[New-Poetry] An Apology

[Robin Hamilton]

Hey, Alex, I'm still bemused by "SH**S".  Did you mean "sucks", or am I being singularly inept and dumb?

After I sent my own post, it occurred to me that you might be making a complex reference the poem by Jonathan Swift which ends, "Celia, Celia, Celia sh*ts!".  (I think Swift printed it with the asterisk.)  Or possibly a pun on the poet's name?

But it's the problem of whether "mistakes" are intended deliberately or not.

I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mississippi reference in Capps' poem is to Berryman's suicide, but without knowing more of the context (I've managed to scrape quite a few of her poems off the Web now) I *still don't know whether or not we're intended to see the speaker as getting this wrong, or simply that Capps bought the over-common drowning version.

(I say this with some personal anguish since in my own elegy for Berryman did that very thing *** -- I'd like to pretend it was deliberate, but at the time I wrote the poem, I didn't know any better.  Worse, I can't see how to revise it to get the "historical facts" right.  Then there's the problem of calling the heroine of "Berryman's Sonnets" Lise when the latest edition rewrites her back to Jean.

Yuck!)

Robin

***        http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/ChideOne/Fourth%20Chiding.htm
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Alexander Jorgensen 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 3:06 AM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] An Apology


  One really hates to be crude (to come across as crude) and unfriendly, to approach an issue at such a pace that whatever that meant to be both intelligently and benevolently delivered comes out and sputters as merely alienating - and I am certainly a victim of my own perplexities. 
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