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----- Original Message ----- From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 1:41 PM Subject: Re: "Some Guests" > There are significant and long moments here that are as good as anything I > could imagine. "A dying class or class of the dying" is a line *to* die > for, the one I wish I'd written. But, reading it aloud, I find my > attention going elsewhere--not for long, not so I'm lost, but just enough > to make me fall over the syntax and the continuity. > > But. Mostly this is angry, elegaic, and sad all at once. > > ken > Thanks to Doug and Ken. -- I think my basic trick in poems like this is to take a dramatic monologue and put it into the third person. Which invites further compression and selectiveness, and allows some associations that wouldn't strictly occur to the figure being described. I used to write the ordinary - often too flat - lyric narrative Doug mentions. Then I started challenging myself with lyric per se - and then I wanted to see how much narrative a lyric could absorb: to what extent a character, or a stretch of a character's life, could itself become an image. The risk is an occasional "musclebound" quality (I courted it especially in section 4 of this one, which is one sentence), and that may be what makes you (Ken) "fall over the syntax and continuity." I'm glad it didn't make you lose attention. I'm stuck with the style, or the insight behind it, and all I can do is "fail better" next time.