Category — Poetry

If what one means is that there is always difficult work to do in preparation for doing great work in some field and, sometimes, even more difficulty in the production of some particular great work in that field, I’m on board.

But in a fine essay at The London Review of Books , “Is Wagner bad for us?,” Nicholas Spice says this near the end:

I know that’s meant as a compliment to poetry, but I’m glad for that “much” immediately before “great music,’ and I’d be very glad for a similar qualifier applied to “poetry.”

I got the idea from this article in The Atlantic a few months ago. I probably won’t keep the title.

Crazy Cats

So here’s the deal – T. gondii needs a cat
To reproduce, but it can live in us
And many other mammals — say, a rat.
Now rats, of course, don’t much like dear Puss.
But we do. And we make a lot of trash
Which rats do like, so what’s a rat to do?
Being small, most are cautious. The rash
Are cat food, and have fewer children, too.

Now what’s a parasite to do? Make male
Rats brave, and sexy to the females, which
Will bear infected kitty chow, and cats
Who eat it share with us, and when we ail,
T. gondii plays with us — guys get the itch
To drive too fast, and gals heat up like cats.

In a 2002 letter to Lynx (unfortunately I can’t link to Lynx, only to specific instances of its pieces), Khizra Aslam describes the form she devised and provides a link to her own ghazanelle in Lynx. It’s the third poem as you scroll down the page.

We Are A Kind Of Map


A buzzer-beating three-point shot reveals
We’re born to know our truths about this world,
And so is everything: a fly conceals
Itself till it’s grown wings and they’ve unfurled;
A virus has the key for just that cell
Where it can multiply; that cell, dying,
Creates an army ready to repel
The sudden viral horde 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.
There’s something might be learned when we’re betrayed
Seeing the world with eyes the world has made.

Changes prompted by comments on a mail list – if I broke it, then I’m the one who broke it.

I found the form yesterday, browsing through Lew Turco‘s Book of Forms, and spent my Superbowl Sunday writing one. I’m not at all sure about the title.

No Joke

It used to be I’d wonder at her laughter —
I’d try to tease her secrets from that tone,

From how she’d turn away just moments after —
Or was that when I didn’t join her laughter?

Sometimes she laughed at something she alone
Could see, and something jagged in her tone

Would haunt my waking dreams for days thereafter,
Such a bitter mockery of laughter

That every laugh I heard, even my own,
Became infected by its mordant tone.

Now every night and every day hereafter
Forever will be crowded with her laughter,

My fascination with its broken tone,
The secrets buried in her teasing laughter.

The January 30th issue of The New Yorker prints a poem (not available online to non-subscribers) called “Booty,” by Matthew Sweeney, which I rather liked on first reading. But when I listened to the recording of the author’s reading of the poem included in The New Yorker‘s iPad app’s presentation, things began to fall apart.

It’s a short poem, 20 lines averaging a little more than 4 words/line, and 10 of the lines are end-punctuated with either a comma or a period; the other 10 have only internal punctuation. When Sweeney reads, he pauses at each of the 10 line breaks with final punctuation. Of those line breaks without final punctuation, there are 6 which he doesn’t mark vocally at all, and 4 which he does mark with pauses every bit as long as those accompanying punctuated line breaks.

As it happens, those 4 all precede a prepositional phrase at the beginning of the next line. But so does one of the 6 unpunctuated line breaks without a pause, and there is one prepositional phrase internal to a line which does not receive a pause, so that’s not what’s happening.

On the page of The New Yorker, only 2 lines extend as much as 6 characters past any adjacent line, and those long lines have lots of the letter ‘i’. The right edge of the poem is genteelly ragged, with only line 2 having a whole word (“T-shirt”) beyond the lengths of its neighbors. Late in the poem, Sweeney breaks a line after “the”

so I slunk on, to the
market, where I half-lived,

and avoids a visually very short line, either “so I slunk on,” or “where I half-lived,” but he doesn’t read his line-breaks anyway, and, by the way, what’s with that comma after “on”? He’s also not concerned with syllables per line, which range from 4 to 7; he’s not counting words, which range from 2 to 6 per line; he certainly isn’t counting stresses, which range from 1 to 3 per line in his reading — just what is he doing?

It seems to me Sweeney wants his poem to sound a particular way, and so it does when he reads it; he wants it to look a particular way, and so it does when printed in an appropriate font. But either he doesn’t care how readers who haven’t heard him read the poem will read it to themselves, or he believes that his own sensibility is sufficiently representative of some more-or-less universal poetic sensibility that worthy readers will get it right by … well, somehow.

I guess I’m NOT a worthy reader.

With nothing left to lose, I’d be lost,
And so might you. When all you’ve loved is gone,
Nothing remains which might defray that cost.
With nothing left to lose, I’d be lost
Just like a losing lotto ticket tossed
Away when I have nothing left to pawn.
With nothing left to lose, I’d be lost –
And so might you, when all you’ve loved is gone.

———

I’m just recovering from a week of alternating nausea and dizziness. My brain is just starting to work again, or at least I hope so. Not at all sure the above is positive evidence.

The book’s been indispensable for me since the 1968 1st edition (which Lew was kind enough to sign for me a few years ago) and I am very proud to say the new edition is out and includes a form I devised for Twitter and originally called a twinnet. I now call it a twiplet, and that’s the name Lew used.

In related news, I posted about the publication in the UseNet group alt.arts.poetry.comments, where George Dance noticed it and was kind enough to add the form to his Penny’s Poetry Pages Wiki. He also wrote a twiplet and posted it on the page including my definition and examples. I’ve added a link under “Poetry, Mostly Blogs” to George’s site.

The worst is each successive day’s the worst–
If there’s a next time, I’ll try dying first.
And if I first said that nine lives ago,
And each successive life built greater woe?
I know the Second Law is no one’s friend–
But still, it claims that there will come an end.

A small revision:

Cold Comfort

The worst is each successive day’s the worst–
If there’s a next time, I’ll try dying first.
And if I first said that nine lives ago,
And each successive life knew greater woe?
I know the Second Law is no one’s friend–
But still, it claims that there will come an end.

A bad song is still a song, and it’s also music, even if it’s not music to your ears or mine. A painting is a painting, no matter how poor a painting it is, and I think it more than likely there’s more than one stinker hung in the nearest art museum or gallery, wherever you are. The decorative arts are still called “arts,” even when they involve garden gnomes.

But poetry is somehow believed to be peculiarly different from the other arts. Here’s David Lehman, whose poetry and criticism I respect a great deal, in the first sentences of the Foreword to Best American Poetry 2011, presented by Poetry Daily:

What makes a poem great? What standards do we use for judging poetic excellence? To an extent, these are variants on an even more basic question. What is poetry? Poetry is, after all, not a neutral or merely descriptive term but one that implies value. What qualities in a piece of verse (or prose) raise it to the level of poetry?

He’s quite right about “poetry” implying value. Try googling “poetry in motion.” Try getting through a broadcast basketball tournament or a thoroughbred racing event without some TV/radio personality using that phrase. Try to remember how it was once applied to boxing.

It seems to me a category error based on historical accident: it just so happens that “poetry” is the name of a particular form (or group of forms) of verbal art, and is also, since poetry was once considered the highest art, a term of praise. But a bad poem is still a poem, and “poetry,” if it is to mean anything more than “stuff I like,” has got to mean, at a bare minimum, the deliberate arrangement of language, in a manner at least minimally informed by the poetic tradition, with the intention to in some way delight its maker’s audience.  ”Poetry” has to include Shakespeare and Millay and Silliman and the middle-school kid writing about his or her latest crush.