[Mark McDonnell]

Far from Michigan

Michigan looks like a mitten, she said,
and home is the crook of the thumb.
She gave me a dry avocado stone.
Mystery struck me dumb.

Memory sets like a weave in the mind,
it binds it, or else it expands —
the hem of a dress, the comb of the sea,
bladderwrack strewn on the sands.

None of it real now, some of it true
and all of it moulded by time.
Dive down the sofa, tobacco-stained fingers,
pale dregs of the evening still shine.

What ghosts, what shipwrecks, fall down the cracks
or hide under rocks like a newt.
Sometimes a day can be stranger than years,
like the stone of a puzzling fruit.



S1L2 was "and I grew up just south of the thumb"

S4L1: "shipwrecks" was "galaxies"
.
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[Carl Copeland]

It’s hard to make Michigan mysterious for someone who grew up there, but I love how you’ve done it. I love the deceptive simplicity and childlike wonder, expressed so beautifully by the anapestic ballad form—a favorite of mine. One metrical glitch for me is “and I grew up just south,” which might have worked as two anapests later in the poem, but comes off here as three iambs. (The phrasal verb “grew up” is naturally stressed on “up.”)

Three more trifling nits:

- Lowercase “From” in the title.

- Fix the typo “avacado.” (And aren’t you Brits supposed to spell “molded” with a “u”?)

- Add a comma after “years.”

I love “diving down the sofa” to bring up “ghosts and galaxies.” I wondered whether the N had been smoking or stained his hands on cigarette butts swallowed by the sofa, but that hardly matters.

I’m enchanted, Mark.

[David Elliot Eisenstat]

Like Carl, I enjoy the speaker checking the couch for lost memories. I just wish there were a little more for the reader to piece together. I presume that the speaker's intensity of feeling toward the mystery woman (girl?) makes her the beloved, and that S2 is scraps from a proverbial long walk on the beach. Had the speaker never seen an avocado stone before? Was it a nontraditional romantic gift? Was it totally out of place on the beach, what with avocado trees only growing in locales with mild winters? If not that, then what does Michigan have to do with it?

Metrically, there are a couple rough spots for me:

- L2, as Carl notes. In addition to "grew" being suppressed by its particle, "up", I want to stress "I" and "just" on their own merits as well. Excising "just" could solve this at the expense of the precise meaning.

- Somehow I have a hard time letting the adjective "dry" suppress the secondary accent at the start of "avocado". Maybe it's a nonlocal consequence of the iamb at the end of the line? I'd rather save the iambic shock value for "struck me dumb" on the next line in any case.

- Since the lines open quite variably in this anapestic meter, I find it less than automatic to suppress "pale" on L12.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Start with this: I don't quite get the logic/simile of the final two lines, but that's just me talking — a very puzzled thinker : ). But I think I will come around to liking it once I think more about it.

The final line is a beauty.

I feel like I've not heard before the comparison f the shape of Michigan being like the shape of a mitten. It is a wonderful sonic/alliterative visual and is carried forward beautifully as the vehicle for a memory that seems woven, at times snugly and at times loose-knit. The deep dive between the cushions comes seemingly out of nowhere but I roll with it to be a search for more fabric to the loose-knit memory — but it is lost. The metaphors work well together: the mitten, the fabric that is a memory, the search between the cushions — all woven together in a wild, imagist kind of way.

There are a few killer lines that hooked me (pun!) as I wove my way through the fabric of memory.

I love the imagery of the memory's ability to both bind together and expand — That's the imagination in high gear!

As to the poem, it feels like a recollection of a tryst with an American woman that still lingers and has become a part of the fabric of your life lived.

For the record, I think Michigan looks like a turtle head.
I grew up in New Jersey, which looks like a bow tie... Or the bust of an old man in a square hat staring at Pennsylvania... Or a widget you fidget with — depending on how much coffee you’ve spilled down you : )

Wonder-filled poem, Mark. Trademark Mark.

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[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Jim Moonan

I feel like I've not heard before the comparison f the shape of Michigan being like the shape of a mitten.

For Michiganders, the mitten shape is a cliché, but not for the rest of you, I hope. For use in future poems: Lake Superior is a wolf’s head, Lake Huron is a backpacker, and Lake Michigan is supposed to be a trout, I think.

[Susan McLean]

Mark, I think it is gorgeous. There are just a couple of spots where the syntax seems to me to demand a stronger punctuation than a comma: the ends of lines S2L1 and S3L3. But perhaps British conventions of punctuation differ from American ones in those cases. For me, the lack of stronger punctuation confused me about the meaning of the lines, which I had to reread to understand. I like your handling of the anapestic meter. It benefits from variation.

Susan

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Mark—

After the first quatrain I expected a poem about an old girlfriend. You surprised me by dropping her like an overripe avocado and giving me a poem about memory. All of us have had the experience of a smell or a snatch of melody unlocking a flood of vivid memories that we had no idea were hidden away in the deepest recesses of our minds. All of us have realized that an experience that we thought we remembered clearly didn’t, in fact, happen that way at all. And all of us have been puzzled by the oddness of the associations among experiences that we sometimes make. How much of ourselves have we forgotten irretrievably?

I had to look up “bladderwrack.” It’s my new favorite word.

Glenn

[James Brancheau]

Michigan looking like a mitten is a cliché for those in the know, living in or around the state, but I think it’s fine here. Anyway, she’s explaining to someone who doesn’t know in the poem. (Though it is impossible to look at the state and not think that.) My family’s house back in the states (in Toledo, where I grew up) is about 4 blocks away from Michigan—used to run up there to get fireworks (illegal in Ohio) when I was a kid. And I lived in Ann Arbor for a while when I was in my 20s. Great, great city, Ann Arbor.

Anyway, I like the poem quite a bit, Mark. Just some thoughts, fwiw. Mitten is nice in the first stanza as she is handing him a pit (stone). For me, that image of Michigan heightened the moment of her giving the speaker the stone—focusing in on her hand. Love that, intended or not.

Stanza 2 is beautiful. I, too, had to look up “bladderwrack.” What a fantastic word—like something from the Jabberwock’s world.

I stumbled over “Dive down the sofa, tobacco-stained fingers,” because “tobacco-stained” feels like something found from the past, but but after looking at it again, I think this is probably just me. (I have just recently lost those stains on my fingers...)

I love that the stone seems to hang over the poem and the possibility of growth vs. the lack of growth. You have such a wonderful voice in your work, Mark, and that is true here as well.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Carl,

I'm very pleased it enchanted you. I fixed the spellings/comma/title. Thanks for your eagle eyes there. And I think you might be right about S1L2. I hadn't noticed it because, of course, I've been hearing it the way I wanted to. But yes, so early in the poem it could create a stumble before the metre is established. Anyway, I've tried an alternative to that line. See what people think.


Hi David,

Thanks for the crit, and nice to meet you. I can see that the poem risks not giving the reader much to go on and different readers will have their own tolerance for that. The vagueness, in a sense, is the point, that the details of the memory/narrative are less important than their lasting presence in the mind. Would you really want me to answer all the questions you pose, either here or in the poem? I will reveal that the speaker, and the poet, had indeed never seen an avacado stone before.

I think I'm OK with the metre on the "dry" and "pale" lines. I scan the first

She gave me a dry avocado stone.

As for "pale dregs", well even if "pale" is slightly stressed, "dregs" will be stressed more, so it still comes out as trimeter to me.


Hi Jim,

I'm glad you hadn't heard of the mitten thing. I was slightly worried that the image might be so well-known over there that US readers would just groan at the opening line. And even though Carl says it's a local cliche, clearly it's not completely ubiquitous. Yes, it was the sonics that drew me to the opening line. The events and people in the poem are a composite, which seems appropriate.

Thanks for your enthusiasm for this.


Thanks Susan,

Those commas you mention seem fine to me. But that's not to say you're wrong. Perhaps you're right about S3L3. I'm thinking. Thank you for "gorgeous"!

Hi Glenn,

Yes, it is more about "memory" than the specific memory. I wish it were better (the poem and my memory ha). I may well come back to it, to try to do it more justice.

(I know you haven't suggested improvements, I'm just thinking aloud).

Cheers all! One line changed.


Edit:

Thanks James,

I missed your crit when I was writing my response.

I'm glad the opening works for you despite it's familiarity. Thanks for the very kind words. It's great to see you here BTW.

I'll think about the "tobacco-stained" line. I know what you mean. That line feels like it's in the past but in the poem's logic should be in the present. And no, I haven't smoked in 10 years.

[David Elliot Eisenstat]

Mark, I agree that L3 and L12 technically scan. They are places where the rhythm is fighting the meter more than I would like.