[Robin Helweg-Larsen]

A very nice listing of all the meanings of X that one can think of, with a wonderful and unexpected punchline for the final couplet. (But I don't subscribe to the idea that the earlier meanings have anything to do with the personal relationship.)

[Kyle Norwood]

Clever and skillful. The lines are nicely balanced, and each of the quatrains has one enjambement for variety. It's probably inevitable that this kind of list-poem will be mostly end-stopped.

[Mary Meriam]

I'll guess this is David Callin's fine, precise voice and thought. I love a poem with a lot of end-stopped lines. It makes the enjambments all the more moving.

[James Watkins]

I'm with Robin on this one. The poem is nice and neat, skillfully crafted, but I don't see it as something a real person would be thinking and saying after a breakup. I see it more as something a person wanting to write a sonnet about a breakup would say/think. There's no ache, no passion, no urgency. It's clever, and that's it. Also, I'm questioning whether a sonnet that was previously workshopped on Eratosphere, something several people are already familiar with and may have even helped create, should be in a supposedly anonymous contest.

[David Danoff]

This is the sort of thing that strikes me as more clever than moving. It gets somewhere by the end--and I like the end quite a bit--but the first 9 or 10 lines are just an exhibition of virtuosity for its own sake. I don't see that they're doing anything to set up or comment on the personal situation; they're just ringing variations on the theme until it's time for the turn. And the choppiness bugs me, even if it's hard to avoid with a list.

[Steven E. Gonzales]

The turn of this poem punched me in the face, and that's what I like about poetry; I wait to be knocked out cold.

I love it because I'm reading this list and going "uh huh, yeah, okay these are things that X can be," and the listing makes me think I'm not going to be so satisfied with the end, but then I find myself moved by it.

This is the kind of poetry I seek to read.

[Paddy Raghunathan]

Lovely list poem, and as the DG observes, does not have a monotonous tone to it.

[Michael Cantor]

It's a very good poem, but I'm another who feels that it's a bit too clever, that there isn't enough there beyond the cleverness, that the cleverness goes on a bit too long. Strangely (I hope this doesn't bring the wrath of the Sphere down on me) I think I would like it better as a ten-liner - eliminate the first or second stanza.

[Mark McDonnell]

Oh dear, I'm going to be another rare voice of dissent on this one. Although I do think it's pretty clever, it strikes me as a language game that goes on for too long, something that could have been produced by two people throwing ideas at each other, so therefore lacks that sense of the careful working through of individual experience or argument that I want from a sonnet. You could do the same thing with, say, the word 'set' (the word with the most separate dictionary definitions fact-fans, or used to be): 'A place the humble badger makes his home/the thing a jelly does before you eat' etc.

I also think that after all the build up the 'twist' ending doesn't quite work. All the examples have been definitions of 'X', where the ending is clearly 'ex'. That's different isn't is?

I'm with Michael that this would work best as a clever 10 liner, with S2 being the one to go: the clothing image sounds prosy and the film image, while jokey, sounds silly and prudish.

Sorry.

[David Danoff]

I almost suggested making this shorter: 4 or 6 lines of set up, followed by the couplet.

But I think the larger problem is the mishmash quality of the list. If all the details contributed, subtly, to an atmosphere of curdled romance, disappointment, longing, self-blame, whatever--it would work at 6 lines, or it work as a sonnet.

As it is, we've got some stuff that I think does contribute to setting up the couplet (promised cache of treasure, unknown quantity, chromosome, infinity), but a bunch of other stuff mixed in that's off in terms of content and tone (skull and crossbones, ballplayers, clothing size). And some stuff that could go either way.

I could see having a more positive response to the ending, if I felt like the rest of the poem had (however subtly) set us up for the personal revelation.