[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Alex—

Your paean to the red grape has some nice sensory appeal, but I had a few questions.

First, I wondered if the serrated left margin is necessary. The rhymed couplets provide structure, and the two uneven margins give the poem a rather amorphous appearance.

Second, I wondered if the first four lines were necessary. As a signpost, they advertise the scope of the poem as celebrating all fruits, but from lines 4-20 you focus on the red grape.

Third, a few lines are difficult to wrangle into tetrameter. I was able to scan line 3 as headless iamb, trochee, iamb, amphibrach. I was able to scan line 20 as headless iamb, iamb, anapest, trochee. But no matter how I tried, lines 9 and 15 were trimeter: Line 9 is anapest, anapest, iamb, and line 15 is iamb, anapest, anapest.

A few expressions seemed either non-idiomatic or rhyme driven:
Line 6: “for our cheers” doesn’t strike me as something that someone would actually say.
Line 11: “in sweet rite” Is there really a rite or ceremony for eating table grapes?
Line 19: “Spring air breathes thick” Aren’t grapes harvested in fall? In the image it sounds like the air is breathing rather than the celebrants. Did you mean it in the sense one might say, “This Scotch drinks smooth?”

The last rhyme is a bit wrenched. Are you pronouncing “lipstick” as a spondee? (I hear it as a trochee.)

I wondered if putting “translucent” and “fluorescent” in adjacent lines was more confusing than illuminating. “Translucent” makes sense, since grapes are semi-transparent, but I think of “fluorescence” as something requiring a black light. I like the idea of comparing them to gems. Could you construct a metaphor here that captures the exact quality of light you imagine? Maybe something like:
Rubbed smooth, with each translucent bunch
as clusters of polished garnets (or rubies, or amber) shine,

I hope some of this is helpful.

Glenn