"Dear Jaime" by Jaime McNair

Typically, I am not very excited by the idea of letter poems, but this one is different. In this poem, the author uses two different voices with opposing lines in response to each other. The last word of each line is matched with the same word on the next line, but this time it is issued a new meaning, new connotation. From reading this, the reader gets the sense that this guy, Phil, is just feeding Jaime cheesy lines over and over again, and she is looking at them one at a time, with disgust. This was a unique way to go about the letter poem, and because of that, I had to read it several times to make sure I got all of the details. I think one of my issues with reading it was a form thing. I wonder what other types of set-up the author could use to illustrate that these are two (which are distinctly different) voices. I think I just had a hard time following the progression of the lines on the page. What most likely adds to this is the fact that many of the lines begin with “I,” and many of the same words are used from one line to the next. Some of these lines would be easier to digest if there was a little bit of space between them, like:

I won’t give into his lies anymore.

“I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”

It’s just visually easy to jump from place to place, and I think that hurts flow a little bit. This is all pretty much a format problem, and I may be the only one who feels this way. I also wanted to see some more creative spins from one line to another, rather than just plainly stating the opposite from one character to the next. The poem definitely shows attitude, which is great. I can totally hear you telling this guy off, but I want to see it in a more concrete way. Rather than just saying “I won’t give into his lies,” why not give us some example of one of these vial and odious lies which would make us go, “Oh yeah, you tell him, girl!” I also noticed a little bit of an issue with who the character Jaime is addressing. At first she says, “I thought you [my italics] wanted us to end” and then later, “If I take him back, this will go on forever.” This should just be normalized to avoid any confusion.