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
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