[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Alex!

As an asexual who is astonished to find herself happily married to a vigorously heterosexual man for the past thirty-one years, I am not the ideal audience for this poem. But I thought I'd let you know that I'm puzzled by several things here, in case it's helpful.

I'll give the narrator a pass on using "love" interchangeably with "lust," since that's pretty traditional.

"just time enough to scan silhouette" — This sounds like a Tontoism for the sake of meter, but I can't see why, since the meter would actually be smoother with an unstressed syllable between "scan" and "silhouette." What's going on there?

The word "fête" seems off to me. I wouldn't characterize typical club activities such as buying an attractive stranger a drink as fêting that person. Throwing someone a party with lots of other people, all there to honor someone's birthday or retirement, sure. But a fête is a collective celebration of one person, not just one person expressing appreciation for another.

I also don't think "fecund" is the right word, despite the alliteration. "Nubile," maybe, which refers to sexual attractiveness but not necessarily to fertility. I have trouble picturing the relevance of fecundity in a nightclub setting. Few men in a nightclub are there in search of the ideal vessel and nourisher for their future offspring, and their delight in a woman's hips and breasts probably has nothing to do with the implications for efficient childbirth and milk production.

Also, fecundity quite literally makes women far LESS sexy, due to stretch marks, weight gain, a drastic diminishment of breast size, exhaustion and lack of libido, etc., etc.

I'm not sure what the distilled "insight" is. I'm guessing it's not that people who search only for shallow, transient beauty find exactly what they were looking for, and then are disappointed that the resulting relationship (and the beauty itself) is shallow and transient, since that seems pretty self-evident to me.

Who or what is "left in homes"? Insight? The formerly young women? The formerly young men? (Your comments about "twilit blights" referring to age make me briefly wonder if "left in homes" is actually referring to retirement homes, but I decided that that couldn't be what you meant.)

Finally, I don't understand why you are breaking the final line, which is the equivalent of underlining and bolding the dropped text, after a hugely dramatic, suspenseful pause. To me, the final phrase does not seem significant enough to bear that sort of extreme emphasis without seeming anticlimactic. But it's quite possibly that I'm missing a point that isn't lost on other readers.

[Alex Pepple]

Thanks for these responses and perspectives, Alessio and Julie!

Alessio, your response shows you’re well engaged with what the poem is trying to do in terms of mood, actions, and outcome! It's really gratifying to hear that those opening lines captured the authentic feeling of club experiences for you. Your description of OTEL in Florence - that sense of "vague twisting black shadow on beat to the music" with feelings as "frenzied as the sight" - captures well what I was trying to convey with "blaze" and the immediacy of that scanning moment. Your appreciation for the word choice of "blaze" over alternatives like "pass" or "fly" shows you understand the club-scene intensity and chaos I wanted to evoke. That's exactly the kind of visceral, almost overwhelming sensation the poem aims to capture in those opening lines. And it means a lot how you, as a reader, connect with the sensory and emotional truth of what the poem is trying to express. Your comment gives me confidence that the poem is achieving its intended effect of capturing those fleeting, intense moments of attraction and connection in club settings. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughtful response!

Julie, thank you for your detailed critique. While we clearly have different perspectives on the poem, I appreciate you taking the time to engage with it so thoroughly. Regarding your specific points:

"Just time enough" is standard English emphasizing minimal duration - the same construction as "just enough money" or "just enough space." "Fête" here simply means "to honor" or "celebrate" (per Merriam-Webster, one definition, applicable here is “to pay high honor to”), which is perfectly appropriate for appreciating someone's beauty—and I see using fete as an intensifier of the act of celebrating the person, especially as it relates to the speaker’s group. Still, if this word feels “off” to several readers, I may need to find a different word here!

And "Fecund" is used in its aesthetic sense of fertility and vitality—especially in a metaphorically nuanced sense—the visual appeal of youth and life force, not literal reproductive capacity, and certainly not as a reference to motherhood. Nubile" or another adjective might communicate the sense of youthful allure more cleanly, and I may revisit that… and the rhymes.

The "insight" refers to wisdom gained through experience and aging, distilled over years. "Left in homes" refers to the speakers in their later years, placed in elder care facilities—the contrast between the vibrant nights of youth and the containment of old age

The line break creates a visual metaphor for the separation between youth and age, with the final phrase representing the distance we've traveled from those earlier experiences: the break is meant to suggest a kind of temporal gap mimicking the gulf between youth and old age. But I can also see how it could come off as overemphasis, especially if the payoff isn’t dramatic enough for everyone. I’ll keep an eye on whether it serves or detracts from the poem’s closure as further feedback comes in.

On agency and gender, I do see how the poem’s perspective could be critiqued for its focus on the male gaze and the fleeting, almost de-personalized connections depicted. The poem intentionally leans into the limitations and consequences of that viewpoint, but I agree that further nuance could make this clearer—or perhaps universalize the theme even more, as Matt suggested earlier.

I understand the poem may not resonate with everyone, and I respect that different readers will have different responses to its themes and approach. Poetry often works differently for different readers and audiences, and that's part of the art form's nature.

Thus, in the final analysis, I’m hoping that even with the poem’s concise characterizations, there are enough anchors of the sense and meaning to connect the dots and sort out the layers of significance. Or if not, to at least determine the most straightforward meaning of the poem (assuming I didn’t have to explain as much as I’ve done with this poem—contrary to my usual tendency!)

Thank you again for your engagement with the poem. It really helps to see how readers are reading and understanding it. And even though it might seem like a mixed bag thus far, I’m I’m grateful to see the poem spark this range of engagement and that several are following most of what the poem is attempting to do.

Cheers,
…Alex

[Max Goodman]

I struggle to understand this one.

"Then," beginning the poem midstream, following something untold, suggests that the poem is intentionally cryptic, or eager for the reader piece things together and maybe to feel in-the-know.

"love would blaze through us" brings to mind two lovers. The mention of the blonde will soon dispel this misconception, making me go to the title and assume that "us" means male clientele of a night club.

"within a second," parsing the experience minutely, resists satisfactory parsing itself. "Second" is a precise, measuring word. "Within" suggests approximation regarding the time. That precisely measured second is not the precise length of time it took love to blaze, but the container in which the blazing occurred. It's hard for me to relate this sense of time to anything I've experienced.

"just time enough" means "that's all the time it took" after I reject the initial implication that the men are under some time-restriction and have barely been given enough time:

"to scan silhouette": As has been mentioned, the lack of an article feels awkward. The focus on shape is appropriate, though I don't know that yet. The blonde hasn't yet been mentioned, so this still feels cryptic.

"fête blonde or not" is the phrase that allows me uncertainly to puzzle this out: The men in the club in less than a second evaluate each woman based on her shape. "Fêting" doesn't describe anything I imagine men doing in these clubs. (Maybe the in-the-know crowd the poem is for are club-goers who would scoff at my ignorance here.) Tip her? Applaud? Hoot? The decision to do any of those would take more than a second, I think. The choice of which women to enjoy and focus on might be that quick, but that doesn't feel to me like fêting.

"fête blonde" is another phrase that feels as though it is missing a connecting word.

"the homage honed on": I can't follow in what sense any homage/fêting is honed on its subject/recipient. The length or volume of the applause, the precise tone of the hoot is honed on the woman's precise shape or other qualities? "Honed" suggests to me more focus on the, let's say, applause, than I imagine applauders giving it, particularly in this situation in which the applause might draw less of the applauder's focus even than it would normally.

I assume that, despite their sharing a sentence, by the homage honing we've moved past that first fraction of a second into the time after it.

"fecund frame": This is strongly accurate; the more fecund a woman's frame--science tells us--the more attractive to men. It doesn't, though, evoke for me the experience of appreciating a woman's shape. My attraction to her fecundity happens below the conscious level.

"face": Yes.

"as the allure was whet": The allure (too abstract a word to aid the image, visually or otherwise) does the whetting, I think, rather than receiving it.

"Insight distilled through years of twilit blights" is very abstract. I'm lost. "Blights" suggests that this experience is negative. Or maybe, since I associate this experience with time later than twilight, and indoors, it is some unnamed blights that drive the clientele to the clubs. The insight is withheld from me--or I'm too stupid to understand it.

"till left in homes" feels intentionally cryptic. Again a connecting word is withheld. "Our homes"? The poem seems to want to be less specific, leave open a variety of possibilities. I don't understand why, and don't have a clear sense of what possibilities the poem suggests. Even "our homes" doesn't have much meaning for me as places where insight is left.

"beyond our bygone nights": The placement at the end and the line break suggest that this is the poem's crucial destination. It suggests a fellowship between the men (or the men and the women?), and again evokes that couple from the first line.

None of this has much to do with what I normally associate with "love." Maybe that's the core of the poem, the insistence on calling this love meant to prompt us to ponder the experience described, or the experience of the two lovers evoked by the first (and last?) line(s).

FWIW.

[Alex Pepple]

Hello, Max,

Thank you for this careful, detailed engagement with the poem. I genuinely appreciate your willingness to puzzle through its phrases, and you raise fair questions about what’s being suggested versus what’s being made explicit.

I sense some of your take tends toward a scientific-type precision that doesn’t quite fit the poem. There are not always explicit connections in literal sense given that the poem relies on compression, metaphor, and implication. You’re right that the poem compresses experience in a way that leaves connections implicit and sometimes ambiguous. Thus, similar to how “just a second” in everyday speech doesn’t necessarily means a precise second, the “within a second” is indeed meant more for its connotation of suddenness and brevity, not as a precise measure, and the imagery and diction are intentionally layered and, at times, oblique—relying on the associative logic of poetry rather than direct narrative.

I recognize that this can make the poem feel cryptic or withholding, especially when the connections are more emotional or metaphorical than logical or expository. I do see the value in your close reading of individual word choices, and it’s useful to hear which ones might obstruct rather than enrich the meaning for some readers.

In writing this, I hoped to evoke the fleeting, almost automatic rituals of attraction and social display that happen in nightlife settings, and the ways in which these early, impulsive gestures echo—sometimes hollowly—through later years. But I fully understand that poems work differently for different readers, and your honest, detailed feedback is invaluable as I consider further revisions.

Thank you again for your close reading and for pushing me to think more deeply about the poem’s clarity and accessibility.

Cheers,
...Alex

[Matt Q]

Hi Alex,

I think the switch to "insight" clarifies things a little for me, since it allows the insight to occur after the night club love-flaring of youth, when presumably the men had little or no insight. However, I still struggle to understand the final sentence.

Insight distilled through years of twilit blights

I take it "distilled" is the main verb here (though I do also find myself trying to read this is a noun-phrase, i.e, "insight that had been distillled...", but then no other candidate for main verb comes). So, there already was insight, prior to the years of blight, but these twilight years later clarified/purified it. So, I'm reading: after those love-flaring years we gained some insight (into love, maybe, or into women, or life) and that was clarified/purified by the hardships/challenges of old age.

till left in homes / beyond our bygone nights

here I read: until it (the insight) was left in homes / beyond our bygone nights.

So, what does it mean for the insight to be left in homes? Where do the men go, leaving their their homes and their insight behind them? Or do the men stay in the homes, and their distilled insight is left (behind) in the past? Ah, or do they die in these homes, leaving their insight behind them. I guess the homes could be marital homes or they could be care homes. In the UK, at least, "home" is often used as shorthand for "care home".

Ah, thinking of the blights of old age, maybe they lose the insight as their minds deteriorate into dementia?

Or do you mean that "until we were left in homes"? But I don't think that this is what the sentence says. The subject seems to be "insight", not "we".

best,

Matt