Archive for April, 2010

CXI

Don April 23rd, 2010

CXI

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.”

This poem marks a couple of momentous moments.  One was the loss of our dog, who had gotten out of her yard and disappeared only to be found later dead on the road.  The other is the composition of my first villanelle.  The villanelle is one of the most challenging verse forms in the language: six triplets in iambic pentameter rhyming ABA, etc., until the last stanza adds an extra A line to end in a couplet.  The catch is that lines one and three have to be substantially repeated as the final lines of the following triplets, alternating until they come together in the last stanza as the final couplet.  In one way it’s easy.  When you finished three lines, you already have a third of the rest written!  But the trick is to make the repeated lines sound like they would completely naturally have been there anyway.  Now that is hard!

The advantage is that if you do it well, there is an intensity bound by rigid limits that lends itself to containing otherwise uncontrollable emotion.  The best example of this use is Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle on the death of his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”  This one is not lacking in a certain similarity to that one.

Farewell to Snoopie: A Villanelle

(No. 1)

The once lithe body lay too large, too long:

The proportions were off, the head’s angle strange;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

Something about the way the limp legs hung

Boded less wandering, a shrunken range.

The once lithe body lay too large, too long.

Never before had I seen her without a song

Of bugle-haunted greeting in glad refrains;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

The silk ears once in gay abandon flung

Were still, and their position did not change:

The once lithe body lay too large, too long.

A fly crawled slowly undisturbed along

The nose; fur rose in wind foreboding rains.

Something about it certainly was wrong.

And standing there, I felt no longer young

And thought age no great bargain in exchange.

The once lithe body lay too large, too long;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

CX

Don April 7th, 2010

CX

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 was really on a blank-verse jag that year for some reason.  More rhyme is coming soon; I promise.  I don’t even remember where this landscape was, but it reminds me of some parts of Wyoming, or of the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge (though I had never seen it at that time, nor was I in Wyoming that year).  It also brings to mind Tolkien’s barrow downs.  Clearly it was somewhere not in the Appalachians seen by someone whose way of relating to landscapes is defined by places that are.   The specific location is forgotten, but not the feel of it.  That is where poetry is valuable.

Apocalypse

It was a bare place, despite the vegetation.

There was grass on the rounded hills, the long slopes,

A few trees standing, just enough

To make you notice that there were not more.

They were dark evergreens, stooped with age.

They did not stand in bunches, but alone,

Spread out like silent sentinels to watch

The years and keep a record of their doings.

There was wind in the grass and the twisted limbs.  There was

Too little between a man and the horizon.

You ought to have to climb awhile before

The sky can open up and leave you standing

Emptied out of everything but wonder.

You ought to have to go past dripping ferns,

Cool with water seeping from the rocks.

The graceful arms of trees should pull back slowly

To open in an unexpected meadow,

Then fold together again to receive you back.

It ought to be a thing you have to seek,

Perhaps unconsciously, and then return from,

Weakened and yet stronger for the journey.

It is not always so, for there was grass

On rounded hills, and wind was in the grass,

And the sky was all around you, all around you,

And lonely trees told tales that had no words.

Donald T. Williams, PhD