Read with Me/While We Wait—A Community of Voices in Percival Everett’s Trout’s Lie
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
" 'Read with me/While we wait' " is an impressively sustained, impeccably aware, and dazzlingly thorough close reading of Everett's _Trout's Lie_, For all the essay's engagement with esoteric problems of language and the philosophy of linguistic play as well as existential mediations on death and temporality, manages to be crisp, succinct, and efficient in its argument. This is achieved, I believe, by its adherence to time-honored techniques of sophisticated formal close reading: the argument emerges from and with an appreciative, generous, and expert engagement with Everett's themes and technique. The essayist clearly knows poetry and how it works; they also seem intimately familiar with Everett body of work, stylistics, and concerns (and, it is evident, with Everett studies). Consequently the reading is never forced, but everywhere in intimate conversation with Everett's quite challenging verse. The reading is sustained, expert, illuminating, and compelling.
Author Response
Thank you very much indeed for your minute reading, your appreciation and your relevant suggestions.
I tried to take into account the other two reviewers’ requests and suggestions in the revised version. I hope that the introduction and conclusion in their longer, revised form will not be deemed too cumbersome.
A word is missing in a quotation by Maulpoix (highlighted in green, page 10). I will have no access to the book before September 4th and will provide it then. My sincere apologies for the delay.
Again, with gratitude,
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I was glad to see attention given to Trout's Lie, but this essay needs much more rethinking before it is ready for publication. I found reading it very confusing at both the sentence level and at the structural level. With the latter, I recognize and respect the attempt to make the structure of the essay perform some of what Everett's poetry appears to perform, but in execution it was very hard to follow, even when I re-read several times to attempt to follow the section headings. Given the relative scantiness in length and content of both introduction/through line and the conclusion, it seems that the author is not yet sure of what their argument is, the thing that can guide readers through an unorthodox structure. Indeed, I found myself returning to lines 523-526 in the conclusion, especially the point about the rhizome. If the essayist wishes to foreground the rhizomatic in Trout's Lie *and* make the essay's structure rhizomatic, then that should be signaled at the beginning and the reader reminded throughout. Without such structuring, the effect for me was of an introduction to everything that the essayist was thinking regarding Trout's Lie: potentially interesting but confusing. That may be the point, especially for a special issue on the "continuing challenges of Percival Everett," but if that is the point, it again needs to be made more explicit. As I suspect that this writer will indeed want to place this project somewhere, I will point out that the writer seems most interested in how Trout's Lie reflects/problematizes the claims made in Roof's Tone, so perhaps that becomes a particular Everettian challenge that might guide a radical revision.
Author Response
Thank you very much indeed for your minute reading, your appreciation and your relevant requests.
According to your suggestions, I added a brief introduction to the collection. Unfortunately it has been very little studied, at least to my knowledge, so I could not properly locate it within a critical tradition.
I am hoping that the completed introduction and conclusion will clarify my point as well as the unfolding of the argument, according to the three parts outlined at the end of the introduction. The aim of the demonstration has been reformulated as follows : ‘How to conciliate the quest for pure form and the unruliness of the bodily? It will be argued that Everett brings them together through a work on forms not only in space but also in time, focusing on endings, in both the abstract and the concrete sense of the term.’
I hope that the introduction and conclusion in their longer, revised form will not be deemed too cumbersome or, worse, even more unclear.
I have also worked on sentence structures, cutting them and generally trying to suppress ambiguties, still in the aim of making reading easier.
I am sorry to say that I found myself unable to follow some of your suggestions. To radically change the structure would have meant writing another, completely different paper. The claims made in Roof’s Tone came as a corroboration of some of the ideas developed in the reflection here submitted, not as its starting point. As to the allusion to the rhizomatic unfolding of the collection of poems I do not see it as being specific to this collection but rather as what provides any poetry collection worthy of the name with its internal coherence, especially on the auditory and visual levels. Anyway the reference to the rhizome was eventually suppressed, not to defuse the criticism but because after having clarified the aim of the demonstration, it felt too general, hence inoperative.
I hope that this will not sound pretentious, for I am simply very humbly stating my limitations.
A word is missing in a quotation by Maulpoix (highlighted in green, page 10). I will have no access to the book before September 4th and will provide it then. My sincere apologies for the delay.
Again, with gratitude,
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This is an ambitious essay, one that takes on the complicated task of engaging Percival Everett’s 2015 poetry collection Trout’s Lie. As the author acknowledges, Everett is best known for his novels. Given this fact, it is safe to assume that most essays in “The Continuing Challenges of Percival Everett” special issue will focus on Everett’s prose. This perceptive analysis of Everett’s poetry will be a nice addition. Its value is enhanced by the ways in which it illuminates, sometimes overtly, themes and techniques that characterize Everett’s prose works. Through insightful close readings of several poems found in Trout’s Lie—often with an eye for how the linguistic and formal qualities of individual poems speak to and interact with each other—the author clearly and concisely defines and explores devices and techniques that shape Everett’s poetry. Readers are left with a deeper understanding and appreciation not only of Everett’s poetry—and by extension his overall aims and concerns as a storyteller—but also of poetry and language in general.
The author’s decision to break the essay into three main sections is a wise one. These sections and subsections allow readers to easily step back from the detailed analysis of each poetic device to consider how they relate to each other. I recommend that the author enhance this already-logical coherence by adding an early overview of Trout’s Lie. How many poems are included in the volume, for example? Simply adding a broad sense of the collection as a whole before engaging specific poems found in it will help frame the essay. The author might also consider quoting some reviews of Trout’s Lie or citing other scholars on the significance of Everett’s poetry early on.
The essay’s ending is powerful. Those last two sentences offer up an eloquent and moving claim, one that pulls the essay together beautifully. Perhaps the author can find a way to set up the challenges of “living” and of “rupture” earlier in the essay, perhaps alongside the general introduction to Trout’s Lie I recommend above. These concerns are implied in the first few paragraphs, but I think they can be made a little more explicit early on, much like they are—powerfully so—at the essay’s end.
A related word of advice is to take the analysis of “the progression from ‘Read’ to ‘Regard’” (lines 369-71) out of parentheses. This is a central point, I feel, and should not be treated as an aside or as a parenthetical comment. In fact, the author might connect this idea explicitly with the essay’s title: “Read with me / While we wait.” Might this be a logical place to engage the source of these lines and connect them with the argument being made in this paragraph? This will provide greater coherence to the essay’s overall claims. The parentheses at the beginning of the next paragraph—which contains another key claim—should also be eliminated (lines 373-74).
The close readings of specific poems are a clear strength of the essay. The long quotations from Everett’s poems in their original format provide convincing evidence of the author’s claims. In almost all cases, however, I would not indent after the quoted lines. The paragraphs continue as the author analyzes the quoted poem; in other words, a new paragraph does not usually begin right after the quoted lines, and thus the indentations should not be there. Visually (in terms of layout), the indentations work against rather than reinforce the content.
In sum, the author’s ability to express complex, multilayered ideas clearly and concisely throughout this essay is impressive. By concentrating on Everett’s poetry, they offer a deeper understanding and appreciation of Everett’s experiments with language, his lyricism and his “song,” throughout his body of work. This will be a fine addition to the special issue on Percival Everett.
Author Response
Thank you very much indeed for your minute reading, your appreciation and your relevant suggestions.
I added a brief introduction to the collection. Unfortunately it has been very little studied, at least to my knowledge, so I could not properly locate it within a critical tradition.
I tried to develop the shift from ‘Read’ to ‘Regard’ and connect it to the title of my paper and its main argument; I also suppressed parentheses as suggested.
Indentations have been suppressed at the beginning of the paragraphs of commentary following quotes.
A word is missing in a quotation by Maulpoix (highlighted in green, page 10). I will have no access to the book before September 4th and will provide it then. My sincere apologies for the delay.
Again, with gratitude,
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
