< The Epistles of Stanhope St. >

[rayheinrich]

a warehouse in Brooklyn not sure if there was a typo here
a crowded dirty place typo is kind, just me misspelling as usual. Normally, I would have been saved by the spell-checker but Ontario, California, Maine, and West Virginia have Brooklin's spelled with an "i" so the spell checker's being politic. If I'd followed it with NYC or "baseball" it would have been smart enough to highlight it as a misspelling.
i'm changing "place" to "store" cuz prices go with stores.

a catacomb

of unkempt jewels
and riches for a dollar

I don't like the long pause after catacomb. I like running it all together and the alliteration that emphasizes (even if it may be a little cute)
I like adding "and" but that implies there are both jewels and riches
when there are only jewels and the jewels are the riches. But using "their" instead of "and" solves that problem.
so:
a catacomb of unkempt jewels
their riches for a dollar

be careful

it's so easy to get out of hand

and on the second floor I like "hand" and "and" rhyming
but mostly the 'and' makes the first line iambic to go along with the 2nd,3rd,4th lines of the stanza.
the shelves loom over me
a rat rat needs some modifier, I think. Took me awhile to realize 'rat' referred to the narrator.
who's seeking comfort of their narrow aisles there was supposed to be a 'who's' at the first of the 4th line of the stanza, it accidentally got dropped somewhere

And YES! that 'rat' is confusing. I thought of these solutions:

the shelves loom over
mousey me / me a rat / me the rat / me the mouse

... and thinking about the rat... I really don't like thinking of myself as a rat (In the context of New York City Brooklyn where rats have a bad reputation, normally I like rats and think they get a bad rap. Mice are just as bad and yet people think They're cute and cuddly. I know someone who keeps rats as pets and their reasonably intelligent and they tamed down and are nice companions I have a picture of one of his rats sitting on his shoulder nuzzling his ear. He says that mice are temperamental and given to biting you with very little notice. But given the favorable Metaphor they've been assigned by Society, I think I'd rather be a mouse even though that Disneyfies it a bit. But I think I can live with the cuteness. And I think of the aisles as being part of the shelves like they're the shelves' feet and the mouse is running across their feet as mice are prone to do.
so the stanza goes:

and on the second floor
the shelves loom over
mousey me
who's seeking comfort in their narrow aisles

the books of dead parents among? to blend the stanzas and narrative, or other choice.
thrown into boxes
by sons and daughters
old lives that wouldn't fit didn't?
Yeah and it looks like the sons and daughters are throwing the parents in the boxes instead of books and logically it just sucks.

old lives are welcome here not sure about this one line. I would consider cutting and seeing how you can blend it into the next stanza

yearning to be opened don't like these last two lines. What about touching the spines, etc?
yearning to reveal themselves

my prizes are the notes
scribbled in their margins tightened up this stanza
I know annotated is a big word but it fits the iambic rhythm. Notes is only one syllable and needs to be padded out. "Jottings" works but I don't like the superficial tone.
But none of this matters anymore because I can't think of a way to connect the books to the dead people much less to their annotations. That's a real world thing I like to do but this poem refuses to cooperate.

letters from the past
addressed to me
their titles?
how little this matters I like the ending but think there could be more punch. Trying to think of it almost like a haiku.

Hey Ray,
Great poem. Glad you pulled it out. Made some suggestions. Hope you find them helpful.
bryn

Yes, I did find them helpful. They especially helped me re-evaluate the poem.
All sorts of problematic things here. When thought about logically, it isn't logical enough for me.
I either wish you hadn't pointed this out or I'm appreciative. So I can't figure out how to
make all that work Even though that's the better story, so I'm just going to focus on the
books and make it into a dirge/ritual chant and leave it at that since if I think about it
anymore I'll go crazy. Thanks for going to the trouble. I learned from it.
So I've re-written the poem as a chant (see above) using some of your suggestions,
but focused on just the books.


PS your formatting sucks!

And that formatting, I kept thinking you meant those square bracketed =8's and =4's
that the archaic MyBB bulletin board software requires for spacing. Why don't they use
the simple space character? That's because I want to space the poem's lines out to be
under the image which is usually wider than the poem.

But then I thought: What if you meant how the lines of the poem are formatted?

Just in case that's what you meant, I'm going to paste in an explanation that I wrote
a long while ago When people used words much worse than "sucks" to describe
how I laid out my poems:
[P. S.]
Lines, spacing and whatnot:
I was nearsighted and if I used my glasses to see the audience at a reading it was hard to
read my poems all pushed together in blocks with the tiny punctuation. Then one night I
met this wonderful woman who read quite well and when I looked at her poems she had
them written down for speaking out loud and I immediately copied her. How she did it:
Lines were spoken without a pause, the end of a line meant a small pause, a blank line
meant a longer one and two blank lines meant an even longer one. No blocks to untangle,
no tiny punctuation marks to have to pick out with nearsighted eyes. Damn, that made life
much easier reading poetry out loud to an audience. And since that's how I think of poetry:
spoken out loud; I like to write it on the page that way cuz I think that that encourages
people to move their lips when they're reading it. I want them to think of it as being spoken
out loud. And yeah, I know, part of that is wishful thinking on my part; but then that's pretty
much what writing is anyway.

Titles:
The less-than, greater-than characters around the title originated because I kept all my poems
clustered together in large text files. To find individual poems those symbols let me search on
a specific title or skip down one whole poem at a time. And in the old days on the internet
there was UseNet that had Newsgroups and I could find my poems posted on them among
zillions of others because nobody else used those symbols for their titles. And I keep doing
it for that same purpose. But I'm not wedded to them, if an editor doesn't like them I'll take them off.

Very sparse use of uppercase:
Purely an eccentricity. I started out really liking Chinese poetry and Chinese (as well as Japanese)
writing doesn't use case and I guess I was just too hopelessly romantic not to imitate. I liked
how it looked and usually use it unless I'm writing poetry that has a specific form like sonnets
or limericks.
(And I prefer haiku without capitals because Japanese doesn't use them. But I do bow to Western
ritual and write my haiku using two or three lines.
[/P. S.]

Extraneous, it turns out, notes about the annotations found in old books:

And I really do go looking for books that have notes written on the margins and I really
don't care what the book is since I'm mostly interested in the notes. In more organized
bookstores I ask specifically if they have any diaries and a few of them have had them
and I bought every one cuz they're easily really cheap. Most diaries, turns out, or just
short descriptions of what the person did that day. If they're closer to the present time
they're usually not that interesting, though their some exceptions that have very
interesting personal details. When they get farther back in time then the day-to-day
things are do get more interesting because people's daily habits and events were quite
different back then. The diaries though, when I get an introspective person can be very
interesting, but there have been a few I stop reading, close up because they're suffering
is so close to mine (or, if different, my empathetic connection to them) that it's just too
painful. There's one woman who wrote about having a stillborn child, describing the
color of its hair, She went on, but I just had to stop reading saying to myself I would
get back to it but I never did And if I came across it again I wouldn't dare touch it.