[Alex Pepple]

This starts with a vivid scene that immediately draws you in. As it progresses though, it begins to feel not fully realized ... yet. There are elements that feel force, such as the poeticized abstractions "Olympian mirth" which weakens rather than enhance the imagery -- and especially, the last line is not earned, seeming to belong to a entirely different poem. One way to strengthen this would be to limit the poem to the immediacy of the volcano, limit the forced extrapolation to grand world stages. This can be achieved by paring this down to something with more focus - likely, with less than 14 lines.

Cheers,
...Alex

[Chris Childers]

I'll be in the minority--I like this one a lot. It reminds me of a couple bits from the Aeneid--the image of Atlas in Book IV being beaten by wind and rain, with streams of water frozen in his beard, a monumental emblem of Necessity as the hinge on which the sky revolves, as well as the more famous sunt lacrimae rerum. The idea of a god of the mountain--Jehovah is also a mountaintop deity--who holds court among the "tears of things" strikes me as beautiful and profound. The "shattered stone carafe" is a wonderful image of brokenness, & I love the name of the crater itself, which sounds like both water and lamentation, & reminds of the song of the Rhine maidens quoted in the Waste Land. "Creatures that breathe and laugh" does strike the ear as somewhat fillery, though it serves to contrast the trivial levity of the tourist with this scene of primordial grief. I can agree that "telegraph" is not ideal, and might prefer "superhuman hurt" to "deep human hurt," but don't understand objections to the end--the point being, clearly, that humans are the creatures of pain and this is their god, a god of suffering; surely it is unavoidable, unjustifiable suffering that links the four places at the end. We seem to have a different standard for Holocaust references, as if only a searingly Great poem can use them & in anything less they're vain pretension & cheap emotion. Okay, we're rightly suspicious of sloganeering and manipulation, but I don't think that's what this poem is doing. It says, here is what we are: monsters and victims. Here is the center of tears.

Chris

Edit: I meant to say that I also object to "midst." Why not just "in"? I can sort of see objections to "Olympian mirth," though the point is good, and it is compactly stated. "The god of life and lightning fork" has a monumentality of utterance which strikes me (ahem) as appropriate. It is possible that this poem could end better, but I couldn't say how. I like the end that's here.

[Rose Kelleher]

The octet is to die for, but the sestet hammers away too hard imo. In fact I think the octet could stand alone.

Editing in: On second thought, I really like the point that's being made in the sestet. A lot. And we need "Clouds shroud the peak, the wettest spot on earth / Streams lace the wall" to explain what the tears are. But the language used in the sestet to make its main point could be improved. For example, for me, "Olympian mirth" is a turnoff, whereas something about "the gods laughing" would be more immediate and concrete, less academic-sounding. Also, "midst" is a noun, isn't it? Unless it's an elision of "amidst," like "e'er" or "'neath," which are rarely used these days, and in which case it needs an apostrophe. Stuff like that. So, while I'm almost in love with this one, I'm not quite yet.

I wasn't bothered by the last line and don't really understand the objection. Suffering is universal, no?

[Petra Norr]

I, too, like the opening of this sonnet. The first four lines are very good.
A very big leap is taken in this sonnet – the leap from the volcano to the horrors in the last line. This is the basis for making the leap:

And yet this sheer cliff seems to telegraph
Deep human hurt; tears glisten down it all.

Unfortunately, those lines don’t work for me. I need a reason to equate the water in the volcano with tears and deep human hurt, and I can’t find one. The association is too weak. It doesn’t make it any better when the “tears” appear again, in L12: Why here, midst tears.
For me, the sonnet collapses midway and nothing after that is credible.

[David Rosenthal]

Well-built, to be sure. The site is painted well -- the shattered carafe is a brilliant image. But the last four and a half lines successively put me off. L12 seems way out of place to me, and I feel let down by the last two lines. The last line is, after giving it some thought, surprisingly confusing. The references are so sparse and specific that the message is obscured. But I am not sure the message would have resonated for me anyway, even if the last lines were done perfectly -- the connection between the octave and the sestet is not well made for me.

David R.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Continuing on my crusade for less explicit bake-off sonnet titles, a sort of anti-map approach, it occurs to me that a title like The Wettest Place On Earth would lift this poem immeasurably, shifting emphasis where to it needs to be.

Nemo

[John Beaton]

I’m with Chris in liking this one. It starts with a tourist trip and ends with the revelation of a pearl of humanity in an oyster of natural and spiritual grandeur. And I’m with the poet all the way.

Hawaiians made the ascent to the summit of this place (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJOdbhCh-tw ) to lay gifts at an altar to Kane, their god of procreation and maker of the upper and lower heavens and of earth.

The cliff “telegraphs” human hurt, as when a boxer “telegraphs” a punch by making it so obvious his opponent can’t help but notice. I don’t think this word is terribly out-of-place in a poem with a helicopter in it. It’s an economical way of saying the cliff is drawing N’s attention to Kane’s cryng.

L12 asks why humans (normally a pleasure-seeking and cheerful bunch) brought gifts to such a place of tears and not to a comparable place (i.e. a mountain with a god at the top, so why not “Olympian”?) of happiness.

L13 and L14 answer: because Kane is crying in sympathy with the mourners of great human tragedy. In other words, the gift-bearers cared enough about the suffering to make the amazing ascent in order to assist with the mourning of it. I have no problem with the list—it simply evokes human tragedy, and cause for mourning, on a global scale.

My only slight quibble is with the geology. This phenomenon was formed by erosion and is not really a crater with a collapsed wall. However, the world calls it a caldera and this is a poem, not a treatise.

John

[A. E. Stallings]

The octave has much to admire. While I admire Chris' reading of this, though, I am not persuaded about the close. For one thing, "Olympian" throws me off in one direction of reference--and I'll admit here to a purely personal and irrational bias against promiscuous mixing of mythologies, say... and "Olympian" seems odd again against Dachau, etc. It's a big leap the poem takes, and a bold one--the poet definitely gets points for amibtion with the sonnet form--but am not sure it works. Part of it may be the list culminating in New York, which I can see because of the monumental visual falling of towers/ falling of caldera wall--that part seems to work--but which seems to be of rather a different scale, however devastating, than, say Dachau and Darfur and My Lai. I know others will disagree with me there, but so it is. The ending does put me in mind of the sonnet Primer by Alvarez, which is an alphabetical list of place names associated with human misery (and includes Dachau and My Lai, I think...), and might be instructive as a comparison.

[Bruce McBirney]

Well, hey, we’re all still standing! Enjoyable week. I know Kate has already posted something on her poem, and I hope all the other finalists will as well. I think that's been a Bake-off tradition.

My intentions for “Waialeale” were expressed by John, Chris and Janet in their posts better than anything I could say here. John’s detailed reading closely tracked what I was trying to do, and Chris’s and Janet’s posts beautifully described the spirit I was aiming for. Thanks for that, and to everyone else who commented, both positively and critically.

Alicia, I appreciate your kind words on the poem’s ambition, but realize you and a number of other folks felt the end of this one overshot--or undershot--the mark with a thud. So I’ll write mostly here about the concerns on the ending.

Regarding the last line, I chose the places listed there of 20th/21st-century atrocities to represent victims from different continents and of different ethnicities and races—white, black, Asian, and the American melting pot. My hope was to suggest the universality of suffering and cruelty even in our “modern” time, so far removed from the ancient place in the poem.

I don’t think that really came through. I didn’t mean to set any “ranking” of atrocities, nor to raise questions about whether the ones listed, or ones that weren’t, were even remotely “equal” in their scope (though any mass murder is an immeasurable tragedy for the lives affected, whether many or few). But using such a list at all may have undercut the poem’s meaning by steering too many readers down paths I didn’t intend.

The related concern was that there wasn’t a sufficient bridge from the octet’s travelogue to the last line’s tragedies. The train of thought there may not have been fully realized, nor set in order, in the poem. The general drift of those thoughts was from nature’s beauty/mystery, to the God/gods credited with nature, to the prevalence (brought to mind by the “tears” on the cliff) of suffering/evil in the world and jn humankind, despite the gods’ presumed power.

I don’t think that’s an untenable (or novel) train of thought, but six lines may be too short to get there in a fresh way. If there’s a better poem waiting to climb out of this one, it would probably have to be a longer one.

Several folks questioned “Olympian mirth.” I hoped that would suggest a contrast between the benign god of this island mountain (Kane, the Polynesian god of creation, fertility and thunder storms, for whom earlier Hawaiians built an altar there, as John said) and the haughtier, more "Western" god of Mt. Olympus (Zeus being much more noted for his love of power and pleasure than his compassion). Probably a stretch.

Finally, as to the critique on using initial line caps, no apology is needed…and none offered. (Not directed personally at Michael, who’s a good guy.) Some of us use them simply as a nod of respect toward, and continuity with, the poetry we loved at an early age that caused us to write poems to begin with. I have no ax to grind on whether anyone else uses initial caps, and don’t think better or worse of a poem either way. But when someone tells me, “There shall be no more initial caps,” it strikes me the same way as when some folks in other circles say, “There shall be no more rhyme and meter.” To each his own. Peace.

I’ll try to come back in a couple days to post something about Waialeale Crater itself.

As I said elsewhere, thanks to Tim for founding and perpetuating this; to Cathy for running the show beautifully, and setting all the discussions in motion with her insightful posts on all the poems; and to Turner Cassity for agreeing to be this year’s special guest.

Best to all!

[Bruce McBirney]

Earlier I said I’d post something about Waialeale Crater itself, so before letting this drop down the board, I’ll do that. It’s one of the most memorable places I’ve ever been. The crater is a semi-circle of sheer cliffs dropping thousands of feet from the eastern rim of Waialeale, the extinct (for about 400,000 years) central volcano on Kauai. The cliffs face out through a canyon toward the ocean. Waialeale gets something like 450 inches of rain per year, sometimes as much as 600 inches, giving rise to its longtime claim to be the wettest spot on earth. (Its “title” is challenged by a couple places in India, depending on what period of time you look at, but it’s certainly one of the wettest.)

As John noted in his post, despite the prior assumption that it’s the remains of a caldera, the “crater” was actually carved down into the volcanic mountainside by the heavy rainfall, rather than being blasted or bubbled up from below. (The real caldera is under the Alakai Swamp, on the broad mountaintop beyond the cliffs, long filled in and overgrown by a low, dense jungle.) But the caldera story is perpetuated by the helicopter pilots (including the one who took us there), who are the only people who go there regularly, due to its inaccessibility and the heavy rain. (I learned about the actual geology just in the past few months, reading online, after writing earlier drafts of this poem about a year ago.)

Regardless of the geology, it’s a beautiful and mysterious place. I’ve been to Kauai four times over the years, totaling about a month, and I’ve still never seen the peak of Waialeale, even from a distance, because it’s shrouded by clouds all but a few days a year. The last time we were there about seven years ago, we took the helicopter trip around the island and to Waialeale Crater. As we hovered by the somber, stream-covered cliff, we still couldn’t see the top—a blanket of clouds above us kept it out of view. One can well understand why it was considered a sacred place--its inaccessibility and mystery, as well as its being the source of the water that feeds Kauai’s seven rivers and lush vegetation. The early Hawaiian route to their altar on top was via a sheer finlike ridge to the northeast that was so hazardous no one’s been up that way in the past 100 years. The only way to the top on foot now is by an arduous multi-day hike from the other side of the mountain, which very few folks ever attempt.

Here’s a link to a photo from a helicopter I found online, with the cliffs approaching in the distance under typical cloud cover. When hovering close to the cliffs, you can see many more, smaller streams as well, that you can’t make out in the photo or the excellent video John posted.

http://www.heathermacauley.com/kauai%20Crater.jpg

This last link is apparently a rare instance when the clouds cleared from the mountaintop, but the streams were in full torrent. I didn’t actually see this myself. (I’m guessing the picture is a bit overexposed for artistic effect, but it’s a dramatic shot.)

http://165.248.241.70/Seward/Sada/Water/cratrwet.gif

‘Hope those links work.

Thanks again to all who participated!

--Bruce