[Carl Copeland]

Huge thanks for being so “gabbily explanatory,” Rick. Poets and artists rarely offer so wide and welcoming a window into their work.

Originally Posted by Rick Mullin

Twice, I think, I risked permanent expulsion from Eratosphere by suggesting we shut the Deep End down because nobody was really digging in.

Aw, c’mon. Does that really happen? Michael Burch claims he was banned for life for pointing out that “Erato was the abstract personification of love poetry.” Is there some fascist poetry site that goes by the same name?

Originally Posted by Rick Mullin

Yes, “Show me a man” means show me someone of extraordinary quality. A Byronic hero. Rooster Cogburn. Well, we had him, but his gone…. “or bring him back,…”

I have trouble seeing the man described in S3 as heroic. Larger than life, yes—bellicose, contemptuous of rules, a sexual predator—and now being called back in response to the rage of those who feel their future has been hijacked. Yes, he’s summoned by the N, but I felt sure it was the bitterly ironic “we” of the last line.

All I’m saying is that if you “recoil” from this interpretation, your rewrite should somehow discourage it. It all seemed so clear …

[Deborah J. Shore]

Rick,

I just wanted to say--and this I do think is my own failing--your explanation of S2L1 never once occurred to me even though you feel satisfied that I must have read it back into S1. I was seeing "tomorrow" as still being in the future and so thought it a very odd construction. S2 really mostly left me floundering with where dissatisfaction was pointing. I still wonder if you have clarity about who made the promise, what the promise was, and who made the excuses. I say this because helping us see those elements of your vision more clearly is probably what could make this click.

I've only written one Sapphic myself, and I published it in THINK journal last year. I'm fairly new to any extended metrical forays. I've also written a hendecasyllabic that I do like, but when I read in these meters, I feel like they are hard ones for a natural and lively voice. Even when I look back at the Sapphic I published, which had so much compressed emotion in the writing of it, it feels elegant but far more emotionally distanced in the reading (and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that!).

I'm impressed by a lot that you've done here. I did note the "or" and thought it might be a weakness but then decided otherwise.

One of the things that drives me crazy with these Latin meters is how frequently folks writing in them expect us to pick it up even though they are opening lines on forced accents instead of what anyone would naturally assume is a trochee. So I really appreciate that your meter is intrinsic to the words (in general I do not like it when meter forces promotions of a syllable that would naturally be demoted next to the other syllable in a foot; this has a long history of acceptance but is a pet peeve for me; I don't mind a pyrrhic in iambic meter AT ALL, but an inversion of natural accent can be a hard sell for me in iambic or trochaic meters).

As for how I interpreted the Queequeg line, I was trying to come up with how someone could simultaneously feel "put-upon" while also feeling in the vein of "infinite cowboy," and that was the only possibility that occurred to me. Additionally, Glen's interpretation is in fact the main overall interpretation I was toying with... except the connections didn't QUITE seem to work (for that or for any interpretation that I could come up with). But just so you know, that was the closest I came to figuring out a way to thread the puzzle.

I did think initially that the speaker was trying to paint this man as a positive to be looked up to, and I still wondered if that was the case by the end (but this would make the speaker a fairly icky person according to my reading of the tattooed an). But no interpretation I came up with quite seemed to hold together in all your connections.

I still don't know how to see the tattooed man as some sort of ideal. But again, I couldn't come up with one line of thought that did not seem dubious or contradicted by other lines of yours.

How is someone bounced from bars and the diner a manly ideal? It's not clear enough that this could be merely on account of a prejudice over his tattoos. This is an action that usually is tied to some poor behavioral regulation or character issues. It would be so very hard NOT to read this man as inhabiting some form of "toxic masculinity." As for the pomegranate, I doubt any of us know what Jack's is, which might be part of the problem. If it was a recognizable grocery store name, and if he wasn't already seeming to be a troublemaker, then maybe we would have been able to come up with an explanation other than sexual harassment.

Due to health effecting memory, you can generally expect me not to get most references. I never did know Dylan lyrics, and I only picked up on Mellville after googling. I would never have known those wives, although I once skimmed an article about them. Queequeg did seem like a name I should know, but I (and this is really just my health/memory problem) couldn't place him at all even after google tried to situate me and explained his character a bit. So the information I'm bringing to the poem could be part of the problem. But I really don't know how to read your intent into that description I'm afraid.

I'm glad you appreciated my effort. It really is quite an effort with me for health reasons, so please understand if I do or do not manage to come back for revisions. I'm not really sure if I'll be managing any sort of regularity here (or contributing my own work) or not. I'm just trying to test the possibility.

Even though your closing line seems like a good one, lines 1-3 of last stanza seems to add enough confusion and (for me) no payoff, that I wonder if it really wants to be there. But no doubt you will figure this out as you try to address all of the feedback we've given.

Deborah

[Rick Mullin]

Hi Carl and Deborah,


Whew. I'm definitely not looking to develop Tattoo Man as anything close to malevolent. I describe him as shown the door at a diner in the same poem in which I describe people shielding their children from him at the mere sight of him walking down the street. He's edgy, he's different. He's put upon. He's done nothing wrong. There are perfectly innocent people thrown out of places... I mean for the malevolence to appear in the upstanding citizenry.

I am thinking about how I might make it clear that he's having the cops called on him because his entire face is covered in colorful tattoos.

I guess I'm OK with the promise part. In fact, I think I have some clarity there. I'm referring to the promise inherent in the American Dream. You might be pushing too hard to find meaning Deborah...? I'd hate to think I ever wrote a poem that has a puzzle in it. I hate puzzle-bee more than I hate Lite Verse, and I avoid reading it. Ambiguity is different. That I like.

And I like contradiction. The ideal of the cowboy includes cowboy outsider. Thus put-upon. But even a tougher-to-reconcile contradiction is usually kind of interesting to me. Carl, I just don't think I have him as a bellicose sexual predator. The ideal (infinite) cowboy is far from those things. And Queequeg is a guy you wanted on your side, as soon as you stop being afraid of him. He's kind of quiet and leaves when he's not wanted....

As for reading Sapphics aloud, Deborah, I find that you need to set table with line integrity, so that you get the bum-de-bum-de-bumbidy-bum-de-bum-de (sounds like a lonesome cowboy on riding on the range, no?) over and over with each line more or less telling part of the poem. The poet John J. Trause insists on reading Sapphics as if he were Sappho, which is to say blubbering heartbroken through the whole poem! He can pull it off. He also raps Chaucer.

I am thinking about whether I need to flesh out Tattoo Man, whom I think N is sticking up for as a kind of archetype--the ugly duckling.

Sorry about the health concerns, Deborah. You've put me to work on this more than it might seem, given my responses.

Thanks again,
RM

[Deborah J. Shore]

Hmmm…. I guess I was reading this as the tattoo man feeling like he had been put-upon. So I sought to come up with a reason why he’d feel that way rather than reading that as straight reportage.

I think you’ll need to establish him in his doing of good deeds or somesuch before establishing him through his tendency to suffer prejudiced or his tendency to brawl (as I’m still assuming from being bounced). Otherwise I can’t imagine folks latching on to the reading you intend.

Also, “show me a man” way too easily triggers a “Oh, the speaker is macho and longs for the good old days when men could behave roughly and weren’t held responsible” sort of response. That doesn’t make it a bad phrase, but it does make it a phrase that especially requires clarification in its context.

So you might need a stanza before the one about the prejudice that somehow develops this character. I don’t really think we need to see the tattoos more as much as we need to see why he’s a gem. I can’t really imagine that someone would be highlighted in the title as being tattooed if they weren’t heavily tattooed that face tattoos are included is indeed, a vibrant picture, but it doesn’t clarify what we need to know about him in order to get on the right track. Presently, I think we are supposed to get the fact that he’s a gem from that one phrase “put-upon,” which is both insufficient next to all the rest of the space devoted to his experiences and can easily be read as his conception of himself rather than as a true evaluation.

D

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Deborah J. Shore

Also, “show me a man” way too easily triggers a “Oh, the speaker is macho and longs for the good old days when men could behave roughly and weren’t held responsible” sort of response.

Yeah, that’s how I understood “cowboy” too—a pretty common pejorative these days.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Deborah J. Shore

As for the pomegranate, I doubt any of us know what Jack's is, which might be part of the problem. If it was a recognizable grocery store name, and if he wasn't already seeming to be a troublemaker, then maybe we would have been able to come up with an explanation other than sexual harassment.

I don’t think changing it to Kroger is going to help. Rick says the sexual implication of squeezing the pomegranates “is unavoidable” (influenced by Ginsberg’s sexually charged supermarket, no less!), but it’s all in the mind of an alert citizen who has “misinterpreted the squeeze”: “Hello, police? Get over to Jack’s right away! There’s a man suggestively fondling the pomegranates!” Sure, he’s literally squeezing the fruit, but the focus on such a trivial action and the exoticism of the fruit cry out for a double meaning. (According to some readings of Moby-Dick, Queequeg should really be with Ginsberg’s Whitman, “poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys”!)

[Rick Mullin]

Hi Deborah and Carl,

Thanks for keeping at me. I will start by rewriting this stretch:

Show me a man/
or bring him back

is now

Enter a stranger/
Marked for life

Also I changed "for squeezing" to "while squeezing". Not so sure about this second change.

Let me know what you think,
RM

[Rick Mullin]

I added a new stanza (4) that really explains things, which is against my nature.

[Carl Copeland]

Rick, I regret making you explain things against your nature, but the changes you’ve made really do help me see Tattoo Man as a victim of prejudice. (I once saw a man with a huge erect penis tattooed on his face, and I’d rather not have to look at him while I’m eating, but I wouldn’t call the police.) You need a “c” in “Mack’rel,” which I rather like, though I can’t make much of “prodigal lodger.”

That may be enough, but if greater clarity is needed, you could borrow space from “doling infinite cowboy,” which you explained as “rolling with a kind of wannabeat® Sapphics.” I’m not sure what the phrase or the explanation means, but it sounds as though the specific words aren’t as important as the rhythm. For some reason, I hear S3L4 ending with the word “outsider.” Too straightforward, I suppose.

Anyway, I love these imitation classical meters, and I seriously admire your hip treatment of Sapphics. If I ever attempt it, this poem will be a big influence on me.

[Deborah J. Shore]

Rick, it’s hard to say how someone unfamiliar with the poem would respond now, but you’ve definitely highlighted the prejudice more and eliminated a confusing pointer. Marked for life is helpful. If you do want this to be a poem of devotion to this person, and that more than a secret reality to the writer, you may want to include a stanza that fleshes the character out.

Carl, I agree that Kroger wouldn’t help, though I was assuming Jack’s was a hang-out and pomegranates a euphemism. I was more trying to point out some of the reasons why we’d never get the intent as is. We’d need rooting in his actual character to come up with the possibility of reading it otherwise.

Rick, I agree with Carl that I admire how you’ve made the sapphic hip and vibrant. It feels more cohesive now.