearly is probably what could make this click.

I've only written one Sapphic myself, and I published it in THINK journal last year. I'm fairly new to any extended metrical forays. I've also written a hendecasyllabic that I do like, but when I read in these meters, I feel like they are hard ones for a natural and lively voice. Even when I look back at the Sapphic I published, which had so much compressed emotion in the writing of it, it feels elegant but far more emotionally distanced in the reading (and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that!).

I'm impressed by a lot that you've done here. I did note the "or" and thought it might be a weakness but then decided otherwise.

One of the things that drives me crazy with these Latin meters is how frequently folks writing in them expect us to pick it up even though they are opening lines on forced accents instead of what anyone would naturally assume is a trochee. So I really appreciate that your meter is intrinsic to the words (in general I do not like it when meter forces promotions of a syllable that would naturally be demoted next to the other syllable in a foot; this has a long history of acceptance but is a pet peeve for me; I don't mind a pyrrhic in iambic meter AT ALL, but an inversion of natural accent can be a hard sell for me in iambic or trochaic meters).

As for how I interpreted the Queequeg line, I was trying to come up with how someone could simultaneously feel "put-upon" while also feeling in the vein of "infinite cowboy," and that was the only possibility that occurred to me. Additionally, Glen's interpretation is in fact the main overall interpretation I was toying with... except the connections didn't QUITE seem to work (for that or for any interpretation that I could come up with). But just so you know, that was the closest I came to figuring out a way to thread the puzzle.

I did think initially that the speaker was trying to paint this man as a positive to be looked up to, and I still wondered if that was the case by the end (but this would make the speaker a fairly icky person according to my reading of the tattooed an). But no interpretation I came up with quite seemed to hold together in all your connections.

I still don't know how to see the tattooed man as some sort of ideal. But again, I couldn't come up with one line of thought that did not seem dubious or contradicted by other lines of yours.

How is someone bounced from bars and the diner a manly ideal? It's not clear enough that this could be merely on account of a prejudice over his tattoos. This is an action that usually is tied to some poor behavioral regulation or character issues. It would be so very hard NOT to read this man as inhabiting some form of "toxic masculinity." As for the pomegranate, I doubt any of us know what Jack's is, which might be part of the problem. If it was a recognizable grocery store name, and if he wasn't already seeming to be a troublemaker, then maybe we would have been able to come up with an explanation other than sexual harassment.

Due to health effecting memory, you can generally expect me not to get most references. I never did know Dylan lyrics, and I only picked up on Mellville after googling. I would never have known those wives, although I once skimmed an article about them. Queequeg did seem like a name I should know, but I (and this is really just my health/memory problem) couldn't place him at all even after google tried to situate me and explained his character a bit. So the information I'm bringing to the poem could be part of the problem. But I really don't know how to read your intent into that description I'm afraid.

I'm glad you appreciated my effort. It really is quite an effort with me for health reasons, so please understand if I do or do not manage to come back for revisions. I'm not really sure if I'll be managing any sort of regularity here (or contributing my own work) or not. I'm just trying to test the possibility.

Even though your closing line seems like a good one, lines 1-3 of last stanza seems to add enough confusion and (for me) no payoff, that I wonder if it really wants to be there. But no doubt you will figure this out as you try to address all of the feedback we've given.

Deborah