[Yves S L]

Hello Calli,

I reckon "when piss leaks from the witch's bottle" is too sour a note in its context, but I do feel that the poem has improved, that in the latest revision it is is more greater than the sum of its parts.

Yeah.

[Carl Copeland]

Your poems always sing, Cally, and this one is no exception. The music and the beauty of the words keep me happy even where the meaning escapes me, as in “bolts the clown.” It’s a Dylan high (Thomas and Bob both): I often understand them less than I do you, but I get high on them anyway.

You really had me grooving to the trimeter of the first three lines, so I stumbled through the apparent tetrameter of S1L4 and dimeter of S1L6. (The latter reads most naturally as “when ETna blows SMOKE rings.”) Both, in themselves, are great lines, as others have said, but I regretted losing the beat.

One thing I didn’t get is how “don’t” turns to “do” in the poem. The first two stanzas paint a dark picture, which might provoke us to “do” something about it, but the third stanza seems to find a bleak, but beautiful refuge in the natural world. That was Paula’s point, though she was talking about the original stanza, and the revision makes it even stronger. The poem really does turn “don’t” into “dew,” rather than “do,” as Nemo put it.

That said, the new third stanza is my favorite, and my favorite lines are the same as Mary’s. “The hunch of the half-starved possum gnawing the blackberry canes” is so vivid that I know you were there.

Just when I was getting used to all the whens without follow-through, “but the fool who …” raised another false hope of a complete sentence. The idea, I guess, is to keep us in suspension to the end.

In “humming about nothing new,” you’ve pulled off the supposedly impossible three consecutive unstressed syllables. That’s the way I naturally read it, and it worked for me.

Cally, I apologize for neglecting to mention you in a neighboring thread among recent Deep End divers. Great to see you, Rick, Siham and Mary making such flawless entries!

[John Riley]

Cally, I love the revision. There is more strength in each line. Each line is a poem and the space allows me to wonder. Not decide, to wonder. I am trying to escape answers in my golden years. All my life has been analyzing and making decisions. It gives us the dangerous determination that all things can be understood. What we don't understand is what is valuable, and memorable. My wife, bless her, has filled our yards with wild and domesticated flowers and plants. I don't know the names of all of them but when I sit outside as my knee slowly heals their being there is what means to me. I don't understand them and no amount of information will make me understand them. I've been trying to understand humans my entire life. I even focused my studies on history and philosophy and literature in a triple attempt to convince myself I knew, I understood, human nature. What a foolish boy I was!

I apologize for talking so much about myself "when the door doesn't stop the wind" says everything I said in seven words. I so agree with you. Let's look at the surface for a while. So much time and effort is spent trying to understand what is under the surface when art works to focus our attention on what we SEE. That is the challenge in poetry or any genre of writing. To use words, the tools used to attempt to carve out an understanding of our existence, to make images and realizations that can only appear on the surface. It's the challenge painters and musicians don't have.

This poem is a revelation of that necessity and an example of how what is needed can be done. So "when the clock looks down on you" don't be "the fool who reads into it."

I know I'm gushing. It's because what this poem does is so needed not only in the poetry world but in the world in general. Let us all stop trying to understand and instead look and touch and reveal. That's where the spirit wants to be. Where it can reveal to us the actual.

Thanks, Cally

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes.

Nemo

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Memsical!!! YAY!!!! Yes, it was funny how the initial caps felt right, but once the poem became more itself, they felt wrong! Those lines feel alive, I suppose, because they are exactly the world I'm living in at this moment—the slowed-down midwinter world with deep rain and critters nibbling the stalks in my veggie garden! These are the things of the world that hold me in place.


ARROW!!!!! I am SO glad you feel this way! And I know exactly what you mean. The original poem came out all in a rush, all there. Strange baby! I didn't know what it was, or what to do with it, which is why I posted it. As always on the Sphere, getting reactions truly helped me begin the cold work process. After that first hot rush of image and sound—the settling and chiselling, helping it find what it needs to be. I think at the time of writing the original version, I was really feeling a mood in the world of fractured haste, of restraints coming off—things that need to be in place, of being bombarded with superficial messages. I try to stay away from the news, and never use 'social media', but I must have been reading too much that day, and I just felt like WHOA!! But you were right that the ending wasn't right. It just wasn't there yet. So, love you, and THANK YOU!!!!!!!!! -------------->>>>>>>>


Yves! So glad you see the improvement! I like the sound of piss together with circus in the next line. And I've always loved witch's bottles filled with urine hidden in the walls or floors as protection against bad magic. If the piss leaks, good magic loses its power. I kind of like the word "piss" in this context. BUT I will keep the line under consideration, I promise! Thank you!

Carl, first, no need to apologise! Siham, Rick and Mary taught me so much in my beginning days as a poet. They were part of my 'singing school'. Also, it might interest you that the Dylans as we call them in my house, too (Thomas and Bob), are what we brought my daughter up on. I believe if you steep children in the Dylans from birth, they are set for life!! The joy and play of language never fails them. I do know after the last 15 years of writing poems, that I'm not drawn to the poetry of ideas but to the poetry of song-making. I don't know what it means either, but I think when this kind of poetry is done well it is still possible to talk about it, to riff off it, to feel soul-nourished by it, to dream on it. I feel like I'm trying to tap into something that is quite beyond me. The surface-social consciousness is responding to the moment to moment bombardment of impressions and news cycles, unrestrained impluses and vanities and demands , while the lower level where eternal verities, instincts, deep rhythms, bedrock stuff keep me steady. It's a pre-literate language for these things that I'm trying to tap.

This is what I hope for, but succeeding is a VERY different matter!

I hear what you say about losing the clear groove, and I know I could smooth it. But I'm drawn by a sort jazz syncopation, and also by sort of pushing the note (STRESS) so it is becomes part of the next word. Stresses for me aren't as simple as OFF and On. It's more like phrasing. I don't know how to explain it, except to tell you that I learned SOOOO much about phrasing from Frank Sinatra. All the amazing Jazz singers who do this amazing bend off the beat, carrying it on further than it has a right to! Yet it works! When I say it aloud, the Etna line, I can bend the sound into three uneven stresses.

I get, too, that the difference between 'don't' and 'do' is hard to parse in the poem. I think I read it as showing that 'don't' and 'do' are somehow inseparable; that one becomes the other. Realities shift, perspectives shift, norms crumble. One of the poems that is life-blood to my poetic life is Wordsworth's Intimations Ode: "the things which I have seen I now can see no more". There's something of that in the first part of the poem, and perhaps the poem revised itself into something more like what Wordsworth felt by the end of his great Ode: there is something deeper than tears.

I am very glad for your engagement with this poem, Carl! All the points you raise are so interesting for me to think about, and consider as I revise.

John, I love your response. I feel as you do. I love wonder, and wandering, too. I know just how you feel. I don't understand, either. It amazes me that I've reached this age, and I've studied and I've paid attention, and still I don't understand. And I don't feel any need to any more. The soul, or the imagination, or whatever word one wants to use, clearly wants something else. As you say 'to look and touch and reveal'. That's beautiful, John! I had to give a talk a few months ago on the subject 'What is Poetry". HA. Anyway, I used as a mantra throughout the talk the line "we are in danger of losing our senses." We need poetry that brings us back to our senses. It really is, it really can be, the most physical of all the arts. Thank you, John!!

Nemo. Thank you for yes and thank you for 'dew'. I knew it was right as soon as you said it. Also, what Mary said!!!!

Thank you so much EVERYONE for helping me pull this into shape! It really took the village! Honestly, every kind of crit, every riff, every single angle, everything! I honestly use all of it. Nothing any of you say is wasted. It all helps me.


Cally

[mignon ledgard]

Dear Cally:

For some reason, I didn’t expect such a significant volta. I’m smiling. There’s a saying:

“Good, better, best,
don’t let it rest,
till your good is better
and your better best.”

After I posted, on the verge of mourning for you spacious style, I felt that the knight was too concrete for the context and style of your poem. No mourning for that deletion.

There’ no mourning for the rain that the door didn’t stop in the first line, because the wind is always in my mind when I read your poems. It also reminds me that I wish to find to what degree the poet Dámaso Alonso was ‘into’ the wind. His complete work is housed in Autralia’s new and amazing Library.

(I decided to skip here. I don’t know if it’s brave or lame, to do this.)

I can’t say I like the piss - haha, but maybe it’s a device, something like a noisemaker to keep someone awake. In Peru, at least in the very cosmopolitan capital city of Lima, store owners place lemons in inconspicuous corners.

I really like “when the circus breaks ground”, even though the clown gets bolted. The next two lines, after “the clown” are perfectly aligned, and how I dislike the tick tock tick tock that at this stage seems to mock my heart. I threw out the alarm clock and took off my wrist watch when my daughter graduated from high school. There are no clocks on my walls, but, too often, they hang on a privileged spot in my poems.

I love “the mob on the hill” and it mocks “the fervent crowd” because it is the perfect choice of words now! With ‘an air’ too.

Most certainly, the ‘warden’s eye’ isn’t nearly as evocative as “the curtain gives a twitch’. I wish I had thought of it as a ‘twitch’ when I wrote about “peeping from behind Venetian blinds.” Curtains would have been truer, too, but it was actually yardage of thick duck cotton canvas I pinned up across a panoramic window—urgently.

The winner is: “the runneling rain” — It’s tops! (Does it need another L?) The corrector is teasing me and the dictionary didn’t help, either.

I had not intended to expand during the nod of hurray I had in mind.
I’m trying to skip here and there..

It’s a quick deflation, the last two lines, the moon, the sun, their ‘contrary’ faces, so used to impart energy—this is one of many ‘good for you’ mixed in with applause from your crowd, in unison!

And goodness, that eye! It can now follow imperceptibly.. “Keeper” for “warden” is one more ace to your sweep.

Bravo! Bravo y Olé!
~mignon

*Mm.. Maybe it’s a draw between
the runneling rain and the twitch.

**Please, keep your now previous to final poems. I think it would be super if, after a long period of due glory, you had a collection of 'before and after' -- maybe even with a few words that may come to you later on. I hope to live long enough to hold and behold it. It's a tremendous gift to your "fervent crowd".
~m

[mignon ledgard]

Dear Cally,

(I messed up and posted my notes. Here's the heart speaking.)

Totally unexpected to see this wonderful somersault. Cally the magician grabs her poem from its center and pulls it up like a handkerchief. Then lets it readjusts. Fingers barely touching, from the poem’s own breath being softly exhaled, it’s magic! It’s difficult to imagine that this revision happened as quickly as it did. But I saw your comment to Carl about playing with the order of shers — and here is a brilliant demonstration of your intuitive art!

I was having trouble, between my poor eyesight, a noisy household, and then realizing my ineptitude to put into words what I was getting from the poem as a whole—every bit a world in itself, as I read others’ comments. One about ‘God, Big Brother and a third—myself wondering if this were so, would they not all be one, as in the trinity. It was going to take me a good while to be able to comment.

And, because you grace us with this display and did not just tell us—seeing the changes is so much more fulfilling for someone like me—I cannot help but hear the echo of someone asking if you have a book. But the one in my mind is not the usual book, but one that includes several of your poems in this very way, showing it’s own crib—where it came from—, side by side with the revision. It would be the best didactic book I have never yet seen. Because I hear you, again and again, and your lateral thinking is multidimensional and only poetry allows the elasticity to rule over the language, but its visual aspect is far more important (and gorgeous) to this your style. I cannot not be selfish when I read your poems. With all my heart and mind, I think your readers, all enamored and enchanted and more than won over, would experience a rebirth of sorts. Because, Cally, the uniqueness of your art opens doors and knocks down barriers, and these barriers are like the scarabs that eat the forests. Freedom! We are losing it all around and you have a key to your own magic kingdom, to show that it is important for each poet to find their own way with freedom, in order that they may reach heights they have yet to see, myself included.

You have two poems, one is beautiful and the other one is superbly beautiful. You had to bring the original more down to earth in order to elevate it; this seems contradicting, but you care enough about your readers understanding. Side-by-side, I am able to see, not just know from being told, how this poem’s world turned as its author looked down and into it. This is a great treat to us! And many lessons, too.

I had noticed the knight and felt that there was more explaining than necessary, and also that it was too ‘technical’ a figure for the freedom of your style. I was glad to see it gone, but I am glad it was there, too. Because we get to see the ease (even if only apparent) with which you let go and rearrange, in the way of a subtraction that is an addition. I could go on and on.

I am moved.
Thank you!
~mignon

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Dear Mignon,

Your beautifully articulate engagement with my poem and my process has moved me very much!

I'm in the middle of a few busy days, and will write more in my next rest day, but I had to return your own words to you: I am moved. Thank you!!

Cally

[Yves S L]

Hello Cally,

The following is now my part of my collection of memorized verse:

"but the fool who reads into

the runes of the runneling rain

and the hunch of the half-starved possum

gnawing the blackberry canes"

Goodness me!

It shares head space with:

"Back out of all this now too much for us
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather"

and

"Because I love you more than words can say"

and so many other ear worms.

[Deborah J. Shore]

Hi, Cally,

This is an evocative piece with strong opening lines and word music. It feels like you got to play as a writer, although strict conclusions about the content feel elusive. Spare and cryptic though it is, I might actually make it more spare (that is, I might trim it if it were mine).

What I wanted to mention--and this may very well be indicative of my limited time practicing form as someone who has primarily been a free-verser--is that I do have difficulty nailing down one meter. The best I could come up with is that this is an extra-coarse three beat accentual. But I cannot make every line fit that, for instance "When the cut steel and the tip stain." That said, it may be your intention to have the poem be metrically-inspired but not strictly metrical.

Good to read you here!
Deborah