SUBJECT>Re: Cucamonga Flyer POSTER>Hannah EMAIL>hrcraig@gmail.com DATE>1109007818 EMAILNOTICES>no IP_ADDRESS>fgw.msa.com PASSWORD>aamfaEF9hh1V6 PREVIOUS>83663 NEXT> 83726 IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

Jim-

This doesn’t work for me, as a poem, because it fails to transcend its simple place-naming strategy.

If the poem is going to be mere snapshot, one might be interested in reforming or tuning the language to a point where it is of interest solely in-and-of-itself. Think of Thoreau’s
”What’s the Railroad…” or Sandburg’s “Window” and so on. To this end, relying on poet-generated images rather than mere “echoes” of city names and entities, replacing weak modifiers (old man, lingering humidity, secretly weep, softly rolls) and verbs, improving syntax (“I see an old man sweeping his porch/of piled crates”) and so on.

If the poem is going to be more (and here I think of train-oriented poems like Sandburg’s ‘Boes, Millay’s “Travel,” Dickinson, Levine, Berryman, Jarrell) than a snapshot (as it seems to want to be, with that particular close) it needs to evidence a better grasp of conceit along with better style, in my opinion. To make the final strophe more relevant to the top half of the poem, to torque the poem so that the final strophe isn’t just a disappointment (a sudden and undefined tumble into the personal invective), to make the narrator’s observations more keen, more potent, more significant (less of a knee-jerk attempt at building pathos).

The sole line of interest, to me, was “planets follow the train.” I found that idea, the reorienting of physics, of “order” to one’s own destination, to one’s own motion…somewhat interesting, but the poem certainly didn’t follow up on that.

-H