Nice stuff.

My complaints fall into three categories, though it may not be accurate to call them complaints. It could just be a stylistic preference. Nonetheless, it’smy job to make a case for my preferences. So i’ll give it a shot.

For the most part this poem stakes its claim on a foundation of tight lines and crisp, spare, imagistic language. The content is precise enough that we sense an “about” at the core, yet fluid enough, as various images flow one to the next, that we feel free to make connections ourselves. The imagery satisfies the requirements of the title: an elegy is a lamentation for the dead, and from the first line this is clearly the intent. However, three lines betray you:

Somehow it came to this.

Below the surface

Too far out to be heard.

Whereas the rest of your lines capture experience with the language of immediacy, in these lines we suddenly become aware of the the poet stepping out from behind the curtain to explain things to us using the language of narration. You want to avoid that sort of thing anyway, but in a poem this short, three flagging line will drag the whole thing down. It’s not that they are wrong; they simply lack what the other lines provide so effectively.

You don’t need to tell us everything, in a poem. You don’t need to tell us anything in particular. It’s not a history, an essay, or anything that calls for the clarity of prose. Were you to create something out of these lines using images and sense data, we might not be quite so certain of your intent, but is that so bad? That you might leave logical gaps in our sense of what the poem means provides a negative space, allowing your readers to interact with the poem, force them to bring their own ecperience to their appreciation of the writing, making your experience theirs as well.

The second area I want to address is enjambment, which is where you are choosing to break your lines. If there is one element that most distinguished poetry from prose, it is the line. Nothing comparable exists in prose. It offers myriad possibilities, both in the way we perceive the rhythm and music of the poem, but also in terms of how we interpret the content.

Right now you have a one-to-one correspondence between your concepts and the images that build them, and your lines. One line, one idea. It doesn’t detract from the ideas or the images, but you are ignoring the potential to set up counterpoints of thought and sound that can enhance the experience of the poem.

For example your opening lines:

His bones
Sift. Dissolving
In silt. The waves
Shifting in
Disquiet guilt.

Okay, it’s an open question whether my version is better or worse. One thing that cannot be denied is that it is different. There is a new complexity in our sense of how the lines should be read, the grammar and syntax beating against the uneven enjambment, setting up a kind of interference pattern that keeps us slightly off balance. And now the conceptual elements come at us with a new urgency as ideas are pulled across the line breaks, seeking completion. Note too how certain words now receive greater attention, highlighted as they are at the beginning or end of a line. Perhaps this might cause you to reconsider certain word choices, or allow you to thwart expectations by having an idea’s completion move in a contrary direction after the line break. These are possibilities that have nothing to do with the content of the words, but by paying attention to the structure of the language itself, you allow for the type of layering and overtones that prose achieves much less convincingly.

The last thing I want to address is the most difficult to describe. An old adage states that a poem should never be about what it’s about. All this means is that you set up certain expections for the reader, through the poem’s title and imagery, and you optimally want to use those expectations as a jumping off point for what the poem is really striving to accomplish.

Perhaps I write a poem titled “Gradma’s Rocker.” if, by the end of the poem, all I’ve accomplished is a visual portrait of the rocker, its place in the room, maybe an image or two of Grandma sitting in it, knitting, or reading, or drinking moonshine—whatever it is that grandmas do in rockers— no matter how polished the writing and how well the language explores poetic elements like rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and all the other figures of speech, it won’t be a very ambitious poem. It will be disappointing precisely because it’s just about what it’s about.

At the very least we would expect an observation on the aging process, perhaps a perspective on how one generation passes the torch to the next; heck maybe a nod to the passing of time itself. Of course, being a poem, were any of these ideas to be spoken aloud and literally embedded in the text, it would be instant death. A prose essay would need to set up an argument, present a position and make its case. A poem can do all that with a simple well-chosen image, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated concepts and joining them in our consciousness simply through the structure of the language.

I’m leading you, through all this, to a reconsideration of your final line, which, if you follow my suggestion, will be rewritten anyway. When you do so, aspire to something more than a mere completion of the previous thought. This finale has the potential to open up the conceptual space of the poem, to redirect our focus to whatever purpose the poem aspires to. If it lacks such aspirations, start over and reconsider your priorities.