First of all, I told Jonathan, in email, that I considered the poem to be excellent, and I do. But "excellent" is a long way from the "great" he attributes to me. There are very few great poems, and I'm not sure that even a dozen of them are sonnets: in any case, we can only guess which contemporary poems are great. So we can forget from the start any comparison with "That time of year thou mayst in me behold," or "The World is too much with us," or even Arlington's "Reuben Bright"—though I think Espaillat's poem is far better than "Haunted House," with its indecipherable syntax in line 5. Just what is on the other side of "And" from "ruin"?
Anyway, here are Jonathan's comments on the poem, in italics, followed by my reply to each:
1) The story told is completely unoriginal. Haven't we all heard it before? What is added in the retelling / that makes it so compelling?
Can there be an "original" story in the sense Jonathan seems to require? We've been managing plot twists for thousands of years now, and so well and so ingeniously that some (misguided) literary folk think that story itself is outmoded, "done to death," and we have to figure out something else to hang our fictions on. Good luck to them! They, and perhaps Jonathan, forget that it's always the particulars of the story that matter, and the particulars are well chosen and managed here. Yeah, it's "Tell Laura I love her," but in just 8 lines we learn a good deal about the main character: he's a romantic, captivated by just a look, not even a night dancing; he's a little shy; and he's embarrassed rather than annoyed or angry when he's disappointed. Then the plausible flurry of activity in the 3rd quatrain, and that extraordinary couplet, rhyming "beers" with "years" while writing of a dead daughter, and the host's almost casual, almost callous, heart-breaking explanation. The host's heart.
2) The language is not very exciting or interesting. The turns of phrase are no more distinguished than you would find in the average "New Yorker story." The language is colloquial, yet somehow "off." ("dead these 18 years").
Ah, The New Yorker! I propose a literary equivalent to Godwin's Law: the first person to mention The New Yorker effectively ends, and loses, any argument about literary style. But since it's only a proposal, I'll carry on at least briefly.
I've already called the couplet extraordinary. ("That's exciting language!" "No it's not!" Maybe he was right to say "New Yorker." Or is it "Ni!"? or "'Ecky- ecky- ecky- ecky- pikang- zoop- boing- goodem- zoo- owli- zhiv'!"?) But the phrase Jonathan calls "somehow off" sounds so pitch-perfect to me that I suspect the speech we each heard as children differed in significant ways. There is a less charitable explanation, which I'll get to in number 4 below.
3) It makes me think of Browning. That's where this particular poetic mode comes from, I would hazard. Didn't Browning already do this sort of thing much better, more than a hundred years ago? Browning wasn't reproducing a 100-year old style, but forging his own.
It's a terrible thing for one's verse to remind other people of Browning, and that the verse that does the reminding is not as good as Browning's best (or is everything Browning wrote better than this poem?) is enough to make a poet throw away the computer. Sarcasm aside, this isn't very much like Browning, except that it tells a story in verse with colloquial language. And if it were, what of it? What is outmoded about the style? Could anyone possibly mistake it for a poem written in 1880 or from any time when metrical verse dominated English-language poetry? If not, isn't it something new? I've said before that if there's a poetic avant garde at all these days, it springs from the New Formalism.
But whatever the merits of that proposition, there's just no intrinsic value in the new. Chris Lott addressed that issue better than I can do without doubling this already long post, so I'll just point you here.
4) There is no music in the verse. It's competent at best, but dull. There are no extraordinary lines or images. I could quibble about some specific metrical choices as well, but what would be the point?
Here's the less charitable explanation I mentioned above: I'm almost convinced—and I've told him so in email—that Jonathan just doesn't know how to read contemporary metrical verse, and he's told me that he isn't a "very fair reader of contemporary formalism." I don't think he wants to be. I suspect he's pretty near offended that anyone would want to write a sonnet at all, and he's not alone in that.
5)The mediocre is the enemy of the great. This doesn't hold up well to great poems in the metrical tradition of the past. What to make of a diminished thing?
No, the mediocre is not the enemy of the great, it's the enemy of the good. But I never claimed the poem to be great, and it's far better than mediocre. What poem, from any recent literary magazine, can stand next to the Pisan Cantos?
6)I don't feel "haunted" after reading it. I don't have a sense of the uncanny, although that's what I think she's trying to convey. The poem fails to communicate this sense (to at least one reader.) Compare it to that great Edward Arlington Robinson poem about the haunted house if you want to see what I mean.
Getting chills or not is an entirely private experience, so I've given the links above so that you can scare yourselves (or not). But "Reuben Bright" is better.
7:38:50 PM 
