[Bill Dyes]

Revision 1:

History

She deplores how his story still lingers
like the chip in her cup, how her fingers
reaching out for his, seem a distant howl
telling him, "...that could never happen now."

added a coma after 'cup' in line 2
changed 'and' in line 2 to 'how'
added a comma after 'his' in line 3

History

She deplores how his story still lingers
like the chip in her cup and her fingers
reaching out for his seem a distant howl
telling him, "...that could never happen now."

[Marshall Begel]

Bill, I read anapests until "seem a distant...", and likewise at "that could never...". Did I get the scan wrong?

I'm reading this as "she" is missing "him", wants to reach/call out to him, but in the last line she rejects him. That doesn't logically flow for me. More likely, she'd be the one rejected, either by her own fears or by his likely response. Apologies if I misread this.

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Bill Dyes

History

She deplores how his story still lingers
like the chip in her cup and her fingers I'd add a comma at the end of the line
reaching out for his seem a distant howl I'd add a comma after "his"
telling him, "...that could never happen now."

The opening couplet seems to be anapestic trimeter, but L3 has four beats and L4 has five beats, so overall the meter feels unstable. In a poem this short, tightness is all, so I can't enjoy either the het-met or the weak slant rhyme of howl/now. I'd also question how fingers can seem like a distant howl.

Overall, I don't really get what the poem is saying. For example, I don't know how chips in cups linger, or what that means. (What are the chips? What are they doing in cups, and how do they exemplify the idea of lingering?)

I don't get why the quote starts with an ellipsis. And I don't know what "that" refers to, nor do I have enough details to imagine an explanatory subtext.

Sorry to be so negative, but it doesn't feel like you finished writing the poem before you posted it. Whatever impulse got you writing this, I'd try to revisit it and follow through with more clarity.

[W T Clark]

I think this is a rather wonderful thing. To me: it is a simple scene: a woman is attempting to reassure a man (a lover) who has told her something that has harrowed him, some experience he has related, that has branded him with a "story". The title is full of connotation: and I cannot help but read the story as a kind of emblem of history, of its horrors: maybe some tale of violence or persecution, maybe racial violence, that is the first thought that rose to my mind: my first "interpretation". What is luxuriant in this poem is the exquisite final three lines. The fingers becoming a howl is to me both exquisitely delicate, yet savagely a piercing thing: and the poem holds both contraries simultaneously: negative capability. I wouldn't listen to anyone who tells you to lose it: to kill imagination. That "chip in the mug" is the centre of the poem because it is such a delicate contradiction: the atrocities of history, its staining savagery, the whole violence of its events is contained within the nagging simplicity of a chip in a mug. It does not trivialise history as much as again hold it in two totally different scales, again: negative capability: it fascets it.

What I wonder at is "deplore". Somehow, maybe because of the way it has come to be so well used in the common language of official statements, its force has ebbed, but I just find it out of register here: chip-like.


Hope this helps.

[W T Clark]

I forgot to mention the delicious irony that strikes me in the final line. The ellipsis seem to say to me, that, no matter how the woman attempts to speak of history as a dead thing, there is an uncertainty, that "lingering" knowledge that this kind of horror is still real.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Hi Bill, Everything Roger questions I do, too.

Word choice is what takes me out of this. The words deplores, lingers, chip (in her cup), fingers, howl — all feel somehow off the mark. The bulk of the poem hangs on the simile that branches off into two (the chip in the cup and the fingers) and it then becomes mired in mixed metaphor.

The word howl in particular seems out of place. I've tried to read into it what Cameron does, but it just falls flat. Nothing that comes before it leads up to a "howl".

It also feels rhyme-driven. The slant rhyme of "howl" and "now" clangs to my ear. In a poem this brief I would prefer it be locked in and synched metrically, sonically and in rhyme. This falls short on all accounts.

Cameron has found a way to piece things together to make it something that escapes me. I think it speaks more to Cameron's ability to conceptualize than it does anything that the poem accomplishes with its telling. Perhaps it's a seed of a poem that would blossom if you gave it more of a chance. I'd consider fleshing this out for 1-2 more stanzas.

The title may hold a clue, but it's effectively useless to me.

.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I think this is quite good, Bill, and I marvel at the fact that its compression can open up so much narrative space within it. The story that lingers like a chip in a cup is such a powerful image, so delicately brutal. I think the word deplore is needed to characterize that story, and it calls for the response of a howl, even if that howl is suppressed somehow by the attempt at denial with which the poem ends. There is so much tension in this that it is almost unbearable emotionally. It's a quite remarkably pressurized unit.

Nemo

[W T Clark]

Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill

I think this is quite good, Bill, and I marvel at the fact that its compression can open up so much narrative space within it. The story that lingers like a chip in a cup is such a powerful image, so delicately brutal. I think the word deplore is needed to characterize that story, and it calls for the response of a howl, even if that howl is suppressed somehow by the attempt at denial with which the poem ends. There is so much tension in this that it is almost unbearable emotionally. It's a quite remarkably pressurized unit.

Nemo

Yes. I'm coming around to "deploring" also. Lovely, savage quatrain.

[Alexandra Baez]

Hello, Bill, nice to meet you.

I had the same scansion problems as Marshall and Roger.

I also tripped at “the chip in her cup and her fingers,” which could be read as meaning that there is a chip in her cup and another chip in her fingers, or that there’s somehow one chip in both of them. A comma after “cup” would clarify this. Similarly, I was confused by “reaching out for his seem”—a comma after “his” would clarify what you mean for me, which I was able to discern only after reading this line about three times.

Also, I was confused in the same way as Marshall by the seemingly contradictory narrative flow, and like Roger, I basically just don’t get what’s going on here. I do want to. I sense the passion, and the condensed nature of this poem does bring it out, but I think this poem might just be a bit too short right now to adequately convey everything you seem to be trying to in it.

Like some others, the woman’s fingers as a “distant howl” felt like a stretch of a metaphor for me. I think there’s another problem with it, too, in that we’ve started the poem from the woman’s perspective, but before it’s announced that the perspective has shifted to the man’s, we’re told that the woman’s fingers seem “distant”—so I find myself surprised that what I thought was right in front of me actually supposedly seems far away. Also, like Roger, I didn’t care for the slant rhyme of “howl”/”now,” and I don’t know what “that” is.

[Bill Dyes]

First of all, thanks Mr. Clark for calling this a 'quatrain'. It is indeed what I set out to write although I am beginning to feel that the uneven metre referred to by Roger and Jim might make this attempt at that form too flawed to qualify. I and this piece probably should have stayed down in "Non-Metrical" where I mostly make my visits. But I will not be looking to expand this into more stanzas. My last 3 attempts at poetry were quatrains. I emphasize "attempts."

I would like Marshall to know that I want this poem to work as a man and a woman sitting across from one another with a history between them. But I also want these two to rise to the level of personification as well. Her, indeed, to the muse of history (Clio) & he, perhaps, to all of mankind. . She at both levels 'deplores' how history has become 'his story",that he retells 'his story" to her. It in fact lingers like a chip in her cup, annoying but always there..

The 'howl' is not just her fingers, it is her fingers reaching out to his acoss a distance that we (women and men) all know can be wider than arms length and it is also the sound of what she at last tells him. In my imagination movement has sound, in the same way that sound can have color. I don't understand why 'howl' presents such a problem or that the final rhyme should be an off-rhyme. .

Always a pleasure Nemo.
A sincere thanks to each of you for taking the time to give me the gift of your attention and your words.

Bill