[Julie Steiner]

Lovely, Nemo.

I initially read Speaker 2 as being a somewhat accusatory daughter. If you would like to clarify the nature and tone of the relationship between the two speakers — and you might not, although it would have helped those who, like me, were struggling to suss out the context — you could easily turn the initial "But" of Speaker 2 into "Friend,".

You might (or might not) also consider changing this somewhat stilted bit:
     “It’s the heart of me you know.
into something like this:
     "The heart of me, how well you know!


Editors of a certain age will probably wince at the capitalized preposition "of" in the title.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Most of my thoughts on this poem don't cohere into paragraphs so I'll just put them in bullets:

• I’ve been dancing all day with this. It dazzles, as Carl says, but darkly. I feel the imagery of your Magellan poems in the final stanza. There is something so specific in the dialog that it resists my selfish efforts to broaden it to be a conversation with the universe. I gain meaning from both readings: One specific, one universal.
  
  
• The universality comes from the fact that the backdrop in the poem is indeed the universe. Though this is arguably a conversation between two people who are genetically connected, it is hard to say for certain who the ”I” is. At first I thought it to be a male but now I’m not so sure. When I step back and lock into the vibrations this poem gives off I begin to feel a mother/daughter vibe. It’s then that this expands beyond the specifics. It gathers energy to become a vision of truth and mystery side by side. The N is in conversation with nature, time, eternity, ephemerality and everything else that appears on the horizon. The old axiom, “I think therefore I am” becomes incomplete. A life lived in servitude to thought is a life lived without purpose. It’s not just that we think. It’s also what we are thinking. It is not enough to think. To find meaning in life we must be intentional in our thinking. We must find purpose. We must seek. That’s where your poem took me.
  
  
• The specificity of the dialog strikes at the heart of my own place on the continuum of mortality. More and more I realize I have moved into the margins of my conscious reality as I know it. If I care to, I can trace my movement from being at the center of the universe when it was a small place. Not much larger than the arms of my mother. Everything I needed was brought to me. From there I've come all this way to arrive here in the margin. Wherever that is. Things pass me by. Soon I won’t be there either. But I don’t care too much about the wake of my existence. I am only moving on.
  
  
• A note about dancing: it might be the purest form of expression. In the narrowest sense of the word, I’ve never been a dancer. I find it awkward. But I have an easier time finding my rhythm when I dance with my thoughts, dance with my senses, dance with consequences, dance with darkness, dance with as many things as I can find to dance with. Sometimes my eyes are the only thing that move.
  
  
• I like the expanded definition of dance that this poem projects. I feel Kahil Gibran in spots. (He said:"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”) This poem is a layered conversation that expresses what I have glimpsed at in my thoughts more and more — but only glimpsed. You've pulled the curtains wide for me: the way a life, as a kind of dance, makes its way and gives way to other life using the burning desire to love and be loved. That’s why I’m writing this at the moment vs. doing a hundred other things on my list of things to do. This is what I need to give me the sight to see into and through the hole.
  
  
• What this poem conjures in me is like what John Donne’s “No Man Is An Island” conjures. I’ve realized late that my own poetic senses are lit by others. I rarely self-ignite. I need outside stimulation to ignite my inside. We are joined.
  
  
• You posted a short video recently of a winged seed (from a dandelion, I think) that was “dancing”on the tip of a garden gnome. That flickering image is what this poem reveals to me: our miraculous being; the unbearable beauty of consciousness and perception to procreate and dissipate, dissolve, disappear.
  
  
• I’ve been dancing all day with this. I think you’re saying there’s a time to dance and a time to ghost. Since the dawn of human civilization we have done nothing but dancing and vanishing.
  
  
• If this poem was staged and put to music it would be a tour de force. It is operatic.

Disclaimer: I read this over two consecutive days, both days in the early morning when contemplation is at its best.

It is a darkly optimistic poem.

.

[W T Clark]

Nemo:
It may be impossible to use "queer" without those of a younger strata not thinking of gayness. I do not think this is a strong problem here.

The flurry of rhymes has a both a kind of slow wisdom and hurtling flight. Placed in juxtaposition with the more bulky first speaker, they have an urgency of reassurance.
I sometimes script it as if it were a King Lear of a less apocalyptic time-line consoling and being consoled by a daughter. It is strange; most young men are not Hamlet: but almost all old men are Lear.
It is an exquisite performance.

Hope this helps.

[Mary Meriam]

Interesting how much punctuation this poem has compared to the one by Cally currently in TDE. I wonder how it would work if the indented stanzas didn't use quotation marks (since those are the poet's own words and not quoted from letters), and if the Cally stanzas had no punctuation or caps at all. I was confused at first about who was speaking, but liked it much better when I learned who was who. The lines are so beautiful. I wonder what it would be like with no punctuation or caps in any of the stanzas, though a couple of dashes in the indented stanzas would signal "Nemo" to me.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Well, I think the difficulty in identifying the voices here, the casting of the dialogue, has proven to be one of the poems strong points rather than a weakness. The effect, no matter who the speakers are, remains constant. I did try and steer the reader, in the title, by the use of the word my. And as for as the sex of the original speaker, I do feel that there is something feminine, something anti-male-heroic, about their insights (though that is perhaps a dangerous game to assay in this day and age when gender fluidity has undermined a lot of our presuppositions). Still, as in any poem, the reader brings to it what he or she is, what he or she has experienced, and so the re-masking of the speakers seems inevitable. The musings on mortality, however, seem to be universal enough to apply to any of a number of character pairs. That's a relief to me. I often have my own understanding of a poem which tilts and even whirls once I read more background material on the poet in question, whether critical or biographical. I did consider giving this poem a dedication, but then I decided, "Let identity fall where it may".

I confess I was rather uncertain about the poem, all through composition, and even after I deemed it finished. The impulse to write it was strong: the original email (much of which is included in metrically re-worked fashion). The communication touched something deep in me, and that sort of poetic-depth-trigger, rarer and rarer these days, is one I can never ignore. All throughout the process of writing I was worried about the lack of imagery, of descriptive imagery—yet it seemed to be something else I was trying to capture, a mood between people, a mood of falling without failing, conjuring not the concrete but rather the surrender of the concrete. Abstraction seems less a matter of merely moving words around when it involves the tensions that connect and disconnect living beings.

Likewise, metrics and rhyme can elevate words, imparting a music that justifies all this talk. I did, in my uncertainty, take refuge in the poem’s formal elements, carefully sculpting all its edges. And so, Carl, I am grateful that you were so seduced by those qualities, over and beyond wrestling with the poem’s content. That music, and the utter sincerity with which the poem was written (as a gift to the voice that inspired it)—these are how I overcame my poetic insecurities—insecurities which were of mind rather than heart (which boldly soldiered on).

The rhyme scheme is of a sort I often slip into. Couplets (and, by extension, triplets) have a bad reputation. Indeed, they can seem cloyingly heavy-handed. I find that the heaviness is sometimes merely visual, too much sameness in one glance, and so changing their topography, choreographing separation and collision, often shifts the emphasis they undoubtedly wield in more mysterious ways.

As for that sense-revealing vodka—'I’ll have what he’s having.’

Nick, oddly enough when I first began working with traditional forms, it was Alexander Pope who was my master. And like him, I was a firm believer that the deliberation which formal composition requires clarifies one’s ideas rather than veils or obscures them. Of course, Pope was a poet of ideas, as was I then, still securely under his explanatory wing.

‘Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse’s steed;
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.
—Alexander Pope

It takes no small amount of precious time
To find the proper words, the proper rhyme,
With which to anchor thoughts in lines of verse
Of such compactness—muscular and terse—
That they can puncture with one swift sure stab
Habitual mental flab and chronic gab.
—R. Nemo Hill

That was some time ago, and my poetic tastes have since gone through dozens of mutations, and yet I still find clarity in formal techniques. Of course, such clarity is poetic clarity, which may differ from cerebral clarity in much the same way that poetic logic differs from rational logic. The thing about metrics and rhyme is that they stop your voice, they make you hold your tongue, sending you on an almost endless quest toward what it is you are trying to say: offering all sorts of choices, many of which seem quite alien to your concerns at first, frustrating your momentum, laughing at your thesis, abandoning you in a wood-of-words—but ultimately expanding your choices! For often what seems a mere distraction proves to be a new navigational revelation, and you arrive at your destination from an utterly unexpected direction. The result, when thought and its complements align, is a haunting polyvalence to every word your poem speaks. What I mean is that even without being able to parse the identities of the speakers in this poem, what they are saying and feeling still comes through, softer and clearer. Could it be said in swifter, more stripped-down language? Perhaps. But the stark statements one makes are often vitiated by their own certainty; they don't vibrate, they don't reverberate with all the statements not made. It’s as if a metrical line is the result, not of forceful gesture, but rather is what’s left when all other lines have receded back into the unspoken. I can think of nothing clearer than uncertainty.

[As for the little dance about the viability of your posting of your question, I am fine with your inquiry, as I am fine with John’s hesitance about it. Really, here on the Sphere, in its potentially perfect poetic world, “it’s fine” should be the only rule of thumb. We all have unanswerable questions, moods, impressions, resentments, adulations, aches, pains and ecstasies. They’re all fine and we should stop apologizing for them.]

Mark, John, as for the sex of the characters, as I mentioned above, I did feel there was a somewhat feminine character to the first speaker. After the poem was finished, I even noticed that the “hole” which is mentioned twice had female characteristics, the depths of death and the canal of birth somehow singing in concert. And I did unconsciously cast myself as a childless observer, outside of the family chain. Yet those are only my personal points of reference, the scaffolding that each reader may, or even must, kick away in his or her own way.

Yes, David, his reading is right. He seems to be writing along with me, moving through the poem’s world beside me, having a conversation within a conversation.

Perhaps you should be a biographer, Cameron, since your instincts here are so unerring. And yet they do not blind to biography-less-ness. The word success was, perhaps, too flippant a choice, with too many winner-take-all associations. Still there is that rush of triumph when one accomplishes what one sets out to do…though we would of course agree that such an accomplishment is far more self-effacing than Olympic. The poem is about the fullness of loss, and I am, first and foremost, a loser.

Cally, I went all over the map trying to lay this one out, but what started as a game of pick-up-sticks on the page finally settled down around that central axis you sense. And dance, yes, as only a conversation that dances can be called communication. And emptiness, space, is so crucial to dance, to the dancers who, without separation, can never come together.

Thanks, Glenn. In a way, I think all poetry is an act of praise, of celebration.

Julie, as you can imagine, I do not mind the ambiguity of identity here: it seems to spur the reader to insert themselves into the poem. As for the use of the "Friend" address, I don't know, it seems too affectedly Wordsworthian for the context. I think both speakers have fallen too far down the hole to indulge in such niceties, ha!

As for the other line, I did really question it when I wrote it; and I do like the line you suggest. In the end, I like the parallelism of the line that follows too much; and I can convince myself that the strangeness of the line as is is a kind of gateway into the strange between-world of the rest of the poem.

As for the capitalizations in the title, I can’t believe you’ve never called me out before. I always do that! I detest the hierarchy of capitalized/uncapitalized words. I know editors flinch, so I always upper-case my titles to try and get away with it. It usually works. It’s a pet-peeve, no more, no less.

Yes, Jim, Magellan is very much there at the poem’s end.
And, yes, the poem is both specific and universal. The specifics echo as far as they possibly can, before they are not specific any more. The dancer vanishes. That’s my ars poetica, from the center to the margin. I usually apprehend poetry in terms of depth, but breadth seems germane here as well...Magellan's voyage again...and again...

Apropos of dancing eyes, in Balinese dance, the eyes and the hands are the principal bodily tools used for expression.

Let that be my epitaph: “darkly optimistic”.

Cameron, I did try and second-guess the reception of queerness, but it is a word I am fond of in all contexts. It was more common in gay-lore when I was young—now it has a bit more negativity attached to it. But I embrace the confusion of that negativity, and so it seems doubly apt here. The whack-your-ear rhyme there, well, I feel like that shoots the word out of a cannon that drowns out common parlance.

Mary, a punctuation-less approach just won’t work for me here. I feel like the eye can do its work without punctuation, but there is not so much eye in this poem. Conversation is full of emphases and caesurae without which communication can be misfired. I could drop the quotation mark for the second speaker, I suppose, but really, they serve somehow isolate the two speakers from one another, making them two distinct moments of personhood. I had tried italics for a while, as well, but that wasn’t working. And I am not interested in signaling stylistic identities here. I think the riddle must remain unsolved by the writer, the solution lies with the reader, and the poet margin-alized far beyond the margin of the page.

Thanks for reading, for entering the poem, all. Your comments have really changed my relationship to it in a good way.

Nemo

[Yves S L]

I am just in the corner riffing. Carry on.

Sometimes the words come rushing fast as light,
And it takes all one is to catch them right.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill

Nick, oddly enough when I first began working with traditional forms, it was Alexander Pope who was my master. And like him, I was a firm believer that the deliberation which formal composition requires clarifies one’s ideas rather than veils or obscures them. Of course, Pope was a poet of ideas, as was I then, still securely under his explanatory wing.

‘Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse’s steed;
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.
—Alexander Pope

It takes no small amount of precious time
To find the proper words, the proper rhyme,
With which to anchor thoughts in lines of verse
Of such compactness—muscular and terse—
That they can puncture with one swift sure stab
Habitual mental flab and chronic gab.
—R. Nemo Hill

That was some time ago, and my poetic tastes have since gone through dozens of mutations, and yet I still find clarity in formal techniques. Of course, such clarity is poetic clarity, which may differ from cerebral clarity in much the same way that poetic logic differs from rational logic. The thing about metrics and rhyme is that they stop your voice, they make you hold your tongue, sending you on an almost endless quest toward what it is you are trying to say: offering all sorts of choices, many of which seem quite alien to your concerns at first, frustrating your momentum, laughing at your thesis, abandoning you in a wood-of-words—but ultimately expanding your choices! For often what seems a mere distraction proves to be a new navigational revelation, and you arrive at your destination from an utterly unexpected direction. The result, when thought and its complements align, is a haunting polyvalence to every word your poem speaks. What I mean is that even without being able to parse the identities of the speakers in this poem, what they are saying and feeling still comes through, softer and clearer. Could it be said in swifter, more stripped-down language? Perhaps. But the stark statements one makes are often vitiated by their own certainty; they don't vibrate, they don't reverberate with all the statements not made. It’s as if a metrical line is the result, not of forceful gesture, but rather is what’s left when all other lines have receded back into the unspoken. I can think of nothing clearer than uncertainty.

[As for the little dance about the viability of your posting of your question, I am fine with your inquiry, as I am fine with John’s hesitance about it. Really, here on the Sphere, in its potentially perfect poetic world, “it’s fine” should be the only rule of thumb. We all have unanswerable questions, moods, impressions, resentments, adulations, aches, pains and ecstasies. They’re all fine and we should stop apologizing for them.]


Nemo

That's very helpful, thank you.

I'm beginning to think that my first few met attempts failed because they didn't have a strong core, which is usually what happens with my non-met failures too. Whenever I find an idea with some meat I'm still giving it to non-met, and those ideas don't come around too often these days. I may need to re-hash some old topics for experimentation sake.

The other aspect I'm running into, which you don't have to comment on but I mention for interest sake, is that I'm finding the possibilities under metrical overwhelming. With non-met, and without any constraint, the forms of my poems just seem to reveal themselves. But with met it feels like I have to move in the opposite direction, have some idea of what the form is going to look like first. It's completely antithetical to how my brain processes poetry these days. It feels like I get a kind of joy out of writing non-met, a sort of freedom. Where met is really forcing me to think and deliberate. I'm definitely up for the challenge, but time to write just hasn't been very forthcoming these days.

And I totally understand the reactions to new members breaking established norms. This place has been a comfort for a lot of you for years, sometimes decades, and it's likely a bit jarring to have new people show up and do things differently. And unfortunately I've always had trouble doing things by the book. But I've learned so much from this place so far that I'm happy to take the corner seat and pick up what I can.

Thanks again for your help, its appreciated.