Archive for April, 2008

IX

Don April 23rd, 2008

IX             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.” 

            Our next piece has the four corners of the foundation of the poetic house: observation, concrete description, relation to an idea, incarnation in form.  The execution of the building on that foundation is still rather clumsy.  There is too much padding in the first quatrain, there are too many parentheses, the transition to the couplet in line twelve is quite embarrassing, and the “moral,” though it could have grown out of the observation as described, feels tacked on.  But this poem actually is a sonnet (a Shakespearean one), as it claims to be, even if not yet a very good one.  I shall therefore be charitable to my early self and call it progress.

 SONNET no. II 

The snow was black against the clouded sky

But purest white when lying on the ground.

And so it was I sat and questioned, “Why?”

And wondered if the answer could be found.

It could: for light comes only from above

(Or so it seems if one to earth is bound),

So if my eyes forever upward strove,

No light upon the bottoms could be found!  

(I mean, of course, the bottoms of the flakes).

Illumination could, though, find the brow

Of snowy earth, who upward turned her face.

(It’s time for the moral of our story now):

                                                If you look up to Christ to find your light,

                                                Then you will appear, not black, but white.   

Donald T. Williams, PhD

VIII

Don April 18th, 2008

VIII             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 have another horrible confession to make.  Along with better influences like Robert Frost and Gerard Manley Hopkins, I was enamored from my senior year of high school through my first couple of years of college with e. e. cummings.  I have an excuse.  I had read some of his fresh little gems like “I thank my god for most this amazing day,” “buffalo bill’s defunct,” and “in spring when the world is mud-luscious,” and discovered that they are in fact fresh little gems.  Unfortunately, I was also juvenile enough to think that his eschewal of capitalization and punctuation was dreadfully cool and with it, and so in some of my juvenilia I tried to imitate his style.  Even then, I couldn’t often get myself to write real free verse.  I had to play with rhyme and meter, even if they were not classifiable into any form with a name.

 friday 

have you ever seen pink Snow?

neither had I . . .

but sunrise glow

of warm pink Snow

and ice blue Sky

and the Wind in your eye

are quite a way

to start the Day . . .

i Know.      

            I was cured of my addiction when someone bought me the complete works of cummings as a Christmas present, and I discovered that the rare fresh gems I had read in the anthologies were in fact rare gems hidden in acres and acres of banality. I realized that the very lack of form was part of what encouraged people just to keep blathering: there was nothing to stop them!  I understood why I was already outgrowing my infatuation with free verse, why it no longer satisfied me.  And I realized that my fascination with form was not just a tendency or an inclination but a calling.

            I still try to write one poem in free verse per decade, just to prove I still can.  One is enough.

Donald T. Williams, PhD