"We Come Elemental" by Tamiko Beyer -- Poetry Daily, 6/22/2013

from We Come Elemental
poem found here

 
first lines:

We step into the humid light. It sticks to our skin

 

the good of sound and form; the bad of ideation

Here's a poem with a scientific slant -- and you would be surprised how hard it is to write a scientifically oriented poem without it becoming aurally clumsy or turning into Tom Lehrer's Elements song. (Here's a good animated youtube spot, because it's worth the click. Notice the dischord in the opening measures, and how it forwarns the unavoidable silliness of the effort.)

There's some good stuff here with sound and form. Form wise, the lines are created out of the wording; the stanzas created with the lines (and all vice versa), so that the stanzas and lines each have purpose and self-resonance. And then there is the use of the indent to mark a thought within a thought (that is, stanzas 3 and 6 are ideas within the ideas of stanzas 2 and 7, and 4 and 5 are within 3 and 6) -- something I like, though I wonder if the indentations might be too large, visually.

With sound, this poem is a live with rhyme and aural repetition. Let me see if I can chart out the play here, including rhymes, slant rhymes, and repetitions (whether I like the repetition or not). I'm doing this half to see if it will be an effective way to display this. Because of the narrow margins of the blog, I am going to shrink the indents. I'll only do about the first half of the poem.

We step into humid light. It sticks to our skin and microbes gorge in greywater runoff pools.

"For the Next Task, I Turn From the Bench" by Matthew Nienow -- Poetry Daily, 6/5/2013

from Southwest Review (98.2)
poem found here
 

First line:
with one hundred bronze clench nails
 

exploring "write what you know," the info dump, and other bits

— reformatted, with some editing 8/2/2014
 

There's things I like about this poem; some things I don't like. I do like that it does not pause to overtly state what is going on — the building of a small boat — but only gives you sufficient clues: specifically, "clench nail," and "strakes." You will see a phrase in fiction writing circles, especially imaginative fiction: the "info dump." An info dump is a moment where the action of a narrative comes to a stop so that the writer can give the reader information on elements of what is going on. You see this very frequently in science fiction, in TV and film as much as in books, and you can understand why, when much of the reality in the text is fictional. You can't, for example, continually use the phrase "dilithium crystals" without at some point clueing the reader in on what it means. More often than not, the writers try to conceal the dump through dialogue. And, far too often, it results in a moment where the characters are suddenly in the shadow of a stupid cloud: "So, you gonna use that hammer, Jim?" "Yeah, Jack. I'm going to use it to force nails into wood." "Cool." Usually, it's about that dumb, once you think about it, and once you start paying attention. And just because it is two starship engineers talking about the plastofisten microcomodumaker doesn't mean they are not speaking, in context, the blatantly obvious to each other. (Once you start watching for them, it becomes quite funny to see the info dumps: all the actors are forced to stand still in an absurd game of Red Light/Green Light waiting for the explanatory exposition to end.)

Which is why, in fiction, an info dump is a bad thing.[FN] And so also in poetry. And yet it happens all the time: a full stop in the poem to tell the reader what is going on. Had "For the Next Task" stopped to tell the reader it was a boat, it would have been an info dump. And unnecessay, as the center of action here is quite clear. All you need is a little dictionary work.

—————————————- [FN] Curiously, it is usually the fact that info dumps are unnecessary to the poem. Great writing recognizes the reader should almost never need an info dump: they usually can get the information they need in context. If they can't (and need to), that's a problem. Indeed, you will find most of the time info dumps are far less about the text than they are about one of two things: (1) the writer hand feeding readers too lazy to make the effort (which is a bad thing); and (2) a writer showing off their own imagination/knowledge (which is also a bad thing, when the text comes to a stop for it to happen). —————————————-

As I've said before: you are allowed to demand effort on the part of the reader. More importantly, you are expected to demand effort on the part of the reader. Because if you poem takes no effort to read, there really is nothing to be gained in the reading, is there? (And "effort," here, does not mean only looking things up: it means actively reading.)

Another like: I really like the phrase "wide mouth mason." (Though, it probably should be "wide-mouth" or "wide-mouthed.")

But now, some of what I don't like. And it may seem I am being a bit overly nit-picky at points; but, to be honest, a great poem could take it.

I don't like that the poem is written as a single sentence broken up only by commas. It is such a long sentence it rather loses control of itself. It ends very far away from where it begins, grammatically speaking. Unfortunately, to be honest, I'm having a very difficult time putting into typed words the wobblies I see, so let me just set out the sentence like this:

For the next task,     I turn from the bench         with one hundred bronze clench nails in a wide mouth mason,         the bucking iron's finger gap smooth upon my hand,         the ball-peen longing for its sway,             to meet each nail's head gently,             to send the slender tooth into its bread,             whereupon the head is backed by weighted hand,                 that the tapered spike may be driven in reverse,                     the soft-tapping slow dance of the working bend,                 that the golden nail may re-enter the wood from which it came,                 & holdfast two strakes together,                     that the many may share a single name.

Hopefully you can hear how by about the appearance of "soft-tapping" the sentence has begun to lose control of itelf. Some of the problem lies in that there is very little parallelism in the lists. Throw upon that the not always tight syntax and semantics (I'm not saying non-standard, I'm saying wobbly), and you have a rather unwieldy thing. Stepping outside of the specific issues, my question is: if you are writing poetry, why not use lines to help the reader manage that sentence? (Or different punctuation?) For me, this poem hides an unwieldy sentence in its arbitrary line breaks, and, by making it hard to read smoothly because of the line breaks, it makes it easier to hide its unwieldiness. Which is so often the case with contemporary free verse: the poet thinks they are writing lines, but they are not paying attention to how the lines work with (or against) the flow of words, and not always at all paying attention to that flow of words. So you end up with a lot of clumsiness created (and then hidden) by the free verse inattentiveness.

A lot of my other issues with this poem lie in its wording. Perhaps some of them are more influenced by taste than by poetics, but it might be worth pointing them out just to talk about them, to let you weigh them for yourself within your own poetic ear. There's a lot to be gained in trying things out.

I don't much like the title. "For the Next Task" sounds too much like "For My Next Trick," and carries a similar nuance. Neither fit the tone of the poem. Perhaps, simply, "Next"? (Or anything at all? Is it important to the poem that it is "next"?)

I very much don't like the missing commas in such as the first line: "with one hundred bronze clench nails" which should be "with one hundred, bronze clench nails." That seems like a little thing, but stringing out adjectives like that only creates difficulties in the reading (unless, you are very carefully crafting), especially when the poem is a long sentence.

I don't like the misuse of words and the resulting clashes in ideation like when "to send the slender tooth into its bread" is followed up on the next line with "that tapered spike." "Bread" is going for gentle, "spike" is rather quite the opposite. This one isn't taste: it's poor form. You have to be careful of this in your writing. When you create a clash between two ideas, the reader has only three paths: ignore one, ignore the other, ignore them both. Your ideation should build up, not be a series of independent moments. When it's the latter, that's when you are in threat of clashes like this one. And you can't generate depth when your words are at odds.

Another spot of this is the word "reverse." When you clench a nail, you are not driving it back, in "reverse" direction. You're more bending it over. The phrase "driving it in reverse" very much more sounds like you're hammering the nail back through so that you can pull it out. Another is that the nail begins as "bronze" and ends as "golden." You can't use a metallic color to describe a metal that is already identified as another metal. Just can't. The colors are too tied to the names of the metal.

Is "re-enter the wood from which it came" redundant?

I don't like the ampersand in the third to last line, but I've discussed that just a couple posts ago (here).

I like "sway," in that there is the idea that a hammer has sway over a nail. But it doesn't work in this context, because "swaying" is very much something a hammer should not be doing. If you are wielding a hammer and it is swaying, you're doing it wrong. (Or you need to stop because you are tired.)

Which leads us, first to "strakes," which I think is being misused here; and then, finally, to "ball-peen" and "write what you know." (Note that I am going to be making hypotheticals about the author in this bit.)

Here's the problem: a ball-been hammer is used in metalworking. You don't use a ball-peen to drive in nails: it's not made to do that, and if you do use it you're increasing the chance of screwing things up by quite a bit.

That said, we bring in "write what you know," one of the many workshopisms you hear in creative writing discussion, one of the many I have come to dislike. And why do I dislike it? Because it's bumper-sticker creative writing, and, bumper-sticker anything is almost always misused, ill-used, bad-habit-forming, badly-conceived, or otherwise detrimental to developing sophistication. Bizarrely, "write what you know" has somehow become a restrictive dicta of workshop mentality. "To write successfully, you must write from out of who you are. You must write what you know." Which means that if the origin of this little poem was listening to a friend of a friend talk about small ship-building, or reading a scene in a novel, or some such, and Nienow knew nothing about small ship-building when he got the idea, then he should not have written the poem, because he would not be writing "what he knew."

Which is, on its face, nonsense. Rather, what "write what you know" should tell you is that if you want to write about something outside your wheelhouse, then learn about it first. If you don't learn about it, you write superficially, and your text ends up superficial and shallow (if not flat out silly). Depth comes out of knowledge. It doesn't equal knowledge, but it definitely comes out of it.

Now, I, myself, take this to extremes, perhaps; but it works very well for me. For example, say I have decided to write a Keats-like, formally stanzaed poem about Hansel and Gretel. If it is the first time I had tried to write a Keats-like, formallly stanzaed poem, I would definitily (1) read, many times, some of Keats's own poetry of the nature, and study what he does with stanzas. I would also very likely (2) see if I can find a book that talks about Keats's use of stanzas: after all, the easiest way to learn about something is to ask someone who knows about that something.

Finally, (3) I will hunt down everything I can about Hansel and Gretel, including versions of the tale, other poems about the tale, and even the libretto of Englebert Humperdinck's opera. I want to see what other people have done. I want to see variations. I also want to see how they did it so I can learn from those people who have walked this path before.

Another peculiar thing that shows up in writing circles, though not so overtly: the idea that if I am writing about X, I am supposed to do it wholly on my own. Looking at what other people did is cheating. Which is complete and utter nonsense. If I am going to write a scene of, say, a ship leaving a dry-dock, I am, yes, going to research the practical aspects of it. But I am also going to see if I can find other people who have written about the same thing, so I can learn from them . . . . and do it better than they did.

Now, like I said, I tend to do far more research than I need, but I really enjoy researching. But, in truth, the number of times I have discovered some little gem of knowledge that just makes the work is more than enough to justify the effort. You can't be a good writer without knowing: both about your subject, about writing about your subject, and about the form in which you are writing.

But I digress.

So. "Ball-peen" here is a mistake, and a big one, because we are supposed to be accepting that the person in this poem knows what they are doing.

But let's flip it about. Let's suppose that the origin of this poem is someone Nienow knows personally — or, even, is about Nienow himself — and they do in fact use a ball-peen hammer.

It doesn't change anything. The claim "but that is really what they do" is justification for nothing in a text that is not reportage. You still have to "write what you know": which is to say, in this instance, learn enough about the subject so you know when elements in the real-life source are idiosyncratic — or, even, wrongly done. So then you can be writing to what the reader is going to read, not to what "is really real." And you can avoid what unavoidably comes off as an error. You still have to know that a ball-peen hammer is meant to be used with metalworking, not for driving nails. And you should know that a reader that knows anything about hammers is going to know that: using "ball-peen" in your poem is going to look wrong, look like a mistake on the writer's part, and decrease greatly the reader's faith in the writer's abilities.

So maybe not "write what you know"? Maybe instead know what you write.

 
•

One final note: what I absolutely hate about this poem: the word my (and the "I" in the title). It is an absolutely unnecessary element to the poem. And the presence of it actually changes the ideation of the poem in a detrimental way. The primary energies of the poem — even the extended sentence nature of it — points the reader to the last phrase: "that the many may share a single name" (and to the "holdfast" that sets up that phrase). By adding the first person to the poem, the poem becomes no longer about that final phrase, but about the person building the ship. Why? Because there is no reason for the first person to be in the poem in the first place. So when the first person shows up (primarily through the "my") it demands and gathers a huge share of the energies that should be being channeled to that summing phrase. With the "my" the poem is now divided in its purposes and aims, and loses for it.

I would argue this point is not one of taste, but one of poetics and semantics; and that the poem would be far better if rewritten without that first person.

"Sister as Moving Object" by Jan Beatty -- Poetry Daily, 4/25/2013

from The Switching/Yard
poem found here

 

First lines:
my sister is moving in me again
with her long          arms and legs

 

some general, exploratory questions

— reformatted 9/30/15

I have a number of questions about this poem. My talking them here rather slants to the feel of critiques; but if I was in conversation, for some of them I would like to hear the poet speak her justifications: I am always wanting to have someone point out to me something I am missing. Hopefully, for you readers, I am prompting explorations, some things to ponder.

(1)

I don't see very much reasoning behind the fracturing of the lines, or much consistency in its use. In many places in the poem the fracturing gets in the way of reading, creating a choppiness rather than an intended breaking up. (At stanza 7, "she raised me up," it starts getting very bothersome – even annoying – for me.)

Directly related to this, the wording of the poem works counter to the fracturing in many places. If you are going to fracture the lines, why then have syntax that wants to join the fragments back together, as with the "like" in line 33:

I took to the heat          like a dog to an electric fence          don't go past

Simply leaving the "like" off would not change anything except to improve the sense of the structure.

Another example is the prepositional phrase in line 9:

Rocks the house          to 1965          wearing pink-pink-

Why not write it is a independent noun phrase (for example, something like a "1965 in a" phrase).

In the other direction, why say "moving to tell me" in line 3, when its wording is on its own fighting the upcoming gap. Why not, simply,

talking in moving          she's still here          don't go past

(By the by, "moving to tell me" is rather already stated in the title of the poem. No need to restate your premise: just demonstrate.)

 

(2)

To say, I have no issues with the splitting up of "pink-pink-" and "caked on lipstick." It works well, as does the "teased-up- / Ann-Margaret hair" line break across 10-11. Though, I see no sense in the hyphens after "up" or the second "pink": they seem gramattically incorrect and poetically unnecessary (if not detrimental). If they were on a single line, would you write "pink-pink-caked-on lipstick"? I read the first hyphen as creating an emphasis:

Mutt: "What kind of pink was it?" Jeff: It was pink. It was pink-pink. It was PINK-pink.

In fact, I am going to try to remember that use of the hyphen. It works very well.) However, adding the hyphen after the second pink reduces the effectiveness of the first, because the words are now merely two in a chain of four. Plus, I have a feeling it is just enough outside the norms of grammar to cause a little stumble.

–

(3)

Sometimes the situation is reversed, and the breaks work against the syntax/semantics. For example, the natural reading of line 7

some days          an ocean liner          splitting

is that the oceanliner is cracking in two. The "splitting" should not be split from its necessary object, "the dark waters." Though, the problem here is not wholly the fault of the fracturing. It could easily be fixed merely by changnig "splitting" into something that can not point back to the ship: "slicing through" or what.

 

(4)

Some of the wording contradicts itself. Most glaringly, line 8 opens up the description of the sister with "my sister's particular beauty" – a phrase repeated down near the end of the poem – and yet, that description ends, at line 11, with "could've been anyone's / sister." One of them cannot be correct.

But, note that I am not talking about events like in line 29:

with everything coming          his thin teeshirt          i watched their mouths:

That is more the effect that the fracturing is supposed to create, to be able to put fragments of thought together to create a combined whole or continuous flow ideationally without doing so grammatically.

 

(5)

I see that the "I"s in lines 29 and 30 are not capitalized, while the "I"s in lines 31, 33, and elsewhere are. If intentional, it reads like an error, since there is no reason evident in the lines for the change to lower case.

 

(6)

Why have the comma in "she, later" – in the second to last stanza – and not have the complementing comma after "music"? Is the first one really necessary?

 

(7)

I can make no sense of the some of the moments in the poem. For example, there is "magnetic" in line 6 (how is a truck magnetic? what is created in calling a truck magnetic?). And then there is "from the guyot to the springboard" in line 17. "Springboard" is hanging in the air, with nothing else in the poem to connect it to anything. But, even at the simplest level, how does one connect a springboard to a guyot? (I am wondering if Ms. Beattty has a incorrect understanding of what a guyot is, since I see no way you can substntially connect the idea of swimming or diving to the idea of a oceanic guyot.)

 

(8)

This is by far the most interesting question/comment.

I'll bet you anything this poem would be greatly improved if it was rewritten without the woman being anybody's sister, with it being written simply a description of a fictional character. I say this often: most of the time the presence of an "I" weakens a poem, and weakens it in the writing of the poem. For whatever reason (I do have reasons, but I say "for whatever reason" because I don't here want to get into them), for whatever reason, people are sloppier, and put less effort into a poem when they are writing out of or through an "I." And this poem in particular screams out to me "GET RID of that damn 'I'! I could be so much more interesting without it!"

Now, many writers – I am not saying this poet in particular, here; I am talking about conversations in the past – will counter with something like "but I want it to be about my sister" or "but it is about my sister," both being an appeal to some necessity behind the presence of the "I." It is that very want, that very pull of "but this is what really happened," that leads to the weakening of the poem. (And look at me, I'm getting into reasons.) You have to get your head out of that mindset. Great, artistic portraits are not great because they are spitting images of the person who posed. (In fact, the oft repeated truism is that replication of reality is the lowest form of art, because it is nothing more than technique.) Great portraits are first and foremost about the painting. (Rembrandt's self-portraits are intended demonstrations over time to this point.) When you are more concerned with the "I," wth the reality than with the poem, you have established an obstacle to the success of the poem. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth talks about how a poet must remove themselves from the immediacy of the experience so that they may analyze the experience, and cleanly do the work of turning the results of that examination into poetry. There has to be a degree of removal, or the experience overwhelms the writing process, and the poem fails.

To me, this poem seems loose directly because of how often it needs to point out that it is about the speaker's sister. Very little of the poem is actually about the relationship between the speaker and the sister: most of the work to that end is done with explicit statements. Most of the metaphoric work is simply about the sister. Ergo, I say this as something to ponder: the poem is confused because the emotions that spawned the poem wants to constantly say "this is about my sister and our relationship," but those emotions and that resulting want gets in the way of the real energies of the poem, which are, simply, the description of a woman. So, then, why not simply write a poem that is the description of a woman?

Or, alternately, scrap the poem, get some distance, study and explore the relationship between the speaker and the sister, and write a poem about that. This one isn't quite working.

 

(9)

Finally, on a similar vein, but one much more exploratory, the title of the poem – "Sister as Moving Object" – is very much the kind of title one might see connected to a work out of the school of Futurism. (Here's a wikipedia link.) Mina Loy was possibly the only truly successful U.S. Futurist poet (not only in popularity, but in bringing the ideas of Futurism successfully into the medium). It would be an interesting thing to read up on Futurism, and rewrite this poem, or write a poem within the idea of "Sister as Moving Object" in a manner derived from out the school. That just to say, perhaps to prompt.

 

•
Just to say, if you do not have Mina Loy's collection, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, I strongly press it upon you. Not only is it very good, it has the potential to teach you a lot.

"Elk Skeleton" by Amy Fleury, Verse Daily, 4/16/2013

from Sympathetic Magic
poem found here

first lines:
Down the draw at dusk seven mule deer come
to browse the blanched grasses around the cabin.

 

wording, metaphor, and the narrative "I"

--- Some editing and rewriting, 6/11/2013.

The words I looked up while engaging this poem: draw, has, scree, leach, lichen, brocades, hove. Some because I was not sure their meaning; some because I wanted to check to be sure I had the right meaning; some because I wanted to check their usage in the poem. (Thank you for teaching me this usage of draw, by the by.) Is this is a problem? Let me be clear: absolutely not. Poetry is about words. It is about discovering words. It is about the usage of words. (Indeed, it is also about the sharing of words and the usage of words.)[FN] Irritation at having to look up words for a poem is to me only one thing: laziness. (Well, two things. It almost assures I will have no interest in the poetry of said lazy person, because that laziness will appear also throughout their creative endeavors poetry.)

----------------- [FN] In demonstration, I'll share something I learned yesterday: the origin of the word hobgoblin comes from the character Robin Goodfellow from folklore. As it happens, at one time, one way that people made diminuitives from names was to put an 'H' at the front. For example. Richard could have the nickname "Hick," and Roger would become Hodge. Here, Robin becomes Hobbe, which becomes hob, for "elf." Then, add goblin. (This from etymonline.com. I have not yet checked it against the OED.) -----------------

That, just to say. Because it does need to be said every once in a while. (And, from it, I think I will add to my aphorisms on creative writing:

Aesthetic writing -- and poetry in particular -- is about words. It is about the sharing of words. It is about the discovery of words. It is about the creative use of words. Any other approach can be only attributed to laziness, or to a psychical insularity, neither of which makes for anything terribly interesting.

I'll work on the wording.

•
So, wording. Let's look at a couple moments and explore:

First: the "has" in line three. Is this grammatically correct? There are three possible subjects that I see: "seven deer," "grasses," and "not all," all of which are plural. Change the verb: would it ever be valid to say not all is dead? Or, change the pronoun: not many of them is dead or three of the five is dead? Now, I will be honest, I do catch myself saying "not all has" while thinking about and writing this post; but, it seems grammatically incorrect.

There's something else with that line: a curiosity as to time. The verb is "has been": a perfected verb, an action that is over. The line says "in relationship to the time of now, not all have have been winter-killed." Yet within the sentence there is a time-stamp of "this early April." So the phrase is, actually, narrowing the time of death of the grasses to early April -- which is a little off as far as seasonal cycles go. What is happening is the poet wanted to establish a time for the poem; but, by accident of language, created an idea that doesn't belong. You have to be careful how you execute things: syntax is very important.

Which prompts another question: does it even need to be said, overtly that the poem is set in "early April" at all? Keep in mind, there is nothing here establishing where (geographically speaking) the action is occurring. And, early April in Maine is very different climate-wise from early April in Mississippi. (O.K. There are not all that many elk in Mississippi, but you get my point.) But I ask, why even state a month? Is there anything being added to the poem that is not already established within the presented details? Actually, I can see how, without the month, one might read it as being early winter -- though, I think the fog works against it. But I believe the idea of spring could have been introduced -- or clarified -- without actually naming the season or a month. My point, however, is, simply: why be blunt if there is no need? (or, if you can avoid it?)

It is always much more interesting to generate an idea than it is to simply state a point fact. Point facts don't have anywhere to go. In fact, point facts tend even to restrict where its associated ideas can go. The end of this poem presents a kind of winter-spring -- or death/life, or death birth -- image, with the moth on the elk bones. Now, a simple comparison: which generates more energy? Abutting the word April with the idea of a moth on elk bones? (which is at best simple metaphor); or something like:

Seven mule deer emerge to browse blanched grasses And a moth, perched on a rib from an elk, tests its wings.

(I rewrite a touch for my purpose, and make no claims that his is, thus, 'good.' I'm just exploring.) Yes, it's still playing with a simple metaphor, but with two non-facts there is more energy generated. Not only is there the 'awakening' of the moth, but there is 'emergence' and 'hunger.' However, with

[. . .] April, And a moth, perched on a rib from an elk, tests its wings.

the word April, because it is a base fact, contracts the energies. It is no longer so much play-in-metaphor but a definition: April, and a visual idea like you would see in April. One of those seems irrelevant. And might it not be true that, really, overtly stated time really has its greatest utility when it is being played against other times? (As in April here, because later in the poem it's going to be June, and I want to formalize the passing of time.)

Similarly, I ask this question: what is added to -- or detracted from -- the poem with the presence of the present and viewing "I"? It only appears twice, with the "my" in the second stanza, and the "I" in the third. Yes, it adds a viewer. But is a viewer necessary? And, to split the difference, does the viewer have to be an "I"? Indeed, up the appearance of the "my" in line eight there is no hint of a viewer, nor any need to provide one. The ideas are working quite well all on their own. I would argue the poem would be far more interesting without the "I," and even more so without any viewer at all -- and, even, that the viewer is irrelevant to the poem -- for nearly the same reasons I spoke about with the use of "April."

An "I" in a poem works the same way and the "April," above. It is not an innocent insertion: it is the presentation of a brute fact: "this poem is a witnessing, the narrator is viewing in the present time." That changes the poem, and (potentially) constricts the ideation of the poem: it is no longer simply ideas generated from a scene; it is not about the person seeing.

Something to consider, something I do myself with my every project: whatever you are doing, if there is an "I," give it a try writing it without it. I have found -- both with my own work and, in a greater number, with other peoples' -- two things: the poem is (1) harder two write, but (2) usually comes out the better. Even when the poem is meant to be speaking a narrator's focus.[FN] (Something worth exploring: E.E. Cummings's many sonnets, most of which have a narrator's voice. When does he use an "I"? What is the reason? What is the effect?)

----------------- [FN] I was just reminded on a web page these last couple of days of a little creative prose writing trick: if you are having difficulty working out a scene, shift to a present first person and brainstorm way. You might very often find that shifting into first person does, in fact, make the scene easier to write, and easier to explore. But that should also be pointing out that it is probably not as good a text as you will have when you pull it back out of first into some other narrative framework. -----------------

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A couple of other notes. I do not think "hove" in stanza two is used correctly; though, I do love the word. To be honest, I don't think it should be used at all since it demands either action on the part of the stones or action on the part of something heaving the stones, neither of which really works in the ideas as presented: it makes stones in someway animate or animated, and if stones are active, I think it rather clashes with the idea of the very non-active elk skeleton.

Finally, at first read I didn't like the comparison of the skeleton to a ship, because the poem is jumping from woods to water. But, the more I read it, the more I like it. I think it is justified with the skeleton being found "at the trailhead," which is an idea of emerging, just as the ship would have 'emerged' onto land from off the water. Though, I do feel like it is a touch underused. In fact, if I were writing this poem, and I got to that third stanza, I would be very tempted to trash the first two and start at the ship/skeleton idea. (Notice also how having the broad dead elk idea being compared to the broad shipwreck idea works in the positive way described above?, in that it is two ideas brought together to generate energies, as opposed to brute statement?)