Dear M,
Since I'm streaming and hacking and too contagious for the usual Christmas 
festivities, I thought I'd have another quiet shufti at your poem and, as 
my Outlook Express isn't working, I copied and pasted 'Advertising Arsenic' 
from Jiscmail.  I forgot that you lose the format when you do this so what 
you get below is your poem edited by computer programmes which (unless 
repasting reverts to the original), by chance, addresses something that's 
tormenting me at the moment: the structure of poetry.
I have to admit that I prefer the accidental form: it flows so easily and 
it's so well punctuated that none of the music is lost.   It feels 
absolutely natural and, because of this, I find it easier to concentrate on 
what's being said without the distraction of a feeling that there's a 
measure of labour in the construction of the poem.  It’s the breaking down 
of the text into lines of 10, 11, 12 and 13 syllables (if you link the last 
line of stanzas 1 & 2 with the first of 2 & 3) that feels somewhat corseted.
It's not that I'm suggesting that there's anything wrong with the 
craftsmanship of what you've written, simply that the computer editing 
works better for me.  I also find it aesthetically more pleasing: those 
lovely lines of dots preceding the second and third paragraphs feel more 
like thought/breathing spaces.
By the way, the irony of ‘I will leave, Emma, be gone finally’ is simply 
marvellous.  What will happen to the poor narrator if the poem’s published 
in a twenty-second century anthology;-) 
bw
c

Advertising Arsenic 


The image that sticks with me is Emma stuffing whiteness into her mouth 
like sherbet powder. She does it on the run, I think, her long skirts 
curling around her legs like neglected cats. She swipes her mouth with the 
back of her hand. Then she says, half to herself, half to me: I will lie 
down now and go to sleep. That's how we both want it: the soft blink into a 
deep gentle end--but I know, and how does she not know?--that there is pain 
and retching, long hours stretched with suffering till the body exhausts 
the light. ........................................Listen, Emma, Woody 
Allen says he's not afraid of dying, just doesn't want to be around when it 
happens. We understand that, don't we? I understand you, feel your 
desperation, the last leap into darkness that turns out to be a flame. I 
would take your hand, help you step over the stile of flesh into the green 
and freedom of the next field, where they are picnicking in a blur of 
meadow flowers. Instead we stick here like flies nailed to a windscreen by 
a rush of wind that chills our 
eyes. ......................................I will leave, Emma, be gone 
finally, and you will always run and try to escape. Your stomach will 
heave, your guts will grind again and again, but you never lived. You have 
that mercy, yet I cannot forget you, cannot dislodge the teasel of you from 
my hair. I carry your weight like an unwanted child.