The Poets' Graves Workshop

I think I'm a bit hungry for some poems with sound and this has pierced my ears. Like others, the sense isn't all quite clear. Some questions: Why is her body unaccompanied in its passion? I can picture that she as that which is more than her body could be absent, but not sure that's what's said. In...

Ray, quite masterful. The control of the cadence playing on the internal as well as end rhymes is simply musical. The volumes of detail amplify the narrator's character as well as play into the music. With a few more reads, I may change my mind, but for now the part about the character's relationshi...

Great Lakes, 1850 The girl met my eyes. She tightened my shawl to her throat and slipped under the dark upper-deck stairs silent on bare feet. My own farm lace-ups hadn't been off since Lake Champlain. I fought the sleet now, my brown felt drawn low and my bag to my chest as the steamer rounded one...

S1 and 2 are beautiful Larry, but 3 feels incomplete. Is the title in the same key as the poem? Really love that opening. I agree with Brian here, Larry. The opening sentence meanders along in quite a convoluted manner, but it's still lovely. I felt a warm breeze, lightly freighted with the scent o...

Ian, Wonderful piece in spite of its lack of title. The form is nicely executed though I wonder at its use with the content. For my ear, it comes off self-referential. May not be bad. The last line, flying in the face of the formal, does put a bit of theater in it.

Off the Curb Of the parts that forgetting hides with her old gingham dress is the look she once recalled he made in Charleston, at the bell, when the wick flickered. It’s the flutter of her skirt when hanging onto the trolley that stands out now, in spite of the warm August day, in spite of the radi...

Thanks for the notes, sorry for the delayed response. Yeah, suspected thrum as worn out, but? Good notes, will mull.

larry

From his ledger of sounds came an evening in the alley— in the alley off third when the thunder cracked. It had been an hour since dusk and the notes he made about rain. He went there to breathe, having bitten his lip after all she said; the juke box drowned her out with the sounds of ‘Round Midnigh...

Not sure I get anything from the idea of fingers drip-feeding into a vein. Also find the images trying to illuminate the premise that 'nutrients we need are hard to come by' fall a bit short. They are interesting but disconnected to S2?

larry

I'm liking this too. Any moment of contemplation wins me over. What if you were to replace the opening 'it' with 'A word nears the edge of sense?' It clears that vague pool and lets you revise the title which sounds a bit grandiloquent. The poem's conclusion could be debated that grasping for the cl...

A revision and a shift towards the sense intended. Again thanks for the notes.

larry

Liking this, too. Agree about the 'blue' line and at first I had difficulties with the last line as too 'telly.' Will is such an abstract it drains the life out of the poem. However, in context with Faulkner, it seems apropos. It does leave the poem wobbly, should it try to stand on its own...

larry

Ray, I did not 'get' the allusion to the play until reading the thread and am not sure what I take from it. Is the play informing the poem or the poem a puzzle about the play? Just a rhetorical question to illustrate my experience. The image at the turn: locomotive thunder dampening the strain of po...

Thanks Seth and Mac, the rhyme seems to be too much...not sure yet of change..

For me the 'paper dolls' infers the making of an idealized self, a culture, a want to be. They work with wind in various ways. I wonder at 'blind'. It describes a condition that doesn't figure with the other elements. She hears, touches and without being able to see the dolls limits their value as a...

I read this last night and it gave me pause. I noted how the poem had a rhyming couplet at its middle like a hinge. It reflects wonderfully the alternating of the 'reading' versus the 'doing' I stumble a bit at the idea of the magazine being about gardening. I wonder if its proximity to the acts of ...

Thanks so much for the notes. I was worried that the Phaethon allusion might be too obscure. A better epigram might be in order. I had wondered if the cadence could make up for the breaks with metrical order and thought the breaks to reflect the chaos, but I think your notes have changed my mind esp...

Legacy (rev) Shifting gears, he picks up speed, trails a scarf and grips the wheel of his father’s car. His wake curls through the bottoms of clouds, and soon the curious dash for cover. At this speed, he tilts the world on its rim, toppling an orbit’s proof of night and day. Above the stars his fen...

This phrase threw me out of the poem; it reads like a label on the side of a box, translated to English from Japanese: single pronged footwear product The image is a bit sparse; a shoe left at cliff's edge: almost a cliche? However there is something more here with life = missing sandal and play on ...

Also the opening has nice allusion to Hardy's 'Darkling Thrush' Also schemes and chaos work for me, fitting nicely with the allusions of the fall. Not sure the end has quite the punch it needs, though I've no suggestions at all.

larry

For me it’s too prosaic and shifting the POV from the boy to father to narrator undermines the dread and menace. Perhaps the poem could use some distancing to what the characters are thinking: ‘watching the river, the boy hears...’ etc. Why is Dad’s fixation with disaster bizarre? Who thinks this? T...

The poem made me think of Sexton's work and engaged me with the danger and surrender of its illusions. The lines being choppy felt as the sea against the wall, (despite the title's inference) so that works for me as mentioned by Geoff. I'm not sure I'd change the 'kneading.' For me it reflects the p...

With all the allusions to menstruation, I expected a more dramatic turn. The form coheres, but does it become a sonnet and at the loss of the poem. The repeated line adds nothing but sound and is sound contibuting anything to it? There is a kind of harmony inferrred by the idea of cycles, but the re...

As B noted, the biographical elements are great and in keeping with Stein's sense of things as named. Second sentence, "I might be easier..." wonderfully sets up the lens for the reader's way into the poem. I think the aphoristic language distracts and weakens the poem. IE; instead of "everything ol...

A couple of thoughts: If waiting for the sun it must have been absent. As it stands it may read as a modifier to sun for which we'd not be waiting? A similar issue occurs with "lingering warmth." Has mid-March brought it to linger or is the warmth there for us to linger in? Perhaps the language dist...