zodiac4 Nov 2004

How do you know the "you" in my comments was really you - Dovina - and not a purely rhetorical "you", maybe even a character I've created named "you", to whom, in the interest of indirectness and otherwise poetickal abstractness I direct all my comments?

That aside (and probably utterly untrue and irrelevant - who knows?) the points of my earlier comment were that:

1) you answered richa's comment that your poems tend to make unsupportable assertions by making a bunch of unsupportable assertions and saying "so there";

2) a useful trick for making unsupportable assertions in a poem is to place a character in the poem who makes the assertions;

3) your poems are self-righteous and doubt-free.

The last bit, I'll admit now, was a little over the top. I'm sorry. But, seriously, I was thinking about the last poem of yours I'd read, "A Better God", and just kind of connecting it with a vague idea I've gotten about you from earlier poems. I might have better said, "You might consider being careful to make sure your poems don't sound self-righteous. The feeling I get from your poems of a rather childish and naive certainty, for me inseparable from the sense I get of you, Dovina, whether or not it's some elaborately constructed narrative voice, is actually painful to me." Better?

Anyways, your response was a general, unsupportable and laughably wrong attack on my person, having practically nothing to do with my comment. After reading it, I checked the last half-dozen times I'd made useful and practical suggestions on your poems, and saw you'd regularly ignored the point of my comments and just said something irrelevant or insulting. So I guess my saying, "As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment" isn't so far off the mark.

PS-You just think it's "childishly thought out" because I said "fucking" - twice.

Anyhoo my characterization of you didn't have anything to do with your narratorial voice or whatever the rest of your comment's on about. Good catch!!!