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Twelve Words after Rain

By on September 17, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

In lieu of a composed poem, one of my mentors invited me to write down a dozen words off the top of my head.

I scribbled

  • fawn
  • highway
  • gardenia
  • earthworm
  • relent
  • independence
  • soil
  • refrain
  • reply
  • repay
  • reverse
  • reform

I buried the list for a few days with the intention of using it as raw material for a second exercise where I’d string the words together, but upon exhuming it I recoiled from my predilection for becoming more abstract rather than more particular as I went along, as though my brain were on crutches. I had begun my list with a narrative of some sort (fawn killed on highway, becomes food for gardenias), then found myself on a dead-end siding, maybe because I was groping for an re- word that never came. (“Restaurant” might have offered interesting possibilities, as in “The fawn is the earthworm’s restaurant.”)

Using the full list was out of the question, but, like a toddler talking to his shoes, the words called “Work with me here!” I tried. “Refrain” appealed since the noun and verb summon each other; I keep thinking that reform, reply, reverse are not impossible and will have to meditate on that. Meanwhile, deer don’t like gardenias, but if my garden is any measure, they are fond of tulips. Since lists always want to appear in threes, this iconoclast shelved five items in a row at the end: oh the luxury of it, the burgeoning of nature, the going over the top! Yet dark implications, not so far removed from my original leaning toward that poor fawn on the highway, prevail:

After Rain

The earthworm’s song to the soil,
The tulip’s to the worm,
The fawn’s to the tulip
Break the morning news.

Daybreak urges the worm to hurry,
The fawn to refrain from what forage she found,
The complacent tulip to a shyer grace.

The soil’s refrain informs their singing
Because she merely coddles the rain,
The tulip, the fawn, the worm, the morning

And waits.

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Vox populi

By on September 10, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

As someone who has taken decades to find his voice, I think a lot about the word. Though its etymological origin lies in human utterance, we musicians speak of the voicing of an instrument, which means its tone color as well as the way a given chord is “spelled” (e.g., in its first, second, and third inversions).

Writers too talk about voice. Track it to its cave and you find the Greek word epos, song. (My bringing up music is not accidental.) When I refer to a character’s voice in a story or poem or play, I mean that his way of speaking constitutes a particular, unique song. This song, in any medium, monologue, or dialogue, should be

  • excited;
  • essential; and
  • authentic

It’s been said that music is excited speech. I think of excited speech as having a kind of Brownian motion. From a little distance we might not recognize the jittering, but look close and there’s something larger than usual, something important going on for the character. Second, a character’s utterance must be authentic, using the magical combination of diction and rhythm and imagery that only he would use in this situation. And by essential I mean that this character must say this thing and he must say it in the now of the narrative.

Shakespeare understood this imperative and practiced it without ever writing (damn it) a vade mecum for his interns–and he often got it right. I don’t, but I have fun trying.

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Warren Zevon as poet

By on September 2, 2024 in Music, Poetry, Writing

I recently sounded out a wise man of letters (and my friend) Jake Burnett about poetry as musical lyric, preoccupied as I have been in forecasting the headaches my poems would occasion a composer.

Happily he did not send me to Sidney Lanier. At Jake’s suggestion I dived into Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” the title track of his 2002 album. I figured that before analyzing the prosody I’d better listen to recordings, my favorite of which is Bruce Springteen‘s. He uses accordion and fiddle in an acoustic-ish version that gestures toward country more than Zevon’s own synthesizer-and-electric guitar orchestration does. Zevon’s rendering felt oddly like the sort of hymn you might hear in a megachurch (Zevon would hate that), what with the fourteeners he favors (pace Emily Dickinson). Given his references to the American west, where the poem is set, Springsteen’s choice makes good sense to me.

Not that it’s a my-wife-left-me-with-six children-and-my-truck-won’t-start whinge. Think mythic mashup with a half-dozen Biblical references (e.g., Jacob and the angel), a half-dozen popular culture references (e.g., John Wayne), and a half-dozen literary references (mostly name-dropping, though Shakespeare appears only in a silent nod. ‘Tis better so.). Zevon manages to turn this olla podrida into a meditation on death. We come to realize that the refrain—”My ride’s here”—refers to the speaker’s death and possible apotheosis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s waiting for a chariot, after all.

So as you see I started trying to break down Zevon’s lyrics into their constituent parts. I’m not there yet, but it’s an interesting and I hope fruitful exercise for someone aspiring to write lyrics for an art-song.

Frederick Seidel, Compassion Artist

By on August 28, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

Seidel is known for being a bit rough, for breaking poetic taboos. Yet today I’ve been looking at his 1963 poem “To My Friend Anne Hutchinson,” which is is skillful, gentle, and touching.

It’s addressed to a woman dying of cancer who’s the namesake of the famous 17th century religious reformer—the one who got herself kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Seidel makes hay out of the comparisons, quotations, and sly or obvious references to Anne the first, as you’d expect, though treatment of his friend remains respectful. Despite seeming not to share her religious devotion, he harnesses some gorgeous imagery to capture it.

Here’s one of my favorite tidbits, the end of the 9th stanza with the whole of the 10th. As he sits at his friend’s deathbed:

Between the unreal and the next world, stretched taut,
Anne, you are trying to talk, wide-eyed and hollow-eyed,

Bright starving eyes! Like sections
Of a tapeworm, the anacoluthons
Break off—fed
On your daily bread
Dread.

That creepy image of the tapeworm coming off in sections perfectly captures the horror of the patient’s inability to complete a sentence. She may be talking in monosyllables such as “Dread”—the work’s only such line.

“To My Friend Anne Hutchinson” is structured consistently with five lines per stanza, though if you try to scan them you go crazy: hexameters, trimeters, tetrameters, and that other thing I mentioned—yet within each stanza he’s highly attentive to rhythm. Each boat is on its own bottom except where the enjambment crosses over into a new stanza, when the rhythmic and aural relationship is tighter, as between stanzas 9 and 10.

He uses some internal rhyme and, unpredictably, a bit of end-rhyme, though often his focus on sound takes subtle forms. Consider again the lines quoted above: we have next/stretched, taut/talk, wide-eyed/eyed/eyes, tape/break, fed/bread/dread—and a bunch of consonance and assonance in which the sibilants s and st figure prominently, perhaps evoking the quiet hiss of hospital equipment. When I read it aloud, those esses elongate the words slightly, slowing me down in contrast to the cold-water shock of “bright / break,” which underscore the sense.

I mentioned his respect for her devotion. Here is the ending, the moment of death:

The mind stops . . . mind and body
Longing for order and mystery,
To be as a cloud, pure as a Taj Mahal
Of grief for a cherished soul,
Floating over beautiful wine-colored October. 

What a lovely tribute.

In Closing

By on August 17, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

I think a lot about the sense of closure in literature, probably because of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), in which he argues that a key element of the author-reader contract is finding consonance between a beginning, a middle, and an end; and that particular, identifiable techniques govern this process, especially for conclusions. His theory applies equally well to poetry, and some years ago I wrote a paper on George Herbert’s techniques along these lines. But never mind that.

I admire Louis MacNeice’s facility at endings. Here is the end of canto XXI in MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939):

     I feel that such a defeat is also treason,
            That deaths like these are lies.
     A fire should be left burning
            Till it burns itself out:
     We shan't have another chance to dance and shout
            Once the flames are silent.

He hasn’t been in a strict meter up to now, but here the rhythm is especially unsettling. He ends with

  • hexameter
  • trimeter
  • tetrameter
  • pentameter
  • tetrameter
  • trimeter

in contrast with the more regular pattern he established earlier. This shift creates a sense of imbalance or unease, letting us know that we’re lurching toward some kind of distressing denouement. Also, notice the end-rhymes in the penultimate and antepenultimate lines in tandem with the final trimeter, abrupt and unrhymed. Far from reassuring us that all’s right with the world, that we’ve come full circle, that last line dangles there in space, reinforcing the sense that the speaker is bereft and lonely, preoccupied with death and extinction. And what better way to signal an ending than with the word “silent”?

Remember too that the autumn of the title refers to the year 1939 in England, with Hitler in full swing and the future looking very uncertain for Great Britain.

I was inspired by MacNeice’s mastery to aim for an unsettled ending of my own in my Jacob-and-the-angel poem, How I Came to Cross the Jabbok:

I had erred but I must have the nerve, the guts
to go on. I limped toward the implacable river,
toward damaged Esau whom I loved and despised.
A penitent with peaceful intent,
in fear and hope I took my first
short step into that cold, cold water.

My rhythm’s more predictable than I’d like, and my rhymes deliberately internal, or slant, or reduced to mere consonance and assonance. But I want to break the reader contract, leaving that last line dangling to reinforce the sense. Of course the repetition of “cold,” which I’ve not done elsewhere in the poem, is a signal of completion. Still, there’s no “turn” as in the concluding couplet of many a Shakespearian sonnet; rather we get to see Jacob’s final decision after all his hemming and hawing, his braggadocio and fear. Jacob accepts responsibility at last.

By the way, I can see three very valid readings of my poem aside from the shamelessly literal:

  • The Psychological, in which there is no angel except in Jacob’s mind. He’s wrestling with his conscience, which has kept him from crossing the river — because his people may die or because he’s ashamed and doesn’t want to own up, or because he’s simply scared.
  • The American Political, in which the story is an analogy for slavery reparations in the United States.
  • The Middle Eastern Political, in which the story evokes the current war between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza.

Jacob will be revealed in all his glory this Sunday as part of a poetry service at the Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Durham, NC.  Maybe I’ll see you there.