Fire No Guns, Shed No Tears

It’s pretty obvious that I love repetition in my poetry. Every quatrain in “The Marian Lee” opens with the same line; the quatrains and the tercets are all mono-rhyme. Each quatrain in “Wear the Lightning” ends with the same phrase.

So I am delighted by the form of Stan Roger‘s “Barrett’s Privateers”.

The second line of every verse (in which all sing) is “How I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!” From the poet’s point of view this isn’t too bad a line to repeat, both from the stance of (1) having it accumulate meaning as the song/story progresses and (2) having only one line into which to get to the point where repeating it would make sense. In fact, in this case, there are a number of instances where the cognitive dissonance between the first line of the verse and “How I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!” is a wonderful frisson, which grows as you gain insight into the story (and listen to it repeatedly).

There are only three free, or variable, lines in each verse: the first one, and the two lines sandwiched between “How I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!” and the following:

God Damn them all! I was told
We’d cruise the seas for American gold
We’d fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett’s privateers.

Admittedly, Rogers gives away the whole story in the first verse when we get to this utterly huge repeton. But the point is, of course, to watch the tragedy unfold, and to ramp up the volume and the harmony along with the inevitability. Rogers is amazing.

From a poet’s point of view, I am gleeful: how does he manage to propel the story along with only two lines before we crash back into the whole group singing “God Damn them all!”???

It’s a reminder that you can probably say it in fewer words, that there is room in the form if you find the right words. Of course, it probably helps to have such an extraordinary repeton.

Full Moon Tonight

I am in a mood for Judith Wright poetry, to rail against the world and still find beauty. And the full moon tonight stops me turning pages at:

Old Woman’s Song

The moon drained white by day
lifts from the hill
where the old pear-tree, fallen in storm,
puts out some blossom still.

Women believe in the moon.
This branch I hold
is not more white and still than she
whose flower is ages old;

and so I carry home
this branch of pear
that makes such obstinate tokens still
of fruit it cannot bear.

Wright’s poem is in quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of ABCB, meaning that the second and fourth lines rhyme and the first and third have no relation to each other or to the even-numbered lines. I’d identify this piece as “heterometrical” because I think the lines are mostly iambic but rarely do they contain the same number of iambic feet. I like this “form” because it allows the reader to experience the rhythm of the poem and allowes the writer to use the visual effect of line breaks.

To me this poem speaks of the futility of beauty, and more: the persistence of beauty in spite of said futility.

The first line of the second stanza shocks me with its end-stopped-ness and its implications: men don’t? What is there to believe? What does that belief gain you or subtract from you? Lots of moonlit paths to pursue.

And what does the title tell me? That this is not the epiphany of a young woman, although the poem, by its existence, lends this epiphany to those of any age or identity. But it is the voice of a woman who feels she is past her prime and may be looking for a reason to keep going.

It’s a beaut.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Crossover.

“of earnest grasping”

In the September 2009 issue of Elle, there is an article talking up Bright Star, a new movie about John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne. There is also a two-page spread on pages 336-37 (unsure if it’s a feature or an ad) titled “Bright Star: The poetry of fashion” that strives mightily to assert how “the film’s fashion mirror[s] trends seen on the fall runways” (those being “bold color,” “bigger is better,” “romantic ruffles,” “thigh highs,” and “featured locks”), pairing stills of Abbie Cornish and her costumes with sketchbook and Victoria-magazine-esque background clutter (e.g., artistically arranged gloves, pearls, roses, key-on-a-string, etc.). The jaded part of me finds this hilariously insipid. The little-girl part of me unabashedly adores fashion sketches (though I found everything depicted in the spread unappealing. Back to the Ralph Lauren ads for me). The former bookseller is musing over how many tie-in editions of Keats’ poetry there’ll be (I have at least one acquaintance who’s a sure bet to buy anything with Ben Whishaw’s face on it…), and reminiscing about how there was a surge in Auden sales after Four Weddings and a Funeral. And the calligrapher is rereading “This Living Hand” and contemplating anew how to letter it.

Help Wanted

I have always admired how Peg is so open to poetry; it seems to trip her, hide under rocks for her, shout.

I can’t seem to get poetry into my life in the way that she does but I would like to try. I don’t necessarily even think that I mean reading poetry, because I do that, it’s more a necessity for other people’s words. (Writing words is my necessity.)

How do I do that? I would like advice, please, suggestions, improvements, deportment, poems to read, maybe, I don’t know. Some help. I would like the input of poetry to be as vital to me as the output is. How do I do that?

“I wouldn’t have been sure of my answer”

During the last week of my mother’s life, I took a steno pad from one of her many stashes of office supplies and started filling it with notes and with the beginning drafts of poems, one which was published a few months later, and others which I will tear apart some other year and use to seed other poems. Perhaps. There’s a legal pad somewhere in my basement with the start of a poem I’d felt compelled to draft maybe nine or ten years ago, knowing I wasn’t going to get very far with it because I would not feel okay about publishing it while my mother was alive, and back then I expected her to live into her nineties (her mother did). There have been poems I’ve written since last spring (“A Stack of Cards” and “Missing Characters“).

(That sentence I just wrote feels so incomplete, but I lack the words to end it properly or definitively. And yes, that could be an analogy to grief.)

So: this entry is to point you to three other poets whose lines about death have recently caught my attention. First, today’s edition of Poetry Daily featured two poems by Jason Shinder, an American poet who died of cancer last year at the age of 52 or 53. The poems are bleakly beautiful (and the subject line of this post comes from “The Good Son”). The Wikipedia entry is startling: it includes a passage that is very unWiki in tone, but strikes me as written in exasperated sorrow.

He was careless with his medication; he was perpetually late to treatment; in the hours before chemotherapy, he could be found ice-skating with a date who didn’t know he was sick.

“We were all maddened by his denial about his illness,” his friend the poet Marie Howe says, “but when we read the poems and his journals after his death, we saw that he had been addressing it in a way he could never say in life.

Second, in a blog entry from earlier this year, Neil Aitken (whose Boxcar Poetry Review has published work by Mary, Jeannine, and me) quotes an interview in which he discusses his preoccupation with themes of exile

merging with the growing realization that my father was dying and that our time together would be very short. I wanted desperately to finish the book for him while he was still alive, and yet even as I was writing and revising, I was gradually sensing the book would not be done in time, and further that there would be poems that could not be written until I had dealt with his impending death.

Third, I’ve been dipping into Laurel Snyder‘s The Myth of the Simple Machines during breaks, and oh, there’s a poem in there called “The Truth,” about her and her grandmother:

…She was
horrible, my grandmother,
and that’s the truth, though
my uncle pretended. “She

was a good old girl, just
the dog done lost her bite.”
But no. “But no she

never did,” we told him.
If only she had.

And this, this…

“I love you,” I said to her as she died.

“Yes, but you love lots of people,”
she growled back faintly.
“Not enough,” I should’ve told
her then, “nowhere near.”

signal boosts – bonus tarot / poetry contest

Boost #1 (offer expires tonight): No Tell Books is offering a free tarot reading or dream interpretation to you if you purchase a book from them before the end of this weekend (August 9; publisher is based in the Eastern U.S.).

(Sorry this alert is so eleventh-hour-ish, but I’ve been much occupied with other things, so I myself only spotted the offer this morning.)

My connection: one of my poems, “Coat,” appears in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Books – Second Floor. “Because It Makes Me Ha–” appears in the first Bedside Guide. The archives of the online journal include four other poems by me.

A recommendation: Wanton Textiles by Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar, a collection with a beautiful cover and tremendous fun both to read and react to — my copy is covered with my own scribblings (and water-wrinkled from keeping me company in my bathtub), which included the beginnings of two poems eventually published by flashquake.

No Tell’s catalog also includes a collection by Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica.”

Boost #2 (deadline Sept. 1): My friend Dichroic is sponsoring a poetry contest. No entry fee; maximum length = 49 lines; poems must be inspired by “must be inspired by the name of one (or more) of the Lunar maria.” First prize is a year’s membership in the Science Fiction Poetry Association (= US$21-$25, depending on where you live).

lily-livered wouldn’t look through the lens

Read Write Poem is doing a pretty neat prompt this week: you choose two words, and then go through the dictionary for words between those words (so in the example by Matthea Harvey — who has written more about this method here [pdf] — the words are “terror” and “future” and almost all of the words in the poem start with s, r, q, p, o, n, m, l, k, j, i, h, and g, in that order). Neat challenge.

I’ve had a few publications since my last post: My Poem Rocks published my poem “Self-Sufficiency“; the twitter zine Tweetthemeat published a “horror nanofiction and Nanoism published the first in a three-part serial.

Also, a few market notes:

  • I’m still looking for short fiction and poetry of 140 characters or less for Seven By Twenty. I encourage reprints, and that length is perfect for haiku, senryu, and most cinquains. I also want prose poetry, and honestly if a line or two from a longer poem stand alone and you want to submit them, I don’t care if they’re part of a longer work – and your bio can link to the longer work if it’s been published online. The point of this for me is to expose people to some cool work and authors, not to be the first to publish something.
  • The editor of Rat’s Ass Review mentioned to me yesterday that he’s still looking for poems for his second issue.