[John Riley]

I've been reading it and to me, it is a poem about the moon with some speculations grounded in some abstractions. The questions you ask have no answers which provide the opportunity to speculate about armadillos and algebra and Indian ink. I don't see anything startling or new in the imagery. Its reach toward originality is grounded in the speculations and they could easily be interchanged with other speculations. I could envision a tin pan alley songwriter trying them out and rejecting them because they don't rhyme. I guess I'm missing something and am more than willing to have it pointed out to me.

Best

[Jane Crowson]

John, thank-you for replying - it's good to know your thoughts on this, and shows me where I'm not communicating.

I do want to show that artists/poets/humans generally appropriate the moon - that ideas of the moon are often abstractions - and a kind of nonsense (how can anyone know what the moon tastes like?!)

I also want the poem to look at how, ultimately, the moon, as a physical thing, most often serves as a backdrop to human drama (in this case, the falling/suicide).

Maybe I need to return to a longer version, and I've trimmed this down too much. Either way, it's useful to have a perspective that shows where and how this doesn't work.

Sarah-Jane

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

I think it does what it should now. Three senses come to play but only one is really dwells in the same world as the moon. The visual actually has skin in the moon's fall. So it sees something actually outside of itself. I do miss the woman as opposed to the figure. More risk in it I think.