[Julie Steiner]

My favorite part was the switch from "the clothes of yesteryear" to "the suits of yesteryear" in the spurned-flirtation stanza.

(Overall, this poem can't compete with some of this author's other parodies, but perfection is a hard act to follow.)

[Keith Kaplon]

Ou sont les habits d'entant?

Ou sont les vetements?

Absolutey wonderful and very entertaining.

[Allen Tice]

Since the references are British, things might work differently there. In Brooklyn, no man not a banker or Court Street attorney of any age would be caught standing still on the street in a vest (possibly implied in S2L2). He would have to be in rapid motion to transportation or indoors somewhere.

"Searching the Title" (as the current title stands): Why should the narrator be storing negligees unless he is a Bluebeard, who has stashed the skeleta of two score women somewhere? O fearful meditation. I don't like a gent who does down folks, men or ladies. I think the pun in the title as it stands doesn't justify itself, it merely confuses poor me with transgressive innuendos. The thought that he might like to dress up in "a woman's light dressing gown, typically made of a filmy, soft fabric" doesn't sitwell with the rest of the poem.

I do think the fellow is more a dandy than I care for, but if it worked for him in the 20th Century.... His reference to knee-touching brings up a subtle point : if not taken as a kind of hyperbole introduced for the sake of humor and allusive illustration, it risks the criticism that can be made of almost all quasi-erotic physical contact when it appears in a poem. Example : Person of Type 1 is revulsed by physical contact with Person of Type 2 (whatever the Types might be). To refer to that in a public manner as in a poem edges toward an abyss, the abyss of losing the Type 1 reader completely. Cavafy went far into that danger area, though usually with less detail. Perhaps for some readers this poet has also?

I like the poem. That said, I don't think it achieves its seeming intent of being a poem that might last a bit. It's a "funny once." Maybe a "sad once."

[Orwn Acra]

No vests in Brooklyn? Have you seen the hipster population?

[Allen Tice]

Sorry, you're quite right about the vests. I have to update my image bank. But you don't live in downtown Brooklyn. I have a striking vest or two I will blind people with at cold winter poetry readings. Or not.

[R. S. Gwynn]

This could be breezier (nice poetic term) if it were all tetrameter. Of course, so would "Loving in Truth and fain in verse my love to show" if its seams were just taken in a bit.

[Mary Meriam]

Well, this is a winner in my book, beginning with the title. Thought, movement, wit, drama, wordplay, good variation in enjambments, and fun unforced rhymes. I see by the punctuation outside the quote marks that this must have been written by a non-American. But in any case, I can hear an English accent. Everyone else seems to know, but I don't know who wrote it.

Favorite lines:

this banker favors skin-snug jeans that sway
each time she moves, and whispers, “Call me Kay”.

They’re gone, all gone, on golden parachutes,
to seek the sun and gargle chardonnay;

[Maryann Corbett]

I'm starting to be suspicious about the name in that title....

[Janice D. Soderling]

do you mean the Hitchcock reference?

[Maryann Corbett]

Er, no, I mean the poet reference. But I don't know anything, so there is no bean-spilling here.