[Kevin Cutrer]

The sestet feels like a different, better poem than the octave. I am not a huge fan of lists such as we get in the first few lines. The speaker's attitude toward these messages: mm-hmm, sums up my feelings about the octet.

But the close is gorgeous.

[Terese Coe]

Originally Posted by Turner Cassity

Um Português

      (for Paulo)


That phone line is so old I rarely answer.
Retrieving messages is just routine:
my credit score, pitched sales, the march for cancer,
cheap satellite tv—a general theme.
I’ve been away. Press play, m-hmm, delete...
I’m caught off-guard—and smiling, raise my head.
I recognize your accent instantly
and yet it isn’t you. It says: you’re dead.

The winter fog that rolled in from the coast
would swallow up that old stone house, and hold me
for days on end, alone. That haunts me most.
“You’ve such respect for silence—” you once told me,
“—you leave the room, and gently close the door.”
The ghost in my machine says nothing more.



Comments:

I don’t know how else to say this: in this quite good poem there is a better poem trying to get out. Nothing is easier than to revise the life out of a poem, but in this case revising might help, though I would not presume to suggest what revisions to make.

I agree there is a better poem in this, but it has great power. Everything about it is good except for two areas:

1. "a general theme" seems to be there for the rhyme only. It doesn't add anything, and the preceding list hardly constitutes a single theme. Marketing? Harassment? Robocalls?

2. The final line could be more original.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Thanks, all.

I must say that the comment which struck me most personally was Petra's, who mentioned that the poem felt so intensely private to her that she was looking in at it through a glass of some sort. This is certainly one of the most private poems that I've ever written, written out of and in the midst of a grief that is not feigned in any literary way. Which is why it was never work-shopped on the Sphere (though it was published in 14 by 14 soon after it was written).

As such it was also written far more quickly than I usually write, and it was not revised much at all. So as to whether there is a more polished poem lurking inside it, well, there may well be--but we will never know, because my heart won't let me touch it. I'll confess that for me it's immediacy keeps alive a grief that I wish to preserve those first quietly wrenching moments of. The somewhat numbing list of the octet isn't, to my mind, something the poem could lose: I can think of no better way to have a huge truth burst in upon the quotidian (as Kate put it) than to allow that quotidian its visceral hold for long enough to lull the text into numbed somnolence. I had originally thought to replace a general theme with a shallow stream, but in the end opted for a lack of metaphor in favor of dull reportage.

The lines about the respect for silence are, by the way, almost verbatim. And as for the perhaps 'unoriginal' trope of the ghost in the machine it is one of my favorite phrases, one that casts such a net of echoes in my mind, that I am powerless to resist it.

If anything, I feel that the word alone in the sestet may be, for me, the sonnet's only misstep--well, not misstep exactly--but misleading step. The arc of the relationship underlying the poem was thereby laid open to a wide number of interpretations. Yet in the end I think that's fine: and thus we are brought back to the innate privacy of the poem. For the grief to become real, it must in the end be made real by each individual reader, and so the relationship must be personalized each time all over again. In that way I am content with the poem: that it might be able to keep alive a deep grief, even independent of me, is my gift to Paulo.

Nemo