[Yves S L]

Hello Jim,

I had great difficulty understanding why the first version was actually a poem. In my mind I was comparing it to the following William Carlos William Poem:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


So what I was doing in my mind was compressing the poem something like as follows:

I have licked
the knife
and cleaned
it of jam

though you warn
me of blood
so fresh
and so red

Forgive me
the blueberry jam
is finished
you must go buy


However, I have even more trouble understanding why your revision is a poem.

The first version was at least a snapshot of a moment of tension, and sure more attention could have been paid to the craft element such as compression and lineation, but you at least had the form of two somewhat developing stanzas (reaction and counterreaction), and a heck of a lot of implication.

The second version removes all implication and tension, as it goes at length to spell everything out, and so for me it really is just prose. I say that poetry is as much about the form as it is the content, and often part of the form is compression and implication. However, to make the idea of form more concrete, one can go through the Williamson poem and state the constraints (strophes having four lines, each strophe having a single main thought, the consistent matter of fact tone, the syllable count of the lines... )the poem is written under, since the constraints are the actual form, which allow the compression and implication. What you have done in your second version is remove constraints, taking it even more closer to prose.

It is often the revisions which shows how someone really thinks of poetry, because now they have to really take their time and make choices past the emotionally loaded moment of inspiration.

The Williamson poem takes the moment of tension, the dynamics of a relationship, and compresses it as much as possible into a snapshot moment, and you were initially doing something similar. I reckon you should go back to that.

You can change how the poem is interpreted without adding lots of explanatory text, like, "she was being sweet though".

Yeah!