From my perspective, the basic premise is good. The idea of meeting a poet in NY at night, and reflecting on the poet’s identity and how it works with both the narrator’s burgeoning sense of self-conception and their growing understanding of how place and love-of-place might affect poetry-as-self is great.
The metaphor also works.
You’ve also got some good lines. But I think you have weak lines, too. I won’t do a line by line as that would be deeply annoying but an example would be S3 line 4, which is a strong linebreak but perhaps not working in the specific context. Do you need the ‘Josh, who’d’ and the specificity of the dialogue or would it be stronger asking who would go sane, throwing us (readers) into that conundrum of city?
I think S4 is also a little over-written. Sometimes less is more.
For me, for this, I’d cull, be brutal. It starts well, I think, but then there’s a sense (from my perspective) of you padding out the lines, walking around them to fit a pattern that no longer serves the poem. I love ‘blast shadows’ and ‘absence’s red taste’ and the hint of gothic melodrama, but at the end of the poem I feel the form weakens this, not adds to it.
There are some gorgeous descriptive spaces, like ‘needle-veined/Bacchae’, which I adore. Also I like the idea of sobriety as a kind of apocalypse, which is interesting and, when framed in terms of the greek myth, those skeins which link past to present, done well. It makes me think of similar paradigms, also makes me feel, as a reader, that nice 'plus ça change' which works nicely with the semi-fatality you seem to express in the poem. But this, though it works, still isn't philosophically entirely cohesive to me.
The premise is clear, the metaphor is clear (ish) but I wonder, what is your overarching intention/concept - the core thing you wish to communicate with this?
I hope that this is helpful
Sarah-Jane
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