Archive for January, 2008

POETRY BLOG: “Tennis With a Net” VI

Don January 28th, 2008

VI             Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

          Form is not just something to be blindly followed.  It is that which mates with Idea to give birth to Art, after their DNA has combined to create something different and more interesting, if not greater, than either alone.  It is also something to be played with, to be tweaked into new shapes according to the demands of the subject.  That is why free verse is so limited.  With no form set, there is nothing to vary, no norm from which to depart in what is hopefully a meaningful way.  So, ironically, the poet who writes what is called “free” verse has the least freedom of all.

            Some of my early tweakings seem more cute and less brilliant to me now than they did when I was a freshman in 1969-70.  But one has to start somewhere. I wasn’t very far down the road yet, but at least I was on it.

 MEDITATION                                    Walk slowly down the road, my friend,

For this moment won’t come again,

And listen, softly, to the wind,

And think of places you have been;

For all too soon will come the end.

Walk slowly . . .

                                                                         down . . .

                                                                                                the hill . . .

                                                                                                                        my . . .

                                                                                                                                     friend.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

V

Don January 11th, 2008

      

V

             Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

I loved Taylor University, but I hated the Midwest for its long, never ending winters that cheated spring and fall.  The winters themselves had their own appeal—they weren’t the problem in themselves–but I could not forgive them for their ravenous greed, their selfish devouring of neighboring months to which they had no right, with the near disappearance of the two milder seasons that resulted.  Nevertheless, one gift of that cheating was how poignant the brief beauty of fall became as a result.  And that poignancy could be carried like a wave on the endlessly blowing leaves which roamed the flat landscape on a wind that found nothing to impede its progress, and which could therefore pick those leaves up endlessly, always adding more of them to the inexorable weight of its plunge toward inevitable cold and death.  You can see their headlong gallop in the opening scene of that great basketball movie, “Hoosiers.”

 LEAVES 

If there were clouds in today’s sky

They would show the speed of the wind

By racing each other eastward,

Ne’er to be seen again.

But the heavens are empty today,

So we’ll have to settle for leaves

In a reckless, cross-country scramble,

Trying to outrun the breeze. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD

IV

Don January 7th, 2008

IV             Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

Most modern poets do not seem to realize that becoming a poet involves learning a craft, and that involves, among other things, the mastery of form.  Words put on a sheet of paper in random groupings do not constitute poetry just because the arbitrarily formed lines that result start in the middle of a page rather than on the left margin.  Form by itself, even when competently executed, doesn’t constitute poetry either; it might be mere verse, not poetry, unless it is accompanied by intelligent observation, description with concrete imagery, and a relation to some controlling idea.

            By this time I had encountered Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Meter, but did not understand it yet, and so produced the general effect without the alliteration in what might be called alliterative blank verse.  I was all full by then of Tolkien and of what Lewis called “Northernness” in Surprised by Joy.  So naturally I had to try to capture something of that feeling.

 SUNRISE 

                                    Army of clouds, like Valkyries mounted ,

                                    Golden hair streaming in the rough wind,

                                    Uttering war-cry unheard by mortals

                                    For years unnumbered, hearts filled with boldness,

                                    Rides forth to doom and fierce battle raging.

                                    Lusting for glory, flying to sunward,

                                    Splashing the sky with their blood as they die,

                                    Sunrise creating, own end meeting,

                                    But rising again from oceans of memory

                                    Once more to utter their battle-cry piercing,

                                    Riding to doom through pathless sky.  

            If you do want to understand Alliterative Meter, read C. S. Lewis’s essay “The Alliterative Meter” in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1969): 15-26.

            And now students can’t even scan simple iambic pentameter.  What do they teach them in those schools?             

Donald T. Williams, PhD

III

Don January 5th, 2008

III Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”   

Serious records of my poetic output began to be kept when I got to college.  It is now my freshman year at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, 1969-70.  One thing this Southern boy learned that year was how huge an effect weather in the Midwest can have on one’s mood.  Rain, cold, and snow are not just passing events there.  When they come, they take over.

 IMPRESSION I 

                                                            It is Thursday again.

                                                            The world’s head is bowed

                                                            By the weight of a cloud,

                                                            And gently, gently falls the rain.

            Why use the ABBA rhyme scheme of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” for this little impression of a passing moment?  Because its chiastic shape teases you with form but does not have the closure of an ending couplet or even the expected repetition of, say, ballad stanza.  And it is the nature of weather in the Midwest to seem eternal whenever it is happening.  Did the young and inexperienced poet think of this consciously as he built his poem?  No.  It was either good luck or instinct.  Well, it doesn’t hurt to have either.   

Donald T. Williams, PhD

II

Don January 4th, 2008

II Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”   

The oldest surviving fragments of my poetic life are a couple of haiku written on a visit to Georgia’s Stone Mountain on April 24, 1967.  I was a sophomore in high school, and Stone Mountain is a massive chunk of exposed granite that towers above the Piedmont East of Atlanta.  Three faces are almost sheer, and one slopes gently enough to be climbable without special equipment.  On one sheer wall is a Civil War memorial, a bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.  The haiku are as follows:

Up and down the rock

The holes were full of water

That had put them there.

The birds flew past us—

Two-winged; three strong; fast as wind;

By Lee’s nose they flew.

At the beginning of this poet’s career we have observation; concrete description; an attempt to connect concrete observation to a larger abstract idea (i.e., the continuity of Nature and the forces of erosion and history that had formed the mountain in the first verse); and the incarnation of all that into a poetic form, however simple (the haiku).  Remove observation and you have nothing.  Remove concreteness and you have an observation that is not preserved.  Remove thought and you have an observation with no meaning.  Remove form and you might have an interesting journal entry, but you would not have a poem.  Are these four elements essential to poetry?  They would be for this poet, and they are all present in rudimentary form at the very beginning. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD

POETRY BLOG: “Tennis With a Net”

Don January 3rd, 2008

I

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in interminable blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I am told that there are still people who read it of their own free will.  Lacking the skill and the endurance to sustain such an ambitious project, I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, combining short bursts of prose with verse of various kinds.  Lacking also both the arrogance and the faith in subjectivity for its own sake which would be necessary to think that the growth of this poetic mind should be of even the passing interest which a blog can generate, I shall also attempt a more modest topic:  ”Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”  I shall illustrate those lessons with some of the poems I wrote in the process of learning them.  I hope my readers will be charitable enough to think that sometimes the lessons are shown by my successes.  I know that one can often learn even more from one’s failures.  No doubt the reader will have plenty of chances to observe that truth in action.  The most egregious examples of it will be passed over in silence, in courteous consideration for the reader’s patience and the author’s ego.

Donald T. Williams, PhD