Notes on Student Poems

• Streamline. How to say something more clearly. 
• More humor. Jazzy titles
• How can the reader know what you know? Readers respond to image, narrative, the unexpected, a different point of view.
• Abandon centering. Think about using stanzas/space to create clearer meaning.
• Rhyme is doing you no favor.
• OK. I like all this where the familiar tale is being mixed with other things and given new particulars. But then in last two lines back to usual--why?
• Too pretty sounding?
• I like this incremental repetition but I want more. Push harder.
• Combination of two things can increase interest, effectiveness.
• Read aloud for rhythm, clarity, necessity.
• What I want most is for you to experiment with not centering--will change feeling of lines.
• Cutting always good.
• Language--what is the ratio of complexity to clarity. Think about necessity. Deliberately making it more difficult and I can be fine with that if it has a purpose--re-seeing?
• Maybe un-sentencing would help.
• This sounds funny.
• A little falling off towards the end where earlier there's all this great, various stuff. Think about order.
• Think about line breaks to shake up usual way of reading and emphasizing words.
• Doesn't hang together in interesting or directive way like what follows.
• Not clear to me why this enters the poem.
• This is a great quote but it seems sassier than the poem itself.
• Think about order--clusters of idea/messages.
• Why so many commas?

Transcribed from a Lake House (but not there now)

Definitely want to work on the poem but now my methods change. Notes, notes, notes, some looking up, then typing into the computer the fits and shreds, firming up the lines, moving things about.

I'd like to make an idea list. It's 7:03 and I have a strong cup of coffee. A list for small places in Cleveland which interests me as a series, an approach. So far 1. Daddy's car 2. The Brick 3. alley by Euclid 4. WW utility room 5. censer 6. Amana freezer 7. BSS parking lot.

What else might qualify in strange ways (I'm crossing the numbers off so things don't have to come out straight):

• Miss Roger's piano room
• the pool at Rocking Chair Cove
• the cottages after I grew up
• the wine bottle when I pushed down the cork
• the pothole where I got that flat tire
• the stuffed veal breast
• the hollow chocolate egg of confetti
• could I try the rubber boots again
• the library on Mapledale
• or maybe a particular book--The Dandelion Cottage with its wallpaper scrap idea of making a home
• the pyrex coffee pot--thinking about it like a movie with repeated sloshings gurgle gurgle swamp swish empty
• the surrey
• the secret place behind our thin suburban woods
• Alvie's 
• the little park and Bob's Big Boy while we waited for Katie