In Response Your Poems…
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written:  February 20, 2005

With the exception of “For Hank,” your poems are very quiet. Like small
droplets of water in a slightly irregular rhythm. If my poems push the
reader out, your poems are quite the opposite – inviting and open, and
not simply because they are less oblique and more narratively driven.
It’s about the pacing, the space left on the page etc. I love “Good
literature/Is Well equipped/With miserable endings.” It’s a great
example of how to say so much with so few words, and how to set a mood
in three simple lines.

If there is an aspect of these poems that needs more attention, it is
the small details – punctuation, capitals (why begin each line with a
capital…unless your Word program automatically did this on your
behalf)? I think that the use of capitals at the beginning of each
sentence disrupts the flow of a piece like “Growing” or “Sunsets.”
Since one of your strengths is the ability to economize the number of
words you need to use, I think you could exploit the use of
capitalization and punctuation to say even more in a limited space.

I have two other suggestions that you may want to consider. The first
is the extent to which one should “sign post” in poetry. There is a
very fine line between intertextuality and name-dropping, and one must
be careful that references to other writers, philosophers etc. are not
simply sign-posting or attempting to position one’s own work inside an
existing canon. The other way in which sign-posting crops up as a
problem is through over-statement. For example, I think that the final
stanza in “Sunsets” is about our inability to control circumstances, and
as a result, is already apparent in the previous stanza: “The author has
a false/sense of control over/his poem.” Would the poem lose anything if
you ended it with the stanza and lopped off, “Today the sun is
setting/someday, everyone will die”?

In some cases, I also think that you could experiment with the long
line. Take the end of “Poem into the Future.” The title already is
projecting something, and a few longer lines might enable you to enact
such a projection on the page. I’m especially thinking about the final
stanza:

Consider:

In your arms
My life has an end
In your arms
I am carried into the future
In your arms, my life has an end, in your arms
I am carried into the future.

This is rather crude example of how this stanza might be reworked. But
placing the “my life has an end” between your repeated “in your arms”
enacts something on the page that is already lingering in the text. I
think this kind of writing can be over-worked (I’m guilty of it), but in
your case, thinking more about line length, punctuation and spacing –
but not at the loss of cadence – could be very productive.

I hope this is somewhat helpful?