Saturday, April 24, 2004

comments on version 2

I remember Richard Speakes commenting on the block thick look of my poems of the time. I began putting in stanza breaks more frequently after that. A stanza break really does give the eye relief. Since we're using lines here, might as well use stanza breaks to help highlight what the line is doing. Otherwise it's much like a block of prose with tight margins.

I like the poem's rush of lists so would like to keep that. I like the poem's sound play ("brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires" being a line of which I'm quite fond). Here I remember Robert Hass quoting another poet (or novelist?), "Kill your babies." Hass shook his head sadly. "He must have been a terrible teacher."

(I did a quick google search on "Kill your babies," and found instances where it occurs as writerly advice but the best attribution I saw was, "a writing teacher once told me.")

This version makes more sense than the first. I did lose some of the poem's forward rush. Which I miss.

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