Off and On
Diana Senechal
I shuffled out of my slippers
and curled my toes into the pine.
Someone else, having donned
them, now heads out onto
the early hour-lit stones
in the steam of rain, the blur
of a day hesitating with form.
I do not long after them.
What are those slippers? you ask.
What do they represent?
Ah, something you’ll never
guess—that’s the whole point—
because I’m still wearing them,
still need them, still find warmth
in their matted plush, wouldn’t
lose them for the world
(well, maybe for some piece
of the world, but not all of it;
no one in their corrected
mind wants everything).
There is something in each
of us that moves and stops,
both at once, that loses
forever and forever keeps.
Soft be the soles that tap
the perpetual barefoot beat.
Take Away the Takeaway 
Bob Shepherd
/ December 14, 2023Good lord I love this. Shared it with a friend of mine who is herself a brilliant poet, and she immediately wrote to me wanting to call to discuss it. So much to love here. I am impressed with the care with which you write, Diana. Corrected, for example, the participial form. Perfect. And unusual. What is this literary technique called, when one changes the cliched phrase and makes it new and powerful again? the Renaissance-era makers of rhetorics had a name for it, and Erasmus would have known it and exemplified it in his Colloquies for schoolkids.
Diana Senechal
/ December 14, 2023Thank you, Bob, for all of this! I will reply more tomorrow.
Diana Senechal
/ December 15, 2023Now for a fuller reply: Bob, I am glad that the poem came across so strongly to you and your friend! This came just as I had two poems rejected without comment after a three-and-a-half-month wait for an answer. Getting poems published by journals takes patience, but I think a certain kind of friction also has to build–something that makes the poems harder to reject offhand.
I had a lot of fun with “corrected.” It is actually a correction of a correction: a buried reference to the dialogue between Desdemona and Emilia in Othello, where Desdemona declares that she would not cheat on her husband for all the world, and Emilia (taking up the cliched phrase) replies that she would, if it were in fact for “all the world”: “In troth, I think I should; and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition; but for the whole world,–why, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? I should venture purgatory for’t.” The poem then “corrects” Emilia’s correction of Desdemona; I was going to say, “no one in their right / mind wants everything,” but then “corrected” hit me. I didn’t expect the Othello reference to come through at all–but I did hope to give a few cliches a good dusting, which in fact came about!
I don’t consider this poem a Glück imitation or homage, but I think there’s a hint of Glück in it. For instance, in her collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, “The Melancholy Assistant” ends:
“Outside the snow was falling,
the landscape changing into a series
of bland generalizations
marked here and there with enigmatic
shapes where the snow had drifted.
The street was white, the various trees were white—
Changes of the surface, but is that not really
all we ever see?”
Bob Shepherd
/ December 15, 2023Unhappy with myself that I missed the allusion to Othello, but that is delicious! And the correction of the correction, wonderful. So artful!
And yes, since Kant, most people who care about such matters have been clear enough about the fact that that is all we ever see, and not even that, lol. It’s so much fun to know of these allusions in your work. Perhaps consider footnoting them, as Eliot did?
THANK YOU! xoxoxoxo
Bob Shepherd
/ December 15, 2023Here, I used footnotes.
But I am comparing great things (this poem of yours) to small (these pieces I have shared).
Bob Shepherd
/ December 15, 2023Diana, il miglior fabbro
Diana Senechal
/ December 16, 2023Bob, thank you for this poem–delightful and deep–and this example of footnotes! They suit the poem’s playful archaic diction well. I have used footnotes, introductions, and postscripts on occasion. I try to keep them to a minimum but sometimes need them or find that they work well with the poem.
Bob Shepherd
/ December 15, 2023Here I used, instead of footnotes, a little introduction:
Diana Senechal
/ December 16, 2023Wow, what a poem!