Author: mary

Exquisite Tension

(on metrical variation in Julia Randall‘s “For A Going-Out”)

Julia Randall was the author of seven books of poetry and life-long advocate for the environment.  She received the Poetry Center Book Award for her final book The Path to Fairview New and Selected  Poems; the American Poetry Society awarded her the Percy Bysshe Shelley Award in recognition of her oeuvre.  She died at her home in Vermont in May, 2005.

I first discovered Randall’s work at the poetry conference at West Chester University.  I fell in love with the breadth of her thought, shown in her allusions, and her musicality, shown in her earlier poems through meter and rhyme.   Her poem, “For a Going-Out,” was published as part of her collection The Puritan Carpenter in 1965 and still resounds with a carefully-constructed tension between the lines with regular alternation of stressed/unstressed syllables and the lines with pairs of unstressed syllables.  

The majority of lines in the poem are trimeter, with the regularly metric lines being iambic trimeter.  This three-beat line reassures the reader. The comfortability of sound adds confidence to the speaker’s voice while at the same time manifesting the inevitability of the poem’s subject, death.  This almost-contradiction works because of the speaker’s two separate voices of certainty, as shown below.  

The poem begins:  

Because you will soon be gone,

And our busy hearts will lie

About the year’s return,

And our busy fingers weave

A seemly dress for love,

Let us count peacefully

All we are masters of.  

Although there are very few regular lines in this passage (only lines 3 and 5), all the lines exude a certainty.  In the irregular lines, that certainty speaks about inevitability and the otherworldly aspects of life.   The lines with pairs of unstressed syllables are first heard as a difference, to be compared aurally with the regular meter.  The pairs of unstressed syllables add a lilt, an unexpectedness (since they do not always appear to substitute for the same foot), a knowledge of something beyond the physical world. The repeated use of these pairs in multiple lines builds the pattern into a voice.  

Only the measured, proper, realistic images are paired with iambic trimeter:  the year’s end, the workmanlike aspects of a partnership. This association shows the reader that realism is represented by regular meter, but also leaves open the exact correspondence of the irregular lines.  

Randall continues this alternative use of her two certainties—one of the realistic world, one of a world the speaker must guess at—throughout the poem.  In the middle of the poem, she writes,  

I live in this belief:

Archaic prayers prevail—

Faith in a cut stone,

Dancing for rainfall,

Goings-out, comings-in.

My loves, I cannot spell

Your passwords up or down,

Your songs in hell,

Your honor, or changed face.  

which I feel is the clearest use of these alternate voices.  The first line is a statement about the real world.  From there, the speaker steps into a personal consciousness, “Archaic prayers prevail / Faith in a cut stone”.  The line “Goings-out, comings-in” is irregular, breaches the  three-beat pattern by giving the reader four stresses.   This explosion of  stress is used twice more, later in the poem, as both the end of the poem and the end of the “you” come closer.  

But the reader is pulled back into the everyday:  “My loves, I cannot spell / Your passwords up or down”.  While Randall probably did not intend the modern connotations of “passwords” (although she did write on contemporary subjects, see “Video Games” from Moving in Memory) since this poem appears in an early  book, today it grounds the reader in technology, the external world.  

In the closing lines following this excerpt, the speaker strays into the voice of the irregular lines as they discuss old happiness, memory,  knowledge by acquaintance.  However, the end of the poem returns to iambic trimeter and regularity as the passage of time takes its toll.  

The two voices of certainty move the poem from solely a commentary about death and the courage of the speaker, and modifies the duality of realism and  otherworld to futher represent shared existence and the internal.  

Of course, the meter and these two voices are effects of the words Randall chose, which speak the poem.  The meter has its subconscious effect, non-negligible, but do not neglect what Randall’s poetry has to say:  

That made the seasons burn

In love’s consuming name.         

(Listen to the poem)

No Bloom

I’m working on a poem about Grace Hopper. By working I mean: reading and thinking. (There’s a wonderful biography on her by Kathleen Broome Williams.) No pen to page yet, no ideas about form.

A few nights ago I found out that Eavan Boland has written a poem about Hopper, published in her Against Love Poetry. I immediately requested it from the library and although my branch didn’t have it, a nearby one did. So tonight, the extraordinarily kind librarian went through the large stacks of unprocessed, requested books to find it for me so that I didn’t have to wait nearly a week to read it.

There are some beautiful lines. There are some places where the rhythm dies, in my opinion, and prose takes over, and I enjoy it less. But it ends on a beautiful line.

I read the poem, enthralled. I read it a second time, my mind asking, which of these lines might make a good repeton?

And I wondered again, how can a good poem make Harold Bloom feel anxious? The wonderful poems that have already been written do not stop me from writing, do not inhibit me.

Does anyone else wonder that? Are there things you don’t read because you’re worried how they will go into your Word Bucket?

One could argue, given the quotation I’m about to include, that maybe even Boland wondered this but read further, into the second quotation. Bloom does not fit here.

Let there be language—
      even if we use it differently:
            I never made it timeless as you have.
                  I never made it numerate as you did.






I am writing at a screen as blue
      as any hill, as any lake, composing this
            to show you how the world begins again:
                  One word at a time.
                        One woman to another.

Weddings

I am working on a response to Jeannine’s comments about being able to hear a poem but my shock and sadness about California’s vote on Proposition 8 keeps getting in the way. I give you Alice Oswald‘s poem “The Wedding” which cares not at all what the biology of your lover may be.

Wedding

From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions…
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.

Refrain

How do you know it’s a poem?

Joanne saved me by pointing to Reginald Shepherd’s discussion of difficulty in poetry. I’m relieved to know I’m one of a crowd that asks “Why is this a poem?” I have the modal problem.

I’ve spent a lot of energy reading poems and berating myself for disliking them when instead (I think) I was simply frustrated by being told it was a poem although it exhibits no traits I would considered poetic.
(I’ve even done this on the IntarWebs and disconcerted and hurt people who write things I don’t consider poems because I could not articulate my own difficulty. I’m a little ashamed.)

How do you know it’s a poem?

They do exhibit at least one trait: these things which may or may not be poems are usually lineated. (I am leaving out prose poems here because I do not know what to do with them. Correction: I know what to do with them: I call them “vignettes” and consider them prose. This does not make them less powerful or moving.)

But how much poetic device does a lineated group of words require before it becomes a poem? If we throw in metaphor and simile and call ourselves done we have cheated the prose fiction writers, and the prose non-fiction writers, who use both of those to tell us stories made up and of ourselves.

Do we require rhyme or onomatopoeia?

How do you know it’s a poem?

The Portuguese and Spanish had monorhyming stanzas. That made it pretty obvious when someone was speaking a poem.

How do you know it’s a poem?

In English I am at a loss to know, if I’m not looking at it, unless the poem is end-rhymed. There’s nothing else for my ear. No measure, no indication. Meter will out, yes, but it doesn’t give you the anticipation or the closure.

Actually, it isn’t the rhyme per se, it’s the repetition of sound. Because a ghazal would sound like a poem in English, with that repeated word/phrase ending the second line in each couplet. It would probably sound like one long line to the ear. (Plus there would be the excitement of when you could chime in and chant along.)

How do you know it’s a poem?

Sometimes, when I have worked to set aside my definition of “poem” I have been able to enjoy a piece for what it is, rather than what I am hoping for.

And yet I sit down to read poems for a reason, with a visceral need to feel the way a poem makes me feel, with anticipation, with yearning. At that feverous pitch, it is difficult to respond well to pieces that don’t sing.

How do I know it’s a poem?

I know it by its repetition, be that assonance, alliteration, consonance, meter, refrain. By something unnamed that surprises me with its music.

I have so much difficulty finding poems like this. Sing me names, please? And tell me, because I genuinely want to know:

how do you know it’s a poem?

Introduction – Mary Alexandra Agner

I’m overdue on my fortnightly post. I’m recovering from another bout with my parents telling me my poems don’t make sense to them. I’m learning how to deal with the fact that I keep quitting.

My worries are subjective. They eat into the facts as though they were chocolate chips cookies, Friday afternoon, latch-key kid home and warm. Between the holes: I poet, I dance, I cajole prose from busy and reluctant scientists and engineers for money. (I tend to iambs, once I’ve started.)

I’m here to find out why I love so little poetry. I couldn’t live without writing it but lack appreciation for others’ work.

I recommend most of Nancy Willard‘s work, and Emily Dickinson’s, and Constance Merritt‘s, and Elizabeth Hadaway‘s.

I leave you with lines by Abbie Huston Evans:

—Here, take them, Emily, they hurt

In telling; can you bear

To hear of elderberries, skirt

The coasts of sun and air?

Know all that hurt you once hurts still.

Need any tell you how

Night brings the moon, dawn finds the hill?

Want you such hurting now?

We, the Light

You will witness a love of country, not

Driven by greed but true and enduring,

For it is no unworthy reward to be famed

Writing in praise of my native land.

Observe: you will see names exalted

Of those of whom you are supreme lord,

And you can judge which is the better case,

King of the world or king of such a race.

Any guesses what poet? Or what king he is addressing? Or even what country is home to this incredible race of people?

I was ignorant of it myself before I began reading a history of Portugal. Perhaps it is unfair of me to assume you too are unfamiliar with this poem, but I am writing to praise Luiz Vaz de Camoes and his epic poem of Portugal titled “Os Lusiadas” or, in English, “The Lusiads,” referring to the people of Lusitania. (Also, I come to praise the translator, Landeg White, for his enthusiasm, extensive endnotes, and excellent rhyming couplets.)

de Camoes had an interesting life; he lived in the 16th century and published “Os Lusiadas” in 1572. (White points out that the poem was approved by the Holy Office as containing “nothing scandalous nor contrary to faith and morals.) de Camoes sailed for India as a young man, was shipwrecked in Cambodia (Cambodia!) losing all but the first three cantos of the poem, and was forced to borrow money to purchase passage back home.

I was hoping for a tour-de-force of West meets East, of lush descriptions of what India, Africa, and Cambodia looked like to a 16th-century Portuguese man. Not quite. de Camoes was writing at the end of the golden age of Portuguese naval superiority; he was interested in looking back on the great deeds of his people, such as Vasco da Gama “discovering” India in 1497, not in painting the places da Gama went.

Either way, I was surprised by the opening phrase—“Arms are my theme”—because White’s endnote says this is a reference to the “Aenead”. de Camoes’ poem is rife with Greek/Roman gods; in fact, one of the major plot points of the story is a war between Venus and Bacchus over the success of the da Gama’s fleet reaching India.

Furthermore—back to that offhand comment about the holy censor offering no censure—it is explained in great detail that Venus and Bacchus and Jupiter and Tethys and the nymphs and naiads are just expressions of the greater, Christian god. Again, my ignorance; I had no idea that these two, separate beliefs had been reconciled in this way.

At the time of its writing, I’m sure that the Greek/Roman gods lent a grandeur to the poem, made it clearly epic, but today those were the points I found most disappointing. de Camoes sings when he is describing the hardships and actions and pride of his countrymen, even, for example, the strange life and fate of Inez de Castro.

Like other great Iberian epic poems, “Os Lusiadas” was written in a monorhyming stanza, meaning that all lines in the 8-line stanza rhymed with each other. White, as translator, has kept only a final rhyming couplet in the octets. I realize English is a horrid language in which to attempt extensive monorhyme but I had hoped. However, the couplets were both impressive and effectual. First, White had some excellent rhymes (Aeneas and genius); second, they were sufficient to make each stanza feel like its own bit, not too much to take in at once, in the long poem, and also offered propulsion, since no tidy end was ever the end.

Yet what man could for long avoid

The gentle web which love spins,

Between human roses and driven snow,

Gold hair and translucent alabaster?

Or who be unmoved by the pilgrim beauty

Of a face such as might be Medusa’s,

Transfiguring every heart she inspires

Not to stone but to volcanic desires?