my friend’s blog
Jim August 20th, 2008
If you would like to view Kristy Stiles’ blog, go to:
http://klstil.blogspot.com/
A more general blog
Jim August 20th, 2008
I just finished reading a friend’s blog about slavery going on in the world. Apparently it is now bigger than in the heady days of the 1800s. It was sad, but my thought is, that human nature is not about to change very quickly. Of course, if it were, all the old poetry might really be as irrelevant as the poetry world seems to think. Indeed, poetry is probably in some sense, the closest thing we have to a pulse of the human conscience in a given age. I am thinking specifically of the outraged poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning regarding children in factories. I myself do not understand why the entrepreneurial urge so often comes down to victimizing others in order to achieve riches. One doesn’t have to go far to find it: a sweatshop in Los Angeles will fill the bill. Perhaps, like Browning, a new round of formal poetry is in order, a poetry that is not agnostic and self-indulgent, nauseatingly confessional and irrelevant, even to the poet. It is time for a counterrevolution.
Journal has a day!
Jim August 8th, 2008
Don and I are both going to be speakers at the Southern California CS Lewis Society’s summer conference on August 9 and 10 at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa. On Sunday afternoon we’re going to be having an afternoon of poetry, sponsored by this online journal. Come on down and join us.
Jim January 23rd, 2008
I hope to read a paper on Leslie Norris at the 2008 RMMLA conference in Reno, Nevada next October. Now I’m having the delicious task of trying to decide what facet of Norris’ work I want to discuss in the hearing of all those English profs. I’m leaning towards using material from my disseratation on the spiritually mature character in Norris’ poetry, the independent, wise and cagey countryman who sees clearly what others miss. Looking does not often result in seeing in Norris. I think he’s right about this.
Why Formal Poetry?
Jim January 22nd, 2008
The obvious question is, why formal poetry? Didn’t that go out? Why do we want to go back to that stuff? Isn’t free verse freer?
Well, there is one main assumption that underlies those questions, that we here at The Road Not Taken would question, and that is the assumption that somehow poetry, and society is evolving into ever better and higher forms. That what is past is archaic and has been replaced by what is better. I think we extrapolate this from the progress of our technology, which has been becoming more clever. I am not sure I want to say ‘improving.’ But that is another discussion. However, art is not technology, and the analogy that many people assume without question is false and deceiving.
Formal poetry is formal in the sense that it has form. I have students who think it’s formal in the sense one wears a tux to a formal dance. No, it has form. Free verse, which became popular in the 20th century, reflected the post war sense that traditional patterns were restricting. To the Postmodern world, pattern was as irrelevant as tradition. I would argue that this attitude has done much to lead to the Postmodern sense of malaise. We have first concluded the world was formless, and then it should be no surprise that we quickly thereafter conclude that the world is mad and meaningless. Free verse is the poetry of this mad Postmodern world.
So if Don and I seem like a couple of anachronistic madmen, it’s because we hold to the notion that form implies an ordered world. Form implies the possibility of sanity, of objectivity balancing subjectivity. That’s why I believe the best free verse is actually very subtly formal. It’s not that Don and I want to bring back the past. We want to restore a measure of sanity to this vital, though often ignored, art form.
This, I believe, is behind the question my students often ask, when they’ve read some formless bit of free verse and ask, “so what’s the difference between this and prose?” They are right: the rejection of form ultimately results in the rejection of boundaries and the inability to know anything at all. As Lear says, “No, no, that way madness lies.” So welcome to The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry, and welcome to Don and my small crusade for a little bit of sanity in the world.
A Requiem Sonnet for Leslie Norris
Jim December 31st, 2007
A Requiem Sonnet for Leslie Norris
The rowan and the silver aspen bow
Along the walk up to your shuttered home.
The owls hoot softly, calling, singing now
To silent brooding snows. The hoary dome
And peaks align, pale white in muted grief.
No bird song fills the trees on this chill morn,
In mourning silence. Shadows stand, relief
Of trees, dark painted, weeping branches torn
By mountain light, bright dazzling your words
That tumbled from a poet’s pen and grace,
Again to lift the spirit and reach towards
The sun bleached gyre, the hawk’s eye view, that place
Where Nature’s beauty stands aside to show
That mystery we feel but never know.
December 8, 2007
Jim Prothero
A Great Poet
Jim September 26th, 2007
I want to talk about a great poet who passed away over a year ago: Leslie Norris. I met Norris when I was doing my dissertation on him some years back. Here I was a nobody graduate student and I called him on the phone. I explained what I was doing and that my dissertation was in part on him. “That’s hard luck on you,” he replied in his soft, Welsh lilting accent. After one telephone interview, I realized I would need more. So he invited me to stay with him at his Orem, Utah home. We sat in his garden, looking out over the Wasatch Range, where the last raw patches of glacial snow clung to the peaks in high summer and light splashed everywhere. We talked about Wordsworth, Keats, and Norris’ own poetry. We talked about his friend, Dylan Thomas and Norris confided to me that in his opinion, no one yet had written a biography that was fair to Dylan Thomas.
Norris was himself most often a free verse poet. But more often than readers realize, he was a formal poet. Like Frost, whose work his resembles, Norris’ formal and metric poetry was so subtly metrical, that a casual glance makes readers think that it is free verse. He used sometimes a Welsh form called cynghanedd, which is more complex than I want to try to explain here. And one of his finest poems is “The Ballad of Billy Rose”, a clearly metrical ballad and a profound piece. When people ask me about Norris and want to know a bit about him, I say, “Imagine a cross between Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas”. Of course, that’s a vast overgeneralization, but it will give anyone a ballpark idea of the fine poet so recently lost to us. Go out and get his Collected Poems. You will not regret it. Amazon has some used copies or you can get a new one straight from his small Welsh publisher, Seren, over the web. I will go on record to say that I believe him to be the finest British poet of the 20th century.