National (USA) Poetry Month

[Tzara]

I've mentioned many times how I am interested in form poetry. That's true, but it would probably be more accurate to say that I'm interested in formal methods, of which rhyme schemes and metrical patterns are perhaps the most common and most obvious, but certainly not exhaustive of methodological inventiveness.

For example, I really would have liked to post Ocean Vuong's poem "Seventh Circle of Earth," from his debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, but couldn't figure out how to format it for the PF&D. It's very striking, consisting of two mostly blank pages with occasional footnote references placed on each page; the actual text of the poem appears in the footnotes. (Read the poem and Vuong's comments about it here.) The poem is about the murder of a gay couple in Dallas who were burned to death in their home and is, in my view, a powerful statement about how marginalized populations are often ignored or treated as afterthoughts by the media.

The technique featured in my selection today is "poetry by erasure" (though "by elision" or "by redaction" might be more relevant, as the poet doesn't compose the poem by physically erasing the source text). It's a technique I first encountered in the visual arts, where a physical text (usually a book) would be displayed with only certain words readable, the rest of the text removed by painting over it, or cutting it out, or pasting drawings or paintings over it.

While visual artists typically exhibit the altered original text, poets more often present only the chosen words, often using their placement on the original page to determine line breaks, spacing, and white space/indentation, as with this poem:

Annunciation under Erasure
Mary Szybist

And he came to her and said
.....................The Lord is

.............troubled

.........in......mind

...................be afraid Mary

The Holy
..............will overshadow you
therefore


....be

.............nothing.........be impossible

And Mary said


And the angel departed from her

Source: Incarnadine (2013)
​

Mary Szybist (surname pronounced SHE-bist) won the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry for the volume in which this poem appeared. The source text is Luke 1:26-38 in the King James Bible (and, presumably, a particular physical copy of that, given the particular line spacing and indentations).The subject is the Annuciation--the angel Gabriel's announcement to the virgin Mary that she is to bear the son of God--a major theme in Rennaissance art. (You can listen to Szybist read the poem here.)

Though I am an atheist, I was nominally raised Christian, so I know the story of the Annunciation and I am quite interested in visual art, so I've seen a number of classical representations it. The cover of Szybist's book features Sandro Botticelli's Cestello Annunciation, a particularly lovely painting, but one that seems a bit at odds with Szybist's poem. While Botticelli's Mary seems to demurely accept the angel's message, Szybist's depiction of the event seems much more ominous, more in character to one of my favorite paintings of the Annunciation (detail), by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, also in the Uffizi.

In the Martini/Memmi painting, Mary seems repulsed by, or at least unwelcoming of, the angel's message.

While I find the erasure technique interesting, I think it is quite limited, both for the obvious reason that the poet is limited to the words and word order in the source material (so, presumably, metaphor and simile are difficult to come by), but also because the resulting poem seems uncomfortably sparse on the page.

So, something interesting to try, but best employed rarely at best.

Stay safe, everyone. See you tomorrow.

 

[Tzara]

Literotica exists as a site devoted to erotic fantasy. And that isn't just the stories; if you look through a typical day's New Poems, you'll find the majority (usually quite a clear majority) are listed as "erotic," and quite often many of those listed as "non-erotic" actually have significant erotic content. I think it's safe to say that most of the readers and writers are interested in the fantasy of whatever coupling is being addressed. (Considering one of the most popular categories is Incest, I sincerely hope they're simply engaging in unactualized fantasy.)

This poem by Stephen Dunn, on the other hand, speaks to actualized erotic desire and its consequences:

The Affair
Stephen Dunn

Just when it seemed his marriage had settled
into sleepy comforts and an occasional boost
from a blue pill, he learned what the luckiest
of adulterers come to know: you don’t need
some large dissatisfaction to motivate
an affair, some overarching complaint.
A door would open in a faraway city;
inside, everything felt like its own good reason.
Of course, the lying unnerved and diminished him,
but after a while it felt strangely humane,
better, he told himself, for all concerned.
He took pride that he gave his divided attention
wholly to whomever he was with.
His wife was his better half by more than half.
His lover was the everything
he allowed himself partially to have.
When their sex turned into love
adultery suddenly felt wrong—the word,
he wanted another word for what they did.
And there were the bones of his marriage
in plain sight, meat on them still.
For a moment he longed for the old days
when there were gods to take offense,
when a man who wanted too much
would be reduced to size
with a life-long redundancy or thunderbolt.
But, no, there’d be nothing so neat.
It came to a choice, and he chose everything.
He left almost everything behind.

Source: Local Visitations (2003)
​

One of the things I like about this poem is that it neither glorifies the adultery turning into love nor condemns it as immoral. It acknowledges the guilt felt by the poem's protagonist and the regret that whichever choice is made (to leave his wife or to end the affair) has not only emotional consequences, but actual pain—that neither choice is "good."

The implication, I think, is that he chooses the lover but recognizes that "[h]e left almost everything behind."

Life is emotionally complex and good poems recognize that fact.

 

[Tzara]

Today's poem seemed spot on relevant to our current situation, though the poet is actually imagining life after some kind of major nuclear event. Somehow, it doesn't seem all that different from our pandemic concerns about social distancing and isolation:

Post-Apocalypse Postcard from an Unnamed Island
in the Pacific Northwest (in the Style of Bashō)
Jeannine Hall Gailey

After Appalachian escapes and L.A. adventures, I've landed here, at the northern damp edge of our continent. The evergreens cling to bare dirt, rock, and scrub, a lesson in survival. I've run out of meds, of food, of energy to keep running. I'm in a cabin on the edge of the water. The hawks here have persisted, rabbits plentiful here where so little has changed.

I think I saw a deer—
bare patches on its fur and scrawny,
but still. It rains and rains.
​

The sea and sky and branches wet and murky. I was watching storms through the glass walls of this abandoned home, all slate shower and granite kitchen, generator and solar coils. There is still heat coming through the floors, from a safer time. I huddle under a stack of old blankets, some of them with children's patterns that make me think "Whose?" and then . . . . There's a well that contains clean water, there are reminders of uncontaminated earth:

a flush of movement
in the blackberry thicket—
a black fox face.
​

Source: Field Guide to the End of the World (2016)
​

The form, of course, is haibun—essentially a combination of prose poem and haiku, usually focused on some kind of travel theme. Gailey has given the form her own kind of twist; her poems often reference comics, pop culture, or science fiction themes, leveraged by her background as the daughter of a scientist who consulted with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, once part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb during World War II and still associated with nuclear technology.

The poem is personally relevant to me as it describes where, if I had the means and desire to shelter in the manner of those who have taken to private yachts in the Carribbean or remote ranches in Montana, I would go—to a house near the waterline on the west coast of San Juan Island, directly east of Victoria, BC, an area noted for its unusual black fox population. We've been there on vacation and we love that place.

But I am not a person of such means (or, I hope, such desires), so M and I are curled up at home, watching the occasionally hilarious NFL draft (I am thoroughly envious of Kliff Kingsbury's house), reading books, and doing jigsaw and crossword puzzles.

Hoping all of you are staying safe. Bye for today.

 

[Tzara]

I've been rather depressed lately, apparently just because—there is no particular reason for me to be depressed. (Well, other than the malaise about COVID-19.) So I was thinking I might post something silly today for a change.

I was also thinking that I haven't posted anything by a UK poet (or, for that matter, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. among primarily Anglophone countries other than the USA and Canada). So today's poem has me killing two birds with one stone, or hitting two stresses with one choriamb, or something like that:

The Uncertainty of the Poet
Wendy Cope

The Tate Gallery yesterday announced that it had paid £1 million
for a Giogio de Chirico masterpiece, The Uncertainty of the Poet.
It depicts a torso and a bunch of bananas.
—Guardian, 2 April 1985

I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.

A fond poet of "I am, I am"—
Very bananas,

Fond of "Am I bananas,
Am I?"—a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a "very."

I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?

Source: Serious Concerns (1992)
​

I have written poems like this that repetitively mangle the word order to produce different senses, but Cope does this better than I ever did. Plus it makes fun of art! (Even, especially, art I'm fond of.)

I cannot leave you with just one poem by Ms. Cope, though. This is a favorite:

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Wendy Cope

It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title.

Source: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)
​

I think I mentioned earlier how much a really good title affects me. It was probably in the context of what gets me to pick a book off a shelf (so, book title), but it applies as well, if not more, to individual poems. In this case, the book and poem and the sense of the poem all align.

I've been here, with a title I liked but nothing else.

Anyway, that's it for today. "Wash your hands!" says Dr. Fauci.

 

[Tzara]

As I mentioned earlier, I am fond of difficult forms in poetry, both reading them and (attempting) to write them. I've also said, probably too many times, that the sestina (which I posted an example of earlier), which is considered a difficult form, is actually a pretty easy form to write if you're not overly concerned about making it a good poem. It's damn hard to write a really good one, but then it's damn hard to write a really good poem of any kind.

But the cento actually is really hard, in that it's difficult to write one at all that even makes sense. A cento is a poem composed completely of lines from other poems. Originally, all of the lines would be from poems by a single poet—you might have composed a sonnet consisting of 14 lines selected from 14 different sonnets by Shakespeare as a kind of homage to the master. Nowadays it is more typical to simply pick lines from different poets to compose a new poem. Usually the source material is documented by the centoist (?).

Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton published a whole book of centos a few years ago. Here's one of them:

Invitation Cards
Mary Dalton

The management
one by one stumble from their cages,
but without sound.
The soul dwindles sometimes to an ant.

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
they wait the chairman’s praise and glass of water,
medals and positioned victories.
After, after—how many years?

However the sky grows dark with invitation cards,
forget the rhetoric, the trick of lying,
of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
stretching by the river.

What was it?—I have forgotten
how to perform a funeral
now that the sun, like a lion, licks its paws.
Here, after a meagre diet of horizon, is some scenery.

Storms of flying glass,
of the pen across the page:
another eye looking through a hole,
half water.

Hurroo! Hurroo!
Law is the one
waited for history, its elbows tense,
where serpent logs lay hissing at the air.

Source: Hooking: A Book of Centos (2013)
​

Dalton really ramped upped the difficulty factor of the form by basing each poem in her book on the same line number of the source poem (in the case of this poem, all of the lines are the second line of the source poem). I cannot possibly overstate how difficut that restriction is. It's damn hard to compse a cento in the first place, but to restrict the lines to the same position in the source poem is craziness.

Her resulting poem might seem a little spacey or surreal at times. That's pretty much a characteristic of centos, at least most of the ones I've read. The sometimes startling juxtapositions of imagery are a strength, while the sometimes confusing narrative sense is a weakness.

I probably bought this book in Victoria, BC, which is kind of weirdly appropriate, as the poem was first published in The Malahat Review, which is the literary magazine of the University of Victoria. If you're curious, they've printed a list of the source lines here.

Three days left! See you tomorrow.

 

[Piscator]

Her resulting poem might seem a little spacey or surreal at times. That's pretty much a characteristic of centos, at least most of the ones I've read. The sometimes startling juxtapositions of imagery are a strength, while the sometimes confusing narrative sense is a weakness.

Agreed, however a friends observation on synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, "Just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's sport." may also apply.

 

[Tzara]

For the most part, I've been only mildly inconvenienced by the stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19. I'm retired, not very social, and read a lot, so other than wandering around bookstores (which I mentioned earlier in this thread), not a lot has changed in my life.

But one thing that is a problem is that the libraries are closed, so unless I own a book or can get it in electronic form from the library or find the relevant information online, I'm kind of screwed. As I am with today's poem.

Back in February I read Jonathan Blunk's James Wright: A Life in Poetry, borrowing the book from the library on the assumption that if I ever wanted to refer to it again, I could just reborrow the book (or just look up the information in a copy in the University of Washington library, which isn't far from where I live). Because of the partial lockdown, I can't do either of those things, so bear with me on the factual background of this poem, because I can't confirm what I think I remember reading about it in Blunk's biography.

The poem is "A Blessing," which is one of Wright's most famous poems and a personal favorite:

A Blessing
James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Source: Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1990)
​

Whatever one thinks of this poem--whether you like it as I do or think it's a kind of sloppy mess--the thing is almost loopy in its emotional imagery. The narrator seems throughout the poem to be on the verge of some kind of manic explosion, of being overcome by ecstasy and joy to the point of being incapacitated.

There are some real-life correlates to the poem: for example, the friend referred to is probably the poet Robert Bly, who is driving the car (Wright himself never learned to drive). They have probably left William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota (which is the setting of Wright's equally famous poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"), though why they are driving south from there is a mystery--Bly's own farm, where Wright often stayed, is north and west of Pine Island, and he was living in Minneapolis (which he hated and which is also north of Pine Island) while teaching at the university there.

I really want to say that the poem references Wright's relationship with Anne Sexton, whom he called "Blessing." The two had begun a fairly intense correspondence following the publication of his book Saint Judas in 1959 and they had a brief but emotionally wrenching affair in the early sixties. The sense I have of the poem is that he has recently left an assignation with Sexton (or is, perhaps heading toward one), but those are suppositions I can't confirm. Perhaps he's just ecstatic to be heading away from Minneapolis and his hated job and the problems he was having with his (I think at this point, estranged if not divorced) first wife.

In any case, it's a poem that is so bursting with positive emotions that it is difficult to read without an emotional reaction oneself.

Tomorrow, the other side of that emotional peak, in a poem by Sexton.

G'night.



ETA: If you'd like to hear a recording of Wright reading the poem, click here.

 

[Angeline]

I think you've shared the Wright poem with us in years past. I'm glad you did again (maybe you didn't: either way I loved reading it). I find it to be not just emotional, but sensual with an erotic undertone. I love that you've shared a variety of erotic poems (both implicit and direct examples). It's good to be reminded here at Lit that erotica can play out in poetry in many ways, and sometimes even a poem about meeting ponies in a field can be sensual, too, too if you just feel it and don't overthink it. Thank you.

 

[Tzara]

As I mentioned yesterday, James Wright and Anne Sexton engaged in a lengthy correspondence that was both poetic (i.e. about poetry) and sexual, and a brief physical affair that was both intense and guilt-ridden. Both were married at the time--Wright to his first wife Liberty, from whom he was divorced in, I think, 1962 and Sexton to Alfred Muller Sexton II (the Kayo referenced in the Amy Newman poem I posted earlier in this thread) from whom she was divorced in 1973, the year before her suicide.

At the time they began their correspondence, Wright was a well established poet, his first book, The Green Wall (1957), having won the Yale Younger Poets prize and his second, Saint Judas (1959) having just come out. Sexton was at the time on the verge of publishing her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), but she seemed clearly to be, at least originally, the one seeking advice from a potential mentor. Ironically, she won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry before he did (Live or Die (1967) versus Collected Poems (1972)).

As best I can tell without being able to cross-reference Jonathan Blunk's Wright biography with Diane Middlebrook's biography of Sexton, I would guess the physical affair period began around 1960-1962 or so and flared off and on for a fairly brief time. Sexton's Love Poems, published in 1962 contains a few poems written to Wright, most notably "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound," but the relationship had ended by 1966 when Wright met Edith Ann Runk ("Annie"), whom he married in 1967.

Today's poem was written by Sexton in response to news of Wright's marriage:

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
Anne Sexton

The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today’s paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Source: The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (1981)
​

The poem wavers between anger, resentment, loneliness, jealousy, despair--pretty much you name it in terms of reacting to the narrator's sense of abandonment and her replacement by another in her lover's esteem. The technical aspects of the poem also wander around a bit--it follows a regular rhyme scheme (ababcc) and mostly seems to follow a four-stress accentual verse pattern (the refrain, "At night, alone, I marry the bed," scans as three iambs and an anapest, which helps anchor the rhythmic aspect of the poem), but as many critics have pointed out, the rhymes are simple and unsophisticated (they are not only all true rhymes but they are pretty obvious ones) and the meter is inconsistent. Some of the phrasing seems wrenched to fit the rhyme pattern: "I crucify" (instead of "I am crucified"), "fishing tack" (instead of "fishing tackle"--"tack" being specific to riding a horse).

I'd like to think that these are intentional choices made by Sexton to emphasize the extreme emotionality of the narrator, but she herself said that she often included sections of bad writing in her poetry. Perhaps she was so intent on getting the emotions down that she wasn't always especially concerned about refining the text. It could have felt to her like taking the feeling out of the poem.

This poem, and Sexton's work in general, generates hugely divergent critical opinions. Whatever one thinks of her poems, she was (and is) both popular--at least for a poet--and influential to many younger poets, especially women poets.

Curiously, Sexton co-dedicated The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book of poems she published (it actually came out in 1975 after her death) to Wright: For brother Dennis, wherever he is, and for James Wright, who would know.

'Night.

 

[Tzara]

I think you've shared the Wright poem with us in years past. I'm glad you did again (maybe you didn't: either way I loved reading it). I find it to be not just emotional, but sensual with an erotic undertone. I love that you've shared a variety of erotic poems (both implicit and direct examples). It's good to be reminded here at Lit that erotica can play out in poetry in many ways, and sometimes even a poem about meeting ponies in a field can be sensual, too, too if you just feel it and don't overthink it. Thank you.

Oh, hi, Angie. You posted this while I was composing today's quasi-blog post.

You're almost certainly right that I've posted that poem before. Wright is one of my favorite poets and this is either my favorite of his poems or darn close to it. Still, you know, If I post him often enough, maybe someone who isn't aware of him might discover his poetry.

I hope your post means you're still doing OK. We all miss you.

 

[Tzara]

During this month, I've tried to post a variety of poems--serious ones, silly ones, erotic ones, ones emotionally joyous and ones emotionally depressive, poems in form and free verse. In any case, the poems I've posted probably do a good job of representing the kind of poets I read, not that that is necessarily a recommendation for anyone else.

I did want the last poem to be something special. Last year, the last poem I posted was Jorie Graham's "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt," which is a powerful poem touching on art, artists, and the Holocaust. This year, my last post is Anthony Hecht's great sestina "The Book of Yolek," another very powerful, very somber poem that touches on the Holocaust. As a young man, Hecht was among the US Army forces that liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany and he was tasked with interviewing some of the survivors as he spoke French. The experience was devastating to him and led some years later to his nervous breakdown and hospitalization, suffering from what we would now term PTSD.

In addition to satisfying the form requirements of the sestina in cycling six select end words, Hecht's poem is written in a richly varied iambic pentameter, using a number of substitutions that help to give the poem a naturalness to its spoken flow. It is among my very favorite examples of the form, which is really difficult to compose well.

The epigraph is from Martin Luther's German translation of John 19:7 (We have a law, and according to the law he must die):

The Book of Yolek
Anthony Hecht

Wir Haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home:
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was the morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.

Source: Selected Poems (2011)
​

Hecht, like Wright and Sexton, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, among other awards, for his volume The Hard Hours. He won the 1968 prize, the year after Sexton's win for Live or Die. He also, like Wright, had both a poetic and a more intimate correspondence with Sexton, though apparently the relationship did not become physical. (One of Sexton's letters to Hecht can be read at The American Reader website.)

I hope to be around to do this again next year, 'cause it's kind of fun. Thanks, all.

 

[Piscator]

Thanks Tzara for your April tonic, which has illuminated this innumerable progression of Wednesdays.A s[lendid spread and I'll come back to it often.

I especially appreciate that he last poem starts with a meal "Of grilled brook trout" although the park I would normally be preparing to venture into in pursuit of this noble fish is closed to the public due to the coronavirus.

 

[Angeline]

Oh, hi, Angie. You posted this while I was composing today's quasi-blog post.

You're almost certainly right that I've posted that poem before. Wright is one of my favorite poets and this is either my favorite of his poems or darn close to it. Still, you know, If I post him often enough, maybe someone who isn't aware of him might discover his poetry.

I hope your post means you're still doing OK. We all miss you.

Thank you for illuminating poetry month with daily poems and explanations. This is the best of the poetry forum to me: that we have folks who are widely read, articulate, and willing to share poems and ideas with us all. Like Piscator I'll be back to reread, ponder and learn.

I'm much better. I hope to be retested next week. It will have been three weeks by then since my first symptoms appeared. I'm a glass half full kinda poet chick, but for this I hope to be negative! (Yay antibodies)

 

[Tzara]

Thanks Tzara for your April tonic, which has illuminated this innumerable progression of Wednesdays. A splendid spread and I'll come back to it often.

I especially appreciate that he last poem starts with a meal "Of grilled brook trout" although the park I would normally be preparing to venture into in pursuit of this noble fish is closed to the public due to the coronavirus.

Thank you, Piscator. It was, as I said, kind of fun to do.

I also love trout, though I prefer them sautéed (I think; my wife does most of the cooking) and as I am not an angler, we eat farmed fish, which I am sure are quite inferior to fresh caught.

If you happen to like mysteries, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novella "Immune to Murder" in the collection Three for the Chair features brook trout as a plot point in the analysis of the murder.

I hope you can get back out to fish soon and I wish there was some way I could sample some of your fresh grilled trout.

Anyway, merci et bonne pêche.

 

[Tzara]

Thank you for illuminating poetry month with daily poems and explanations. This is the best of the poetry forum to me: that we have folks who are widely read, articulate, and willing to share poems and ideas with us all. Like Piscator I'll be back to reread, ponder and learn.

I'm much better. I hope to be retested next week. It will have been three weeks by then since my first symptoms appeared. I'm a glass half full kinda poet chick, but for this I hope to be negative! (Yay antibodies)

Thank you for the compliments on the thread, Angie, but I'm much more happy with your apparent positive health status.

We want you to be healthy.

 

[Piscator]

Thank you for the compliments on the thread, Angie, but I'm much more happy with your apparent positive health status.

We want you to be healthy.

Ditto it's a strange time when negative is positive but we're all rooting for you Angie

 

[todski28]

Haven’t said much in here been busy writing cheap poetry, but this thread has been excellent viewing and highly informative and a good insight into looking at a poem in a more objective light as opposed to the surface level impact.

Hope if it isn’t too much effort that even if you don’t update this as often, still post some things in here.

I’ve been exposed to some gems of poetry I probably never would have found myself thank for rhat.

 

[Tzara]

Haven’t said much in here been busy writing cheap poetry, but this thread has been excellent viewing and highly informative and a good insight into looking at a poem in a more objective light as opposed to the surface level impact.

Hope if it isn’t too much effort that even if you don’t update this as often, still post some things in here.

I’ve been exposed to some gems of poetry I probably never would have found myself thanks for that.

Thanks, todski.

I probably won't update this thread until next year, but I am thinking about maybe doing something similar by creating a thread on more specific topics like prose poetry or the sestina or prosody or erotic poetry or whatever, because I do like to write these things.

Doing it every day for a month is tough, though.

Maybe prose poetry. I didn't post any prose poems in this year's set, so maybe prose poems would be a good topic.

At the moment I need to get back to A→B, B→C, C→D, /∴ ~(C·D).




Note: Not the actual problem I am trying to solve.

 

[Tzara]

Once again it is National Poetry Month here in the USA and I'll be posting a poem each day (or thereabouts) and talking a bit about why I like the poem. Anyone is free to either comment further on any poem I've posted or, even better, to post and comment on a poem of their selection.

Because of the recent emphasis here in the PF&D on forms, I'm going to start with this one by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins (who, by the way, just turned 80 last week). As the author's note appended to the poem indicates, this is one of the more difficult poetic forms:

Paradelle for Susan
Billy Collins

I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.
I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.
Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.
Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.
Thinnest love, remember the quick branch.
Always nervous, I perched on your highest bird the.

It is time for me to cross the mountain.
It is time for me to cross the mountain.
And find another shore to darken with my pain.
And find another shore to darken with my pain.
Another pain for me to darken the mountain.
And find the time, cross my shore, to with it is to.

The weather warm, the handwriting familiar.
The weather warm, the handwriting familiar.
Your letter flies from my hand into the waters below.
Your letter flies from my hand into the waters below.
The familiar waters below my warm hand.
Into handwriting your weather flies you letter the from the.

I always cross the highest letter, the thinnest bird.
Below the waters of my warm familiar pain,
Another hand to remember your handwriting.
The weather perched for me on the shore.
Quick, your nervous branch flew from love.
Darken the mountain, time and find was my into it was with to to.


NOTE: The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only those words.

Source: Picnic, Lightning (1998)​

"Paradelle for Susan" first appeared in The American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. It was not well received, with a number of readers writing in to complain about the perceived lack of quality of the poem, including one reader who declared it "the worst paradelle [he had] ever read."

The editor of The American Scholar, Jospeh Epstein (recently infamous from his op-ed on Jill Biden's doctoral degree) asked Collins to respond and he wrote what was essentially an apology, citing the difficulty of the form for his poem's weakness of expression.

The whole thing, though, was a joke. Collins made up the form and its history in order to satirize the popularity of what he felt was the fondness of some poets for unnecessarily difficult poetic forms such as the sestina and the villanelle. The problem was, it wasn't only readers of The American Scholar who didn't get the joke; other poets, thinking the form was authentic, began to write paradelles—much better paradelles than Collins' deliberately bad one.

I'll probably highlight one or more of these other examples later this month, but for now Collins' original paradelle seemed an appropriate post for April Fools Day.

 

[Piscator]

Thanks Tzara for Billy's lovely bad poem and the tale behind it which had me laughing out loud LOL to those under 30?

 

[Angeline]

The Paradelle is an excellent choice for today, Tzara. As P'tor said, it's lol funny. I actually tried to write one once at the urging of the evil Lauren Hynde. That was not so funny. On a side note, it's lovely to see Billy Collins active on social media. It's one of the unexpected pleasant outcomes of everyone being stuck at home for the last year.

I will add a poem by Charles Bukowski that speaks in his straightforward, sometimes gut punch voice about writing poetry.

so you want to be a writer?
Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

 

[Remec]

Since it came back up, I thought I would run a search for when we were all going on about paradelles (and see if I could find the challenge Angie was speaking of).

I did discover that more than a few of us attempted such things and I even threw one into one of my 30 in 30 runs.

 

[Lyricalli]

I got a good chuckle out of that Tzara, and that form looks terrifying. Kudos to you and anyone else who takes on that challenge. Pretty impressed with the one you posted in NaPo, and yours, too, Remec, from that old 30/30 run.

 

[Lyricalli]

I will add a poem by Charles Bukowski that speaks in his straightforward, sometimes gut punch voice about writing poetry.

I dig the poem and the passion in it, but Charles definitely doesn't think I should be writing or doing a NaPo

 

[Angeline]

I dig the poem and the passion in it, but Charles definitely doesn't think I should be writing or doing a NaPo

Me neither, not to mention he'd hate my obsessive editing. He was brilliant but crabby lol.