[R. Nemo Hill]

Jim, hover away, and thanks.


John, this one is from my travel journals, transcribed from prose to verse, and one of the distinctive qualities of those journals are their bug-stained pages, for the tropical air in Bali is always filled with something.


I hear you, Rick. And believe me, I do often often go back and excise Nemo-isms that seem too easily arrived at. I did question this one, especially since the word nowhere is more metrically ambiguous than anything else in the poem. Ultimately, I decided to stick with—but I am keeping an eye on it.


Cameron, I was finished with this one and still hadn't found a title for it (which for me, is rare). I hit on the present one in large part because of its scope in comparison to the minutiae of the poem itself, the sheer size/slenderness tension you were struck by.


Roger, I agree about the first stanza, it came out with such ease, and feels like an entirely natural marriage of colloquial speech and formal meter and rhyme. It actually came about when I noticed its first two lines, which were the beginning of a paragraph of prose in my journal, were perfectly paired metrically and effortlessly slant rhymed. The rest of the poem was hard labor, ha!

As for swift nowhere, well the swiftness is meant to denote how short the insects lives are, their impatience bringing them so swiftly to nowhere. The brilliance is the bulb they are circling, the only light in the predawn shadows. As far as the word invisible, well, it might be worth rooting around for a replacement, but I do kind of like how quickly the stanza is advanced by that one-word-line. Yet it's true, there is a tiny bit of a rhythmic vacuum there, so I shall ponder. As for your rearrangement of my phrases in the final stanza, well, when I first read it I thought, yes, that makes total sense. But going back, trying to understand why I took a less intuitive route, I found it has more to do with my eye than my mind, that what I see here, in front of me, the page, is the then, the past; while what is there, where the corpses have been exhaled to, is the new now. In the end, all the directions in space and in time begin to swirl in confusion in my mind the longer I think about them, and I grow more satisfied with that bewildered dance, a bewilderment that the clarity of your more logical equation might dispel. And as for exhale, I simple meant I inhaled, and my exhalation blew them from the page. I realize it's a descriptive short-cut, but the two-beat line seems to excuse such abbreviation of expression.


David, oh yes, the mood of that Thomas poem strikes me as akin to my own.


James, that slant rhyme in the second line of each stanza which becomes a true rhyme at stanza's end, that was really what held my attention here. I guess I've been hearing so many comments on the board these past months about strict formal fidelity that I wanted to see if I could have it both ways, if I could to hold tight to the form, yet give the form a little hiccup—but a precise hiccup. Thank-you for noticing!


Thanks, Max. The poem is so slender, as Cameron puts it, that whatever strength it has seems almost aromatic to me, like the perfume from a coil of incense smoke.


Nemo

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Hi Nemo,

It is incredible how consciousness can vary so much with external pressures. I was not in a good place when I first read this and came across the inversion of ‘brilliance drawn’ and it threw me out. I am still not enamoured but I am glad I came back. The deft touch here now pleases me greatly.

Jan

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes, Jan, the moment is as important as the writer and the reader, a humbling truth.

The root of that inversion was the desire to repeat the structure of the language there:

consumed by flight,
by brilliance drawn

I like that effect, the momentum it creates, and I will often twist customary grammar to accommodate it. If I un-invert the line, drawn by brilliance, it loses it sonic force, the word by is repeated, but the iambic metrical pattern is not. It's the combination of the two that works for me.

Nemo

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

My aversion to the construction is purely a personal foible Nemo. I did not mean it as a negative crit.

Jan

[R. Nemo Hill]

Positive, negative, whatever, it's all just a discussion, Jan.

Nemo