SUBJECT>Re: Fall Break POSTER>Hannah EMAIL>hrcraig@gmail.com DATE>1108052240 EMAILNOTICES>no IP_ADDRESS>fgw.msa.com PASSWORD>aamfaEF9hh1V6 PREVIOUS>83278 NEXT> 83303 IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

Yoly-

There’s something awfully fractured about this, inconsistent…it’s hard for me to get a read on what’s going on, or to keep with/maintain interest in one thread because of the way it skips about. At the same time, there are elements of language here that I thrill to, especially a sense of energy and those little leaps outside of the “box” of imagistic realism. I get a kick out of those.

My basic complaints: That the refocusing of the poem onto/around the narrator’s personal rhetoric makes the first two strophes far too dispensable (and they are great, so they shouldn’t be!) There are a lot of elements in those first two strophes that struck me hard, and I don’t see why some of those threads (particularly the notion of imposing and transgressing borders/peripherals ) couldn’t be made more pertinent in the latter half of the poem. You sort of get back to it with this “tempest swallowing/the ink of cultural margins” but the language the deals with this element, this philosophical component of the poem….becomes/is extraneous to the language of desire/image, to the production of sensual detail. I wish the two were better brought together by metaphor or whatever.

That the two “I am” statements seem to pull away from one another, not towards. “I am a self-interest billboard/buzzing: escape to paradise” and “I’m a ghost in human drag/while memory burns the whiskey” do not particularly cohere in tone. Do they?

For the most part, though, I think your flexibility with language is very nice, here. The only grammar/syntax problem I have is with:

Is it right, that you clumped battles won
in your hands, slipped them in my pockets
as vouchers to dismiss reservations?

Which is reasonable, but just seems a little “clunky.”

Nice work, Yoly.

-Hannah