Slow Torture of Not Being a Real W.B.

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem's central conceit—the poet at the handle of a Honda lawnmower, measuring himself against unnamed greatness—gives the self-doubt a concrete anchor, and the specificity of the brand name does real work here. It keeps the speaker's anxiety grounded in the ordinary rather than letting it float into abstraction. The title's "W.B." (presumably Yeats) sets up an aspiration the poem then deflates, and that gap between the marble monument and the man cutting his own grass is where the poem's humor and ache both live.

The strongest moment is the pairing of "another rhymer / trying to copy the old timers." The internal rhyme enacts exactly the derivative rhyming the speaker fears in himself, so the craft embodies the confession. That is a genuine piece of technical wit, and the poem would benefit from trusting such moments more.

The phrase "mountains / of common men the good Lord / sees fit to torture" reaches for a grandeur that sits uneasily against the deliberately humble tone elsewhere. The image of common men as mountains is difficult to picture, and the line risks inflating the very self-pity the poem seems, in its better moments, to hold at an ironic distance. Sharpening this to a single clear image, or cutting it in favor of the more earthbound detail the poem does well, would tighten the effect.

The final line shifts abruptly from short verse lines into a long prose sentence, and the change in form is jarring in a way that does not appear intentional. The turn to Asia and Boise introduces a new geographic contrast very late, and "treated honorably" states the theme rather than dramatizing it. The closing image of the grass that "keeps growing" is the right instinct—it returns to the lawnmower and suggests the endlessness of the labor—but it arrives buried in that unbroken sentence. Breaking these closing thoughts back into lines, and letting the growing grass land as the last isolated image, would restore the momentum the ending currently loses.

One small consideration: the poem's stance toward its speaker wavers between sincere lament and self-aware comedy. Deciding which register should dominate, and pruning the lines that pull the other way, would give the whole a firmer center.

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What lovely irony - you ARE a W.B.! 

I love everything about this.  I can relate so well, and it makes me smile. Actually chuckle...

I might change "the" to "that" in the final line to give it a heavier stomp, but that's just a thought.

Thank you for this!

L