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Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium
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Sunday, February 29, 2004 |
I'd ordered Marie Ponsots' books because of this 8-month-old review column by William Logan in The New Criterion, in which the usually reliable curmudgeon heaped praise on her work. He was more like himself writing about Sharon Olds, a writer who initially fascinated me but whose habit of ending lines with "the" eventually made it impossible for me to read her. I'm only half-kidding. Greg Perry evidently shares something of the same feeling about ending lines with articles. The man, by the way, is busy. Doesn't he have a day job? Not that I'd wish one on him.
But while I was feeling pleased with the way my prejudices were being echoed in the big world out there, I visited a new used book store just about a mile away and found a copy of Logan's Vain Empires. So far, it's heavy going, but I haven't slept much the last two nights because a boarder at our NC house has turned out to be a crackhead and a thief, and today I spent about 2 hours hauling 60 lb rocks (well, not all of them) from the woods into our garden, so I was willing to give myself some slack.
I might even have ventured publicly my opinion, fostered by a lot of iPod listening in the last two months, that Wallace Stevens was an old gas bag. But Michaela Cooper had to go and post this (last Friday, but I didn't read it until today). I hope she doesn't give Sharon Olds a similar treatment. I won't know what to do.
7:17:46 PM 
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Saturday, February 28, 2004 |
Although I'm not writing the nearly daily sonnets anymore, I still plan to try the themes suggested here, even, I think, the one on drowning New Orleans. Next up on the list, the figure of the heart, was suggested by Chris Murray. Unfortunately for me, two books I'd ordered, Marie Ponsot's The Bird Catcher and Springing: New and Selected Poems, were waiting for me when I got home yesterday, and I found this:
ONE IS ONE
Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world—though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
and thrill its corridors with messages.
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel and brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.
You scare me, bragging you're a double agent
since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too.
Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,
and joy may come, and make its test of us.
I've got serious some work to do if I want to do better than that for invention and energy, and I may not be able to do it—but there are things that bother me. Before any talk about those things, let me say that I like the poem. It was the first thing I read when I opened Bird Catcher, and after reading it I was excited to read the rest of the book. I'm about half-way through the book, and I'm still excited. Now let's go.
The stanza breaks, especially the second, are odd. The first splits the second quatrain, but there really is a strong shift in the sense, which might justify the break. The second splits a sentence with an enjambment across the stanza break for no reason I can discern. The breaks almost seem to be an attempt to disguise this Shakespearean sonnet as something else—but what? And why?
The rhymes, too, are problematic: rest of us rhymed with test of us is wonderful, but locked/shocked, though/no, and do/too are dead flat ordinary; walls with brawl is lazy; agent just doesn't rhyme with eloquent; and rages with messages is no better. But it's not that kind of poem, you say: why expect full rhyme? And I answer, four of seven are full rhymes, and three of those are boring. Why be charitable for the others?
What about meter? The last line of each stanza is IP, with a perfectly ordinary hypermetrical unaccented syllable at the end of line 12. The last line, in particular, seems as it might be deliberately regular, summing up the couplet and the poem and closing that one wonderful rhyme. But the rest is a hodgepodge of tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter. Line 7 seems to be heptameter and 8 to be trimeter. The parsimonious explanation is that meter didn't enter into her calculations at all, and even the last line is accidentally regular.
What's going on? The stanza breaks don't look like a sonnet; the pattern of rhymes and sort-of rhymes do; the strong reversal at the couplet does; the meter doesn't exist. The poem gestures at the sonnet and disguises the gestures and ends for all the world as if it had been a sonnet all along.
Maybe it is. But I think of a story Willis Barnstone tells, in the introduction to his The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, about his work with Borges, translating Borges's sonnets. They had a very friendly working relationship, but one night, instead of calling or visiting himself, Borges sent a messenger about a particular rhyme: "Borges thinks you should try harder."
11:32:46 PM
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Thursday, February 26, 2004 |
George Wallace answers the call.
Actually, there's no indication of any relation between the two, but the timing was too good to pass up. Thanks to Greg Perry, who's been posting some interesting material on inventing forms, for pointing me to the article.
6:25:06 PM
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Peripherally related to the discussion Kasey Mohammad and I had in comments a few days ago, I found these pieces (here and here) on language and the brain at Human Nature Daily.
The first reports that the motor cortex of readers is involved in the interpretation of action verbs, which literally get the blood flowing, involving more parts of the brain:
For instance, reading the word lick triggers pronounced blood flow in sites of the motor cortex associated with tongue and mouth movements.…
"Brain areas that are used to perform an action are also needed to comprehend words related to that action," Victor de Lafuente and Ranulfo Romo of Mexico's National Autonomous University in Mexico City comment in an editorial in the [Jan. 22 Neuron]. "Remarkably, just the reading of feet-related action words such as dance makes [the motor cortex] move its 'feet.'"
The second is a more general review of recent work, but this passage got my attention:
Using fMRI Dr [Sophie] Scott has shown that the brain takes speech and separates it into words and "melody" - the varying intonation in speech that reveals mood, gender and so on. Her studies suggest words are then shunted over to the left temporal lobe for processing, while the melody is channelled to the right side of the brain, a region more stimulated by music.
There are reasons, rooted in our biological nature, for action and meter (or other rhythmic devices) to have a greater effect on readers than text lacking those features.
5:49:54 PM
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Wednesday, February 25, 2004 |
Yesterday (or was it the day before?) I found the excellent biologist's blog Pharyngula through a reference at Joseph Duemer's Reading & Writing. Lots of fabulous linkage. I've added Pharyngula to resources on the left. In honor of the occasion, here's some (I hope) appropriate verse from Walter Garstang's Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses:
The Ancestry of Vertebrates
Gill-slits, Tongue-bars, Synapticulae,
Endostyle and Notochord: all these you will agree
Mark the Protochordate from the fishes in the sea,
And tells alike for them and us our lowly pedigree.
Thyroid, Thymus, Subnotochordal Rod:
These we share with Lampreys, the Dogfish and the Cod,—
Relics of the food-trap that served our early meals,
And of Tongue-bars that multiplied the primal water-wheels.
CRS, No Doubt: I've also added Watermark and Love During Wartime to Poetry Blogs.
9:30:41 PM
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My best and oldest friend emailed me to ask if I was sure about Mrs. Slaughter in the third grade (she was there with me, 43 years ago, and also left-handed). Until she asked, I was sure about the broad outlines of the story, but suddenly I wasn't so sure anymore. Mary Anne knew it was Miss Slaughter, not Mrs. (In those days, when mastodons walked the earth, no one was Ms. anything.)
So I called my mother. Who says she doesn't remember whether Miss Slaughter actually tied my hand or just asked her if it was OK. It wasn't, but my first grade teacher, she said, had definitely tied me to my desk. These days a child like me would be medicated, and I'll trust Katey that it might have been a good thing.
There's another disputed memory in my childhood. My mother and I both agree that these events occurred: someone got up late at night, poured a glass of milk, spilled it, got a rag and wiped up the mess, put the rag in the fridge and threw the glass bottle of milk (remember the mastodons?) across the kitchen to the sink. She thinks she did it. I think I did it, and the memory is vivid, including yelling for help because I didn't have shoes on and there was broken glass on the floor.
I wouldn't have gone on about this—I probably wouldn't have mentioned it—except that today I read this piece by Frederick Crews at the New York Review of Books, reviewing two books on the recovered memory madness that swept this country from the late 80s into the 90s.
I was one of the victims of that madness, and it made me furious that anyone (not Crews!) was still defending that crap. My wife of 12 years, suffering from the effects of drugs given to treat a pituitary tumor and from the tumor itself, sought help from Susan Roth, a psychologist at Duke, who convinced her that she had been raised in a Satanic cult and had killed her own children, among others. Roth convinced her that both my wife's mother and I were molesting my 6 year old daughter.
There followed 6 months of videotaped interviews, supervised visits, anatomically correct dolls, and sheer terror. It was the time of the McMartin pre-school trials. People were going to jail for things they could not possibly have done. Eventually various agencies decided there was no evidence that any abuse had occurred, and my wife's complaint was dismissed with prejudice. But she got custody, and when I lost my job (think my job performance suffered?) and had no resources left, financial or emotional, she disappeared. I haven't seen my daughter for 11 years, though a couple of years ago she contacted me and we had a brief correspondence before she cut it off.
I have no idea if this poem, about 3 years old, is any good:
Old Songs
When I got home my wife was gone, and so
I bought a mandolin—eight more strings
To tie me to a world I didn't know,
In which my daughter's fenced from me by rings
Of law and fear. Almost the only things
Her mother let us share before the end
Were meals and music. Maybe she still sings
"I'll Meet You in the Morning" with a friend,
And thinks of me, and remembers how we'd spend
Those Wednesday afternoons with jugband songs,
Bluegrass, and Scottish airs. I could depend
On her to get them right when I was wrong—
Her ear was better. She was eight years old.
What songs we sang when she was mine to hold!
8:11:38 PM
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Tuesday, February 24, 2004 |
James asked me two good questions:
1) Do you compose your sonnet (or other structured verse) on paper first? Have you ever tried to compose structured verse directly on screen? If so, any difference? 2) How strict are you about iambs? I get the sense you put more focus on syllable count, but I may be mistaken on that score.
Before I answer, let me make it clear that I am not prescribing anything, but only telling what suits me now. I've changed my ways before and I probably will again, at least about the second question. As for the first, I've written virtually everything at the keyboard for 30 years, and, since I've had Macs (1985!), I've seldom printed anything before I thought it was good enough to show to a first reader. The story I tell, which is at least partly true, is that Mrs. Slaughter, my 3rd grade teacher and I'm not kidding about the name, thought I'd be handicapped by being left-handed and tied my left hand to the desk when we were learning cursive. I can't read my writing 30 minutes after I've written it.
These days I write poetry using a program called NoteTaker, a sort of super-outliner. I've posted the drafts of the last sonnet I wrote here. The lines of asterisks represent the places where I copied some core out of one entry of the outline into a new entry and started elaborating or changing from that new base. I try not to erase anything (I'm bad sometimes) so that all previous versions and doodles are visible by scrolling, and I can also go to different pages and sections in the NoteTaker document to read or copy things I've done before. It works marvelously well for me.
NoteTaker will produce html, but not flexibly enough. I use BBEdit to format these entries, and Radio Userland for blogging. It's pretty much digital all the way down for me—I don't remember the last time I used a pen or pencil on a poem.
The simple answer to the second question is that I count only feet, not syllables. These days I'm fairly strict about substitutions, using (almost) no headless iambs and using trochees only initially or after a caesura. I don't mind the occasional anapest, except in the first foot, and I'm trying without much success to use more feminine rhymes. I'm wary of enjambment, mostly because I used to be much too free with it, and I will not enjamb across rhyme groups or stanzas. I do claim the right of elision, when it suits me, between adjacent vowels and across the liquid consonants. As an example, here's how I'd scan that same sonnet:
Walking Away
1. He LEFT / the KEY / in the UN / locked DOOR, / surPRISED
2. To FIND / it ODD,/ and HARD / er THAN / he'd THOUGHT.
3. He'd MISS / this CUL / de SAC, / he RE / aLIZED.
4. He'd MISS / the CAR, / the KIDS, / the COF / feePOT.
5. SINCE there / was ON / ly ONE / way HE / could GO
6. He WENT / that WAY, / each QUICK / ening STEP / unPLANNED
7. UnTIL / he FOUND / the ROAD / he COULD / n't KNOW
8. When IN / that OTH / er LIFE, / that OTH / er LAND.
9. SOMEhow / he WORE / no SHOES / and his FEET HURT,
10. But DIS / tantLY, / JUST as / his SUN / burned BACK
11. Was ON / ly IN /teresTING. / He FELT / aLERT, /
12. But WHY? / Was THERE / some FEAR? / Was THERE / some LACK?
13. AFter / a WHILE / a BEET / le LAND / ed THERE
14. And SPAWNED / beFORE / reTURN / ing TO / the AIR.
That's pretty conventional pentameter, though I don't think I'd quite realized how many trochaic substitutions there are before scanning the thing—I don't scan while I'm writing except to count beats or to try to figure out why something's wrong. Still, the three in lines 5, 9, and 13 start, not just lines, but sections of the poem, and the fourth, in line 10, occurs immediately following a caesura and reinforces, I think, the loss of purpose the character is experiencing. The first two could probably be read as iambs without bothering me much.
There are three feet here one might reasonably call either anapests or iambs using elision: the 3rd foot of line 1, the 4th foot of line 6, and the 3rd foot of line 11. I call them all iambs.
Line 9 starts the volta, not really necessary in this kind of sonnet, and it has an interesting additional variation in its last four syllables. That pattern, - - / /, is sometimes called a double iamb and sometimes called an ionic minor. I don't really care—but it's not a pyrhhic followed by a spondee.
If I were revising this right now, I'd probably start with line 12—it isn't really strong enough to set up the couplet. One thing that might help is to arrange the line so that the accents shift between the first "was there" and the second. Maybe something like this:
But WHY? / Was THERE / some FEAR?/ or WAS / there LACK?
7:46:16 PM
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Monday, February 23, 2004 |
I'm tired and sort of out of steam without a sonnet to write tonight, so here's one from Kim Addonizio's The Philosopher's Club to send me off:
Lullaby
This hammock, slung between two trees, exists
so there might stumble to it, drunk, one night
with a blanket, three people the moon enlists
to remind itself it's lovely, like the white
back of a woman bathing as she kneels
at the edge of a river, lifting the shivering water
to her face in cupped hands. Which now is the real
tableau: this luminous, naked body, or
the three friends? Rocking quietly, their heads
close together, they are almost happy. Each
has separate sorrows, and in their separate beds
they'll feel this moment moving out of reach,
receding. But let's keep them touching here
a little longer, voices raised against the air.
8:45:45 PM
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Sunday, February 22, 2004 |
I am quite aware that much of what is called "free verse" is actually written using ferociously difficult formal constraints. But basing a poem's structure on the Fibonacci series is not something a reader will ordinarily perceive as form. Poetry, and all art, depends first on sensual apprehension.
11:08:45 PM
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Much of every kind of poetry is just bad, which tells you already that I'm ignoring poetry as honorific: "It's like poetry in motion!" means nothing more than "ooh!" There's also a lot of stuff called "poetry" which isn't poetry, not even bad poetry, no matter what the author or some readers may call it and no matter how good the stuff is. I love and would be very sorry to be without a great number of what are called prose poems—for instance Eileen Tabios' extraordinary Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole—but I don't think it's useful to call them poetry.
There can be verse which isn't poetry, but without verse—lines broken to create rhythmic units—there ain't no poetry. Free verse is certainly poetry and there are truly great free verse poems, but I'd argue that poets who write only free verse, whether deliberately or through unthinking imitation of the dominant style, have abandoned valuable tools. Except for the line break, they have no opportunities or structural devices not also available to the writer of prose. Well, maybe one thing—they don't have to make sense since many readers have stopped expecting clarity (which is not the opposite of difficulty) from anything formatted with a ragged right margin. I'm not sure what value there is in that, since it too often means a reader will see that margin and put the book back on the shelf.
The line break, because it's almost all there is, is much more important in free verse than in traditional poetry, and free verse poets who don't think hard about how and why they break their lines are in trouble. Those who mistake whim for thought are in worse trouble, and that's the case with William Watkins, whom I first noticed in a comment on a discussion Kasey Mohammad started the last time I wrote about lines. Watkins later posted his comment as an entry on his own blog and followed it with this post, which Greg Perry noticed, appropriately remarking "Now I know what the theory of the line is in free verse: MAGIC." Greg noted his apologies to Watkins, but I won't. I will say Watkins understands the problem, as he writes "[t]he fact that on the whole it is innovative poetry that foregrounds lineation is naturally because it dispenses, on the whole, with metre and rhyme." (That adjective "innovative," applied to forgoing meter and rhyme, does look pretty silly at this late date.) But when he writes that the "duration/reach of the line was developed over time to reach a point beyond which the line could easily be spoken out loud, easily kept in the mind as one single cognitive unit or phrase, and which could not be accommodated easily in material forms as a single line" he is just being incoherent.
Consciously abandoning the tools of meter, rhyme, and traditional forms is not so different from consciously choosing them: both choices are an acceptance of constraint. The first choice, because it's like playing table tennis on one's knees (Frost was wrong about that), can increase a reader's admiration and respect when it is done superlatively well, though it's no excuse for less than superlative performance. Good free verse is harder.
Denis Dutton recenty reviewed Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment : The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 19, noting that Murray didn't adequately acknowledge that the "academic mindset of such scholars concentrates on historical importance in the arts, but it is also prone to confuse historical importance with aesthetic achievement." As a result, Picasso was ranked above Rembrandt and Schoenberg above Brahms. It is telling that, in poetry, nothing similar happens, and Shakespeare and Goethe are not threatened by Eliot, much less by Zukofsky. Deliberate poverty of technique may be admirable, but it has restricted poetic achievement.
I originally posted the wrong version of this, with the paragraphs in a different order.
10:18:14 PM
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My apologies to Michael Helsem, who suggested a sonnet on New Orleans as the New Atlantis (my term), since "in a matter of decades, New Orleans will become a sunken city, due to global warming." I spent yesterday morning and most of today struggling to make a sonnet out of this but, as he suggested might be his own problem with the subject, I just don't know enough to make the poem. I've learned a lot: for instance, New Orleans is actually in greater danger from the Mississippi River dams that prevent the Big Muddy from being as muddy as it ought to be (see "Drowning New Orleans" in the October 2001 Scientific American). But it's just too big a theme for 14 lines unless there's some personal way to approach the poem, and my only personal relation with the city is that, despite many plans, I've never managed to get there. I don't think I'll ever write this sonnet.
That's as good a setup as I'll ever get for saying that these near-daily sonnets have come to an end. You can see them all (some slightly revised) here until the end of March, when I'll take the page down so that I can send out the sonnets I can salvage. I've written 28 since January 5th, and I've learned a lot and grown some new metrical muscles, I think. But it's caused a lot of nights with too-little sleep, and I haven't been able to do the other things I want to do on this blog, especially promoting the use of meter, narrative, and rhyme by writing about excellent work by contemporary formalists and by replying to the misinformed and sometimes incoherent notions used to justify the abandonment of traditional poetic structure.
I still plan to write and post the sonnets suggested by Chris Murray, Ivy, and Jilly Dybka, but it will be more like one a week than one a day.
8:36:07 PM
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New links on the left, in order of appearance: The New Formalist, Verse Daily, CUP OF CHICHA, Neil Gaiman, The Brutal Kittens, geneva convention, g r a p e z, the Ingredient, venepoetics, and We Write To Taste Things Twice.
12:38:15 PM
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Saturday, February 21, 2004 |
Today I'd planned to add a number of blogs over on the left, mourn the loss of Chris Lott's Ruminate (not even archives!), and get a new sonnet done, but my wonderful wife just sent me a birthday email telling me to go out and flirt a little, so I'm by god gonna do it, if I can remember how and the flirtees don't run screaming. A man needs to keep his wife happy.
1:56:32 PM
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Everybody say "Happy Birthday, Mike!"
12:07:26 AM
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Friday, February 20, 2004 |
Thanks to Anita for suggesting a sonnet on walking away from it all.
Walking Away
He left the key in the unlocked door, surprised
To find it odd, and harder than he'd thought.
He'd miss this cul de sac, he realized.
He'd miss the car, the kids, the coffeepot.
Since there was only one way he could go
He went that way, each quickening step unplanned
Until he found the road he couldn't know
When in that other life, that other land.
Somehow he wore no shoes and his feet hurt,
But distantly, just as his sunburned back
Was only interesting. He felt alert,
But why? Was there some fear? Was there some lack?
After a while a beetle landed there
And spawned before returning to the air.
11:46:46 PM
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Thursday, February 19, 2004 |
I got an email today from Justin Sirois, owner of narrow house recordings. They taped the avant garde poetry reading (and the earlier discussion?) at St Mary's College that I reported on last November, and will soon be offering a CD set. The performances were amazing—as skeptical as I am of the whole idea of an avant garde, Laura Elrick, Heather Fuller, Carol Mirakove, Kristen Prevallet, and Deborah Richards knocked my socks off that night. I plan on buying a copy. While you're doing the same, check out the other recordings available.
Now I'm gonna go play music. See ya tomorrow. Well, figuratively speaking.
5:50:34 PM
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Wednesday, February 18, 2004 |
Tonight a corporate shindig to unveil
Our shiny business plan curtailed my verses,
And Thursday I'll take my mandolin and wail—
But Friday a sonnet, barring fiendish curses.
8:26:51 PM
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004 |
Thanks to Crystal for the request for a sonnet about stars. The request lines are still open!
Stars
It wasn't half a billion years until
The first-born stars had died to make the stuff
We're made of—even then a slide downhill
From symmetry to chaos sure enough.
For everything is broken, even stars,
Even the cores of atoms, even space
Is broken, and nothing can unmake the scars
Of time which finally unmake every place.
Like you, the stars tonight are beautiful
And dying—what could ever matter more?
No simpler way could be as magical,
For we are still those stars that went before,
And with the Hubble circling in the night
We see their light, almost as old as light.
10:06:37 PM
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Monday, February 16, 2004 |
Saturday night I went to the first open mic at Durham's Joe and Joe's. I'd heard about it from a local poetry mailing list, but it turned out I was nearly the only poet, and I felt naked without my mandolin. But hey, it was Valentine's Day and I had all these baby-fresh sonnets, about half of them love poems, so after two martinis (it started an hour and a half late) and some mixed-as-usual acoustic guitar and drums I got up with my pentameters and it went pretty darned well. Eight minutes per, and I read nine sonnets, all from the last month and a half. Sex always goes well, even and maybe especially rhymed, and so do funny poems. Slipped in a couple of other themes while they were off their guard. The applause was more than polite, and after the whole show several people asked for cards, which I rather miraculously happened to have with me.
If it hadn't been for those two martinis I might have had the sense to take notes on the laptop (I read from the laptop) so I could say who was there and did what.
The sound system, while adequate for reading, buried most of the singers behind too-loud guitars or keyboards. Still, it was obvious there were talented people there, and the music was quirky and interesting. One fellow, Will Something-Or-Other, knew how to get the buzz out of the speakers and balance his guitar; consequently, his act was probably the best received. If I'm in the Triangle I'll try to make it back to the next one, when I expect the technical problems will be solved.
All in all a good evening, and a good first outing for the New Sonnetarium. Today I drive back to Maryland, and tomorrow start on the sonnets folks requested las week. The request lines are still open!
9:13:57 AM
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 |
Warning to Cupid
Put away your arrows, boy—
Your potion's pointless on a man
Ten years your toy
And hers,
Since she is mine—
But if she tells me that you plan
To make my blood your potion's source—
Of course you can,
I'm hers,
And she is mine.
Still, you should know that potion's force
Will bring to no one else my joy.
They will, of course,
Be hers—
But she is mine.
7:49:46 PM
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Thursday, February 12, 2004 |
What would you like to see in the next set of sonnets? Let me know in the comment box or by email. Can't promise, but it seems to me that poets ought to be able to write (not should always or even usually write) on subjects requested by their audiences.
Let's stay way from politics and revelation—this time, anyway—and if it's to be for a specific person, give me enough information for me to make the poem at least somewhat personal.
6:12:59 PM
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Wednesday, February 11, 2004 |
Eight days from ten of rhyming after work,
And, once again, by Wednesday night I'm done.
There's nothing in my head but swirling murk—
More sonnets when the new week has begun.
11:02:18 PM
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004 |
Unrequited
I had a crush on Liz because one night
She danced real slow with me and every beat,
Since she was lame, her hip slipped tight
Across my hard-on—Christ, but it was sweet!
And Gina, who broke every hippie's heart,
Her famous shorts she'd cut so short the hair
Would glisten while she sat, those thighs apart
To show she knew you knew, and didn't care—
Truth is, I was in love with everyone,
But most of all with Ronnie—when he'd sing
His "Stranger Things" I'd almost come undone
To hear him cry out "Mikey, do that thing!"
And everything was in my mandolin,
Or all he wanted, of all I'd ever been.
8:01:48 PM
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Monday, February 9, 2004 |
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Jordan Davis's Million Poems is on fire the last few days. Not everything works—as if all my sonnets worked!—but there are gems there.
- Don't miss the last two days at Wood s Lot, here and here, for poetry and talk about poetry. Kenneth Rexroth on translation is particularly good.
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Chris Murray has posted one of her student's sonnets. It's looser than I like to work, but still a fine piece.
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Shanna Compton also liked Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool. Buy it!
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Josh Corey's just posted some haunting poetry and links. I don't share the politics or the poetics—I'm pretty much a radical centrist—but I was nevertheless moved.
10:09:56 PM
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Far Away
I bought the DVDs eight weeks ago
But haven't started Buffy's season five,
And not because she won't get out alive—
Just like her first death, it won't last, I know.
Of course, it's just a television show,
Where every week her Scoobies must contrive
Some plan to stop some villain's wicked jive.
There's something there that shakes me, even so.
That sudden sister should have been a joke—
Still, how could Buffy choose to let her die,
Their mother dead? And Glory! When she broke
Sweet Tara's mind she is a god, I thought,
Yet Buffy, dying, won—my wife and I
Together watched her save the world. A lot.
8:49:46 PM
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Sunday, February 8, 2004 |
Mysterious Ways
I found her on my porch one night, half stoned,
Black-eyed, and broke. I had a sofa-bed,
And passing out "Will I be safe?" she moaned—
I figured while she snored she wasn't dead.
Next morning came the tale. It was her son
Who'd beat her up and robbed her for cocaine,
And daughter who, not to be outdone,
Had dropped her off with whiskey for her pain.
She wouldn't call the cops, and I got mad.
I didn't see her till the hurricane
Had come and gone and taken all she had:
"My Kenny stole so much from me God swore
He'd send a storm so he can't steal no more."
8:53:16 PM
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I've added several blogs over on the left, and separated POETRY BLOGS into those devoted almost entirely to original poems (BLOGS OF POEMS) and those which regularly mix in talk about poems and the po-biz (BLOGS ON POETRY). My only criterium for what gets blogrolled in the first place is that, at least some of the time, in one way or another, these are places that help me better understand my own practice as a poet. It's not an exhaustive list because it's exhausting maintaining it.
For those of you mad enough to want to see my almost-daily sonnets in one swell foop (did I really just write that?) I've added a link under ME & MINE to The New Sonnetarium.
BTW: Jim Behrle is 19 years, 362 352 days younger than I am, and I think John Latta is 360 350 days younger. Happy Birthdays, Strangers, from a subtraction-challenged engineer!
12:14:39 PM
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Saturday, February 7, 2004 |
Grateful Sonnet
It never used to matter how to ease
I never used to wonder how to ease
My joints those winter days I'd walked too far,
Or not at all, or not enough to please
My doctor, or only to the nearest bar.
That's 40 feet. I'm broke. That's for the best.
And, better still, I'm stiff I ached because the bay
And river, one due east and one due west,
Are both about an hour's walk away.
I chose the river so the sun would warm
My back and spare my eyes as I returned.
Of course the clouds rolled in but did no harm
That garlic soup cannot relieve, I've learned.
So thank you, Carlos, for the recipe—
True comfort food, a sovereign remedy.
Revised: 02/08/2004
Anybody have a better title?
8:12:58 PM
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Friday, February 6, 2004 |
I usually like to think of myself as a cavalier, but then I'd have to be a royalist. And no cavalier could have written this:
So spake our Mother EVE, and ADAM heard
Well pleas'd, but answer'd not; for now too nigh
Th' Archangel stood, and from the other Hill
To thir fixt Station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as Ev'ning Mist
Ris'n from a River o're the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel
Homeward returning. High in Front advanc't,
The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz'd
Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the LIBYAN Air adust,
Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate
Let them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.
10:53:48 PM
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Poetry is made-up stuff.
10:09:17 PM
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First And Last Time
The thing you're most ashamed of—what was that?
Baby, what kind of question's that right now?
I'm still inside you! Now you're not. Just how
Do you expect to get back in? Chit-chat?
I'll know you first, my sexy technocrat.
You've got a job—that's almost worth a 'wow!'
You wear no ring, and claim you've made no vow—
But tell me or I'll be dressed in seconds flat.
I was a kid, and she was younger—she
Was drunk. I bought the wine. She passed out
In my front seat and I invited friends.
Thank god they had more decency than me.
Or thank your friends. I had to ask. Boy Scout,
You're not. How can we ever make amends?
9:14:09 PM
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Thursday, February 5, 2004 |
We Are A Kind Of Map
A buzzer-beating 3-point shot reveals
We're born to know the truths about this world,
But it's too much: a larval fly conceals
Itself till it's grown wings and they've unfurled;
A virus has the key for just the cell
Where it can flourish; that same cell, in dying,
Creates an army ready to repel
Precisely that invader or die trying.
Of course that's metaphor, but not a lie,
Not just a way of trying to impose
Some sense on senselessness, a useless "Why?"
We answer till we like what we suppose.
We'll make mistakes—but make them unafraid:
We see the world with eyes the world has made.
10:22:24 PM
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Wednesday, February 4, 2004 |
Forgive me, friends. There's no denying
I'm much too tired for versifying.
But don't you fret—depend upon it—
Tomorrow there's a brand new sonnet.
9:47:41 PM
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Tuesday, February 3, 2004 |
Failed Solipsist
A week of ice and wind when I had meant
To bike the 30 miles to work and back—
It seems the world's conspiring to prevent
A healthy life for me—it wants me slack.
Just like I know I really ought to watch
The sauce, but it's not good to drink alone,
And friendly barkeeps always pour my Scotch
Without a jigger—I should piss and moan?
My first half-century's gone. If things don't change
I'll never finish this one, but they don't,
And since it seems I simply can't arrange
The world to fit my plans, then I just won't.
"The world is too much with us." That's a lie.
The world's against us till the day we die.
10:04:22 PM
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Monday, February 2, 2004 |
I don't know how I've missed the personal site of Dennis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, but the Blowhards haven't. Some especially good things here and here. The text of the latter is, unfortunately, garbled in a few places.
I've mentioned Paul Lake work as a poet an critic before. His new piece at Contemporary Poetry Review is a tour de force.
I haven't had time to catch up on the poetic blogosphere, but last week Ron Silliman wrote a good and interesting piece on thwarting of expectations as a literary strategy. He sees clearly that no such strategy will work for long: readers will figure it out. At that point the writer can choose to make even more extreme efforts to keep readers disoriented as long as possible, and that is the strategy SIlliman prefers as a writer and as a reader. Nothing wrong with that.
But at each stage of greater disequilibrium there will be fewer readers willing to play the game. Constantly being confronted with apparent meaninglessness is just as boring as never finding anything new. There is another way to play with expectation, one which is, I think, more respectful of the reader, one to which, by the evidence of this passage from the post, Silliman is apparently blind:
A poem in quatrains tells you an enormous amount about itself even before you've absorbed the first word – an entire series of expectations are set & framed. These can be met or confounded – either approach has its pleasures – but it's significantly different from a poem that leaves the reader unsettled, off-balance, not certain quite what to expect.
Let's make those quatrains, in some ways, even more predictable by putting them in meter and rhyming them, say, abab. Now the reader's expectations are surely even more constrained, and for that very reason, deviations become more noticeable and more meaningful, and, potentially, a source of greater pleasure for the reader. The play of the meter across natural speech rhythm becomes a source of unexpected music, a well-chosen rhyme is not predictable, and, of course, nothing in the form places any constraint on content, which can range from nonsense to serious philosophical argument to pure emotional outburst or any imaginable combination of human speech and thought. It is the business of good metrical poetry to keep the reader unsettled while always respecting the reader as an equal partner—that is, to surprise the reader with a new view of a recognizable and shared world.
Clarification: 2/3/04
Yes, the quoted passage says the reader's expectations of the quatrain may "be confounded." But since that is contrasted with poetry which "leaves the reader … not certain quite what to expect," it's either just a careless mistake (natural in a blog) or Silliman means something very strange indeed: that his preferred poetics systematically thwarts the reader's every expectation. That is a literal dead end. People and other animals die when they are are taught that nothing they do matches their world. Luckily, books are not like guards at concentration camps or the gulag. We can throw them at the wall.
10:07:32 PM
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Petulant Muse
Another sonnet? Baby, have a heart …
Try something multi-culti—a ghazal!—
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic—Sing! Muse—oh, we'll have a ball!
You'll be important when we've finished it—
Just think—your name on Stanley Fish's lips,
Your verse taught in Contemporary LIt,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!
And talk about commitment—I'll be yours
For months and maybe years and when you're stuck
I'll send my sisters round with overtures
Of love and—wait a minute—that would suck.
Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement's still the best.
8:58:08 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Michael Snider.
Last update: 1/24/06; 10:08:48 PM.
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