[Julie Steiner]

Susan and Jim, thanks very much for your comments.

Draft Three posted above, taking things in a very different direction — inspired in part by Jim's "oblivious yet enlightened" remark, and by deciding to just get out of the way and see where this seemed to want to go.

[Julie Steiner]

Additional tweaks (in various colors) posted above. Most recent are brown.

[W T Clark]

Julie: it's always been your prose that I've found truly wonderful, and often wished it was more widely available, but this poem (third version) equals that. If it were mine: I'd cut the first triolet. I admire this.

Hope this helps.

[Mary Meriam]

Hi Julie, rather than try to explain my suggestions, I did this - hope that's ok with you. I don't think the triolet form was doing you any favors.

My power: To contain
the boundless depths of pain.
My curse: I can’t explain
my power. “To contain
the boundless” sounds insane.

Apollo is the one
behind this lunacy.
We all know how much fun
Apollo is. Run
when he sends poetry!

I know this won’t end well.
Still, cursed, I can’t believe
when it’s myself I tell
“You’ll long to enter Hell,
the one goal you’ll achieve.”

I need an audience:
to tell the truth to me
makes me mistrust its sense.
I need an audience
for any confidence.

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks very much, Cam. I'll cut the first triolet.

Mary, I hear you. I had an even longer series of triolets a few years ago that I ended up trimming into six lines each, since I didn't feel the repetends were being transformed enough to keep the plot from dragging. I did like the shifts of meaning I managed to put into the last lines of each triolet here (with the exception of the Apollo triolet), but it's helpful to know that you didn't.

[David Callin]

Hi Julie. There's some great rhyming skill here - no surprise from you - and you do an impressive job of squeezing the story into triolets. The trouble, for me, is that it does end up feeling squeezed. Are triolets a good way of telling this story? I wouldn't say so, but that's just me.

As I say, though, I do admire the way you tackled this.

Cheers

David

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks, David.

The poem definitely doesn't give the ideal poetic impression of effortlessness, but I'm okay with that. I think the squeezed, trying-too-hard feeling fits the narrator's lack of freedom. But I realize that to many readers it will feel constipated.

[Susan McLean]

Julie, I think that what the poem does well is to demonstrate all the clever ways that a line can be made to convey different things. It is a showcase for the form. What it does less well is to convey narrative information. I get the hopelessness of the situation, which is conveyed repeatedly in different ways. But there is not a lot of progress in the narrative in the course of the poem.

Susan

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks, Susan. Draft Four posted above.

Thanks very much to the audience that has kept telling the truth to this Cassandra. Your praise and pushback were both very important.

I've accepted that this poem will never please everyone, but the current version (with new first triolet) seems to fits well with "Manifesto" and "Women Only Write About Themselves", and I think will make a good bridge to some of my darker material. So I'm happy with it. Again, thanks for helping me get it to that point.