[Tim Murphy]

I'm with Susan. Breaking at line twelve makes for an excrutiatingly good interstanzaic enjambment.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Susan and Tim have given you good advice, and I concur: the break at line 12 is a good idea, uncapitalized, as Susan says. And I want to tell you that as the wife of an infantryman--veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and the Rhine Crossing--I felt this poem in my bones.

[Tim Murphy]

I have asked one of our most senior members to comment on Bill's poem. Frankly, I was a little flabbergasted by how negatively he reacted to it. I have shared these remarks with Rhina and Bill. Tony asked that they not be posted. Bill asked that I secure Tony's request to post them. I just talked to him, and he's impressed that Bill wants this to be discussed.

"Thank you very much for faxing Bill Daugherty's poem and your own. But let me further add that I am by no means as smitten by D's poem as you are, and would prefer that you omit any mention of my views at the Eratosphere. ' Serenades' sems to me, first, lumbering in its music; awkward and ungainly; this is especially true of the concluding lines of all three stanzas. Secondly, the poem pivots on the questionably "witty" change of referent to the "you" from stanza to stanza. In the first, a reader will assume that the addressee is some absent love, back home, perhaps. (But "Hidden creatures call" is an unjustified change in direction, as well as gramatically confusing. In the second stanza, the speaker both sees and doesn't see the enemy (who is 'shadow number six') therefore somewhat visible, especially as revealed "through a parting veil," but yet aimed at "without a sight," perhaps firing "from the hip." Part of the erotic feeling from the first stanza drifts into the second, now rendered obsessive through guilt. But, most unpleasant of all, it continues to drift into the third stanza, by which time the original beloved has been totally forgotten, and the erotic note, even when renounced, is directed at God. There is something crude about this: vulgar, adolescent, immature. A child's petulance, commanding God to go away."

--Anthony Hecht

I thank Tony for carefully expressing an opinion I vehemently disagree with, and I admire Bill for asking that Mr. Hecht's views be made known.

Personal thoughts on this. First of all, my reaction to this poem probably has much to do with my not having served in Viet Nam. With guilt for not having been cannon fodder, as Bill was. Unlike Tony, I have never seen a comrade commanded to mow down by machine gun 30 women and children advancing under the white flag of surrender. The horrors Tony and Bill have experienced I escaped by "virtue" of my homosexuality, which rendered me unfit to serve my country.

Second, I've been praised to the skies and dumped on by all kinds of famous poets. Richard Howard, one of my teachers at Yale, saw an early manuscript of Deed of Gift, and told Ed Hirsch, "I fear he is too long divorced from the discourse of contemporary poetry." I asked permission to use that as a blurb, and my letter received no response. He also told Hirsch that the only poem in that slim manuscript which fully disclosed Murphy was "Martinique," which is written in French. I laughed at the first comment and learned a great deal from the second. The latter was perhaps the best crit I ever got. It remade me as a poet. I hope that Bill can similarly profit from the comments of Anthony Hecht.

[Richard Wakefield]

I find some real pleasures here, but I also have some of the same reservations that have already been expressed. The meter, to my ear, does seem mechanical, and some words, indeed, whole lines, seem rhyme driven: "I think of you and plans we made" could be lifted from almost any pop song, or country song, for that matter. And "shadow number six" is almost painful.
The strengths, though, are great: the shifting meanings of "you" and "sleep" are true poetry, and the last two lines rise very, very high.
Richard

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

I've already responded at length to this poem, which I admire greatly, so I won't say any more on that. But I do want to second Tim's comments on the possibility--no, probability--of learning from the negative criticism of poets whose work we admire and respect. What it does is to force a reappraisal, an opportunity for justification in one's own mind, for verbal choices that are generally made without calculation. If that reappraisal is done honestly, it can lead to a better understanding of why we do what we do in specific poems, and that's always valuable--if it's done as real discovery and not as a way to respond and refute the critic. At the end of the process of thinking through such criticism, sometimes I've seen how I should have done better, and sometimes I've been reassured that what I did was, for better of worse, what that poem needed from me, despite the disagreement with someone I would have wanted very much to please. In either case, the thought involved has been even more valuable and instructive than painful.

[Tim Murphy]

I've blithered entirely too much about this poem in prose. So let me try to say what I feel about Daugherty (and his request that Hecht's comments be posted) in a martial epigram:

A Soldier

Though recoiling like a coward
lies within his comprehension,
he’s a truck with no suspension
that has only one gear, forward.

[David Mason]

Tim Murphy asked me to comment on the comments given in this thread, and I feel very tentative about doing so, but on the whole I'm closer to Wakefield and Hecht than to Murphy on this score. The poem does remind me of Owen, and that's part of my trouble with it. Not the strongest Owen, but the weaker work before he had found his more rigorous voice. I think something of the contemporary voice is missing from these measures and on the whole it sounds to me rather dated, despite the references to more recent war. The "god of wonder and of might/depart" passage calls on conventional phrasing as the lesser Georgians might, and I don't think the poem has really given us anything we don't already have from other war poems. Actually "God of wonder and of might" sounds more like an old Christmas carol, "We Three Kings," to me.

Again, I'm saying this with due deference to the author and all concerned on the thread. Just trying to give a brief impression of how the poem strikes me.

Dave

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 04, 2004).]

[R. S. Gwynn]

I think I'll have to go with Dave on this one. It has several good moments, but there's something Nashville about the way the refrain is handled. Owens's "Strange Meeting" is the poem I'd come back to regarding this.

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Bill

Tim has invited me to comment on this poem in the light of Anthony Hecht’s remarks. I have to say that Mr Hecht’s views broadly coincide with my own. This seems rhythmically awkward throughout and particularly at the close of each of the three stanzas. (I assume the version Mr Hecht saw was printed in that way.) The pentameter jars inasmuch as the pattern of tetrameters and trimeters which precede encourages the expectation of a final line of three or perhaps four beats. (The degree of closure would differ in each case.) Though some might argue that this jarring effect was a kind of metrical mimesis, for me it merely jars. The enjambment from stanza 2 to stanza 3 I find melodramatic, rather than dramatic. As to the diction, David Mason has remarked on the odd blend of modern ballad and hymnody. “Ambuscade” sounds slightly archaic to my ear, though my OED suggests it may perhaps still have some currency as a technical military term. In my opinion, the shift of addressee from stanza to stanza is not as a concept flawed, and I would not take so severe a view of it as Mr Hecht; but, as phrased here and in the context created by the whole poem, it does not quite come off. I should add that the material has much poetic potential.

I greatly admire your openness and courage in urging the posting of Mr Hecht’s comments. It is not what I should have done, I am sure. From your postings in the past, however, it is exactly what I would have expected of you.

Kind regards

Clive Watkins

[David Anthony]

Nobody asked me to comment, and quite rightly as I'm far beyond my depth.
However....
In S1, I think the address is both to an absent lover, and to death--a wish for death (dying of the light) in preference to the guilt and horrors to come.
("Ambuscade" was common usage at that time in Vietnam, as I recall from the news reports.)
The horror of the memories that must be lived with thereafter, day after day: when we run out of people to blame, we blame God.
I think it's flawed but a fine poem. I wish I had written it.
Apologies for the intrusion.
David