SUBJECT>Re: Mornings With Ethan POSTER>Hannah EMAIL>hrcraig@gmail.com DATE>1109786738 EMAILNOTICES>no IP_ADDRESS>fgw.msa.com PASSWORD>aamfaEF9hh1V6 PREVIOUS>84092 NEXT> 84115 IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

Seymour-

Interesting piece. And long for you! Yay.

Here’s my stuff, yo:

- I really like the middle sections…I’m so fond of the second, in fact, that I’m tempted to say that’s where, that’s the moment at which it becomes worth it, for me, as a reader:

Here’s to the leafy gossip, magnolia[,]
faithful in green. They’re clearing the woods
behind our house to make way for more.
Each morning we try to ignore
the rumble that rattles our windows.
It’s this machinery that enters our dreams,
unmanned, unstoppable. Trunks ribboned
in yellow. We know the screech owl’s days
are numbered. Who know(s) how many?
Not the brown(-)skinned workers who [slowly] cruise
in pick-up trucks. Their days are long and end
in cash, in beer runs [with](“with” seems wrong…phrasing here could be better?) smiling cashiers
who do not understand. Sweaty love (mm…consider “sweat and love”? or just “sweat?” I know. I know. I’m pushing.)
is our common currency. This earth
plowed under. The hawk, the heron. Birds
as metaphors. Yes, I know the gossip
of the dogwood is temporal. I press
against the bark and say the number three.

- I think you have diction issues with the first section. There’s something strangled in the way the lines bump into one another…a choppiness, a scatteredness that I don’t find particularly effective. The in-and-out (so characteristic of the way that you portray character by buoying it with mesmerizing atmospheric detail) doesn’t work the way I expected it to—I just have trouble focusing in on Ethan or the narrator.

A lot of those problems return again in the fourth section. I wonder if making the spider allegory more transparent would help?

- Third section is yum, too. I would like more “walked.” I mean…you say it enough to make it the anaphora that carries the rhythm of the trope forward. And if the end result is a little more surreal, so much the better (something very Mallarme poking its nose in here). I love the counterbalance of the still, static pools of light and the body walking among them, through them…

Once there was a time. A boy walked out
under unnamed stars, in a field
made muddy by walking. But the mud
was still pure. And if he kept walking,
beyond the lights of patios,
(through or beneath or something) house lights left on by old men, old women
unable to sleep, the lights of warehouses
stunning the dark, manned by skeleton crews,
parking lots lit for no good reason,
then it might be winter and snow might fly
up into the brightness there. Once, there was.

That's all from the peanut gallery.

-H