Enjoyable, But Is It Really Poetry?

The title of this post was the heading on a review of a local anthology of prose and poetry in The Press, the main Christchurch newspaper. It had me spluttering in my morning coffee.

I haven't read the anthology, but I do have an idea of what it contains, having seen the submission guidelines, and flipped through the finished book. The reviewer seems to be breaking what I understood to be a fundamental rule of reviewing, that you review a book for what it is. You don't complain of a science fiction novel that it is not a romance, or of a book of light verse that it fails to follow modern semiotic techniques (whatever they might be). This reviewer, instead of actually reviewing the poetry, jumps on his soapbox:

How strange that the poetical traditions of rhyme and thythm, which go back well over six centuries ...seem to have disappeared without trace.

He then says Of course, I am not maintaining that rhyme and regular rhythmic patterns are necessary for poetry which seems to me to be a bit of a cop-out, given that he fails to review the poems on any other basis than their lack of thyme and rhythm. Further, he suggests that it is not particularly difficult for any reasonably literate person to produce this kind of thing. That comment seems to me not only to disparage most contemporary poetry, but also prose. If poetry becomes easy to write once presented in irregular lines with no rhyme, then surely he is saying that prose is easy to write too? He gives no recognition to the fact that not all sequences of words produce the same effect and that words have to be chosen equally as carefully for their sound and meaning whether they are presented as prose, unrhymed unmetrical verse, or rhymed and metrical poetry.

As I said in my earlier post on the poets of 1951, I began to feel that at that point the tradition of rhymed verse had reached a dead end. One of the reasons that the rhymed verse of 1951 sounds so much less modern to me than the unrhymed verse is that the unrhymed version makes much more use of normal speech rhythms, or at least something that could pass for it. The poets who still wrote in rhyme and meter still seemed to use some of the old techniques of inverting normal word order to make it fit. It's the "Procrustean" technique - if it won't fit the form, chop it about and rearrange it until it does. (Procrustes, apparently, was known for chopping or stretching his guests to make them fit the bed).

Besides Denis Glover, reviewed in my previous post, I read Adrienne Rich's first published collection "A Change of World" and Mary Stanley's "A Starveling Year". The latter was a 1994 reprint - she attracted little attention in her time, and it was republished, with additional poems, at a time of renewed interest in some of New Zealand's earlier women writers. The original was published in 1953, but it went to the publisher in 1951, so I stretched the rules. It was her only published work, whereas Adrienne Rich, of course, went on to have a long and distinguished career.

Checking over the two books, I find that Rich for the most part does not use inversion of word order. Mary Stanley sometimes does. Overall, there are fewer examples than my first impression - which goes to show how strongly the technique colours our impressions of a poem - invert the word order and it immediately stands out as being what the traditionally-minded seem to think of as "poetic".
For example
I by all my imperfections stand accused

the water-walking god in greed
exploratory fingers thrusts

Other passages, while staying with normal word order, nevertheless sound very formal:
put off constricting day (Would you invite your husband to bed with those words?)

Cut off by tides we here are islanded
also by time and graver circumstance

When contemporary poets, rarely, choose rhyme and metre, it sounds different. There is often more use of enjambment. The rhymes may be slant rhymes. They manage something far more difficult than what was expected of earlier generations of poets - they make the lines sound much more like everyday informal speech, so that the rhyme and metre seem to intrude less. It's difficult to do. When it comes off, it's lovely - some of my favourite contemporary poems are rhymed. (And it's not that I don't like the old ones - I do, but I wouldn't expect a modern poet to write like Keats or Hardy or Frost, any more than I would expect a modern novelist to write like Jane Austen or Charles Dickens.) Here's a recent example of rhymed verse at the Poetry Daily website - look for the abba rhyme scheme.

And one more thing - rhymed poetry, particularly poetry that concludes with a rhyming couplet, just sounds so damned sure of itself. In today's more complex world, it's not always appropriate to end a poem with what seems like a declaration that "I know this, and that's that!" A poet who wants to end "well, perhaps..." will find it a lot easier to do so without rhyme.

NaPoWriMo #6: Words from a Friend

Daylight saving has ended. It was wonderful to wake up in daylight this morning, with plenty of time spare to walk to work, instead of dragging myself reluctantly out of bed in the half dark. I had considered the prompt for the day when it appeared at Readwritepoem yesterday evening, and during my half hour walk to work, the poem formed itself in my head, and I was then able to jot it down at morning tea time. It will no doubt be subjected to later editing, but I think I am getting into the swing of things.

We were asked to gather fifty words from a friend. I asked Kay, which was taking the easy route I suspect, as I knew I was likely to get words I was comfortable with using from a fellow New Zealander of similar sensibilities. Of course, we didn't have to use all fifty - just to pick the ten or fifteen that were most resonant. When I saw "dentist" I remembered the bumble bee that was buzzing like a dentist's drill behind our bedroom curtain on Sunday morning, and I wanted to use it, so summer seemed to be the theme to run with.

The words I used from Kay were rain, mouldy, dentist, weather, apple, summer, red, and Dad. Three more transmuted into other words - "mountain" changed to "Orongorongos", "chicken" was replaced by "chook" and "China" made me think of Anne Tyler's book "Digging to China" (which turned out to be "Digging to America" when I did a google search for it) which transformed itself into Spain, which is on the opposite side of the world from New Zealand. I also encountered the word "ramshackle" in the introduction to a section of a poetry book I was reading last night, and it gave me such a tingle I had to include it as well.

If anyone needs a translation of any of the New Zealand words and phrases, ask nicely and you might just be lucky!

Digging for Spain

Did it ever rain? We don’t remember any
the weather always perfect.
Sun sparkle on water, the blue
of the distant Orongorongos
across the harbour, pohutukawa dripping red puddles,
the daily trek down the zigzag
with togs and towels, buckets and spades.
“If you dig far enough,
you’ll get to Spain” Dad said
but we knew about the earth’s fiery heart,
we weren’t stupid, not like the boy
down the road who took his sister
and his pocket money to buy a tram.

In the garden we threw mouldy windfalls
that piled up beneath the apple tree,
built ramshackle huts, climbed the pines
with basket and hammer to gather cones
for winter. Once, we watched when Dad took the axe
to the sick chook’s neck.

Flopped on the bed with books borrowed
from the library three at a time,
peeled sunburnt skin in strips, listened
to the fat bumble bee caught behind
the curtain, buzzing like the dentist.

NaPoWriMo #5: True Colours

The prompt for the day at Readwritepoem was to take a paint chart and use the names of colours to inspire a poem. At first I thought an autumn poem would be appropriate for this part of the world, but strangely, very few of the golds, oranges and reds on my paint chart seemed to have autumnal names. And after studying the names, I realised that I could write a poem that wouldn't be about colour at all.

When I saw "Rob Roy" and "Lochinvar" an idea started forming. And when I looked up Sir Walter Scott's poem Lochinvar on the internet I found I couldn't get its rhythm and rhyme out of my head. Rhyme is hard to do well and clumsy when it's not done well, but for once I decided to try it.

All the words and phrases in bold are from the paint chart, with the occasional "s" added as the poem demanded it.

The village is empty, its roads dusty grey
Its young men and women have all gone away
some to the cities and some to the war
and some sail on the tide to follow a star

The sandstone is crumbling, the broom rises high
a lone eagle flies across the pale sky
Scotch mist makes a mantle to cover the hill
and on gorse and on hemlock there falls a blue chill

The mine shaft’s deserted, no sound but spring rain
some fell among gunsmoke on Waterloo’s plain,
and some travel further on surf crest and spray
to follow a golden dream in lands far away

In a tumbledown barn on an old rusty nail
there hangs a worn saddle, its leather cracked and pale
but there’s none to bring apples or stroke horse’s neck
for they’ve all left the village and will not come back

A bitter crabapple grows twisted and gnarled
in the village forgot by the rest of the world
and the figures that swirl in the fog surely are
the ghosts of Rob Roy and of young Lochinvar

NaPoWriMo #1

It's Bad Poetry Month! Thirty poems in thirty days is the aim, a slightly crazy one since I have to fit it in round full time work, meals, dishes, ironing and all the other stuff.

Still, last time I did this, in amongst the totally forgettable poems were a handful that surprised me, that made it all worthwhile.

The folks over at ReadWritePoem are offering a prompt for each day of the month. Since we are almost twentyfour hours ahead of the USA here in New Zealand, April 1st was almost over before their first prompt went up. So I have used one of their other prompts from earlier in the week - I may declare April to be a 31 day month so that I can use all of their thirty prompts.

Here, brought to you by the words mingle and multitudinous is my first rough effort. (No, the words don't actually appear in the poem. They helped to inspire it, just the same).

Escher at the Salmon Ponds

Above the salmon ponds a multitude of swallows dart
in jagged tessellations. They dive and swerve in pursuit
of invisible insects. Beneath them, a river of fish
flows from one end of the pond to the other.
As fish leap at the instant of turning, birds swoop
to meet them. Boundaries dissolve. He feels himself
melt into their seamless motion. For a moment
he becomes bird, becomes fish, then reaches
into his pocket for a pencil stub, a scrap of paper
to capture the vision before it fades.

Readwritepoem: Ekphrasis

Image by Rick Mobbs of Mine Enemy Grows Older

Portrait of Nanda
In an empty room, in the gathering dark
I sit in a green chair,
hands in my lap. I am still

thinking about the way that you left.
The wind and the rain blew in through the door
of the empty room, in the gathering dark.

the peach trees we planted grow by the road
where you drove away. You did not look back
at the trees, or the room where I am. Still,

I sit here, thinking about you, and the trees
which bore this summer one solitary peach.
I plucked it last night in the gathering dark

and thought of sap rising, and the veins in my body
like branching twigs, enclosing my heart
ripe like a peach. I am still

thinking of the juice of the peach,
and the worm inside, and you
far away in the gathering dark,
and like the trees, I am still.

Ekphrasis (poetry inspired by an image) for readwritepoem
I decided to make it a double challenge and write a villanelle - although I have interpreted the form rather loosely and dropped the rhyme scheme, and also repeated ends of lines rather than whole lines.

Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day in New Zealand. Which I almost forgot about, since I had to work. In some centres, they schedule readings in the evening on National Poetry Day, when those of us who work for a living can actually get to them. In Christchurch, the only people who organised anything were the university, and it was at lunchtime.

I could probably have gone if I'd remembered, except that I would have had to go by car to fit it in my lunch break, and it's really hard to find a carpark around the university in term time.

So, instead of poetry, I took photos of oil spills in the supermarket car park. I hope poetry had a good day without me.

Freshford

The photo below wasn't very successful as a photo. It was taken from a moving car, late in the afternoon, when the light was less than I realised.



It did, however, inspire a poem. The other inspiration was the first line (in italics) which was taken from a poem by Jeffrey Harrison, The Same River, which was the poem for Sunday 9 September at Poetry Daily

Freshford

Yes, yes, you can’t step into the same
river twice, and I can’t cross
the same bridge as my ancestors,
but all the same, this bridge is one of the things
that has changed least since you lived here,
linking the village with the quarry, on narrow roads
meant for horses. On both sides now
the stone houses, clean and prosperous looking,
country retreats for the middle classes,
and cars pulling up at the inn, in the twilight.
There were weavers and washerwomen once.
Where are their rough cottages? Pulled down,
or renovated, made large enough for small families
to sleep one to a bedroom. Your seventeen children
one by one left their shared beds
to trudge over this bridge to distant cities
in the hope of work. Look, here are photos
I took from the car window. Have I captured
your ghosts? I see only a blur. We are moving
too fast.

And here is the bridge:

Snippets

1) All the tests were negative, and the hospital let P come home on Saturday afternoon. As he says, it's one way of getting a free medical check before our trip. I'm really glad they didn't keep him till Monday, because it would mean lost wages if I had to take time out to trip up and down to the hospital.

2) The new Guardian Poetry Workshop is up. Check it out. There are ten different first lines - the idea is to choose one and write a poem using it. Every month I print the workshop out and I never actually do it. Unfortunately, they don't give a very long time frame for submitting the results. But I keep all the exercises in case one of them inspires me in the future. I also like to read the poems they select from those submitted, and the comments.

3) One of the reasons I won't be doing it this week is that I have to produce a bunch of mailing labels, subscription reminders, invoices etc for Takahe magazine. I decided to give up this job now that I am working full time, and I was just about to hand it over with this issue, but they want me to stay. Money is being offered (it was previously unpaid) - not a huge amount, but enough to make me think. There won't be much in the bank when we return from our trip. I haven't been in my new job long enough to be paid while I'm away.

4) I hope the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK doesn't spread. I have memories of various parts of the countryside being closed in the last outbreak over there a few years back, and I'd hate to think we mightn't get to see everything we want to. So far, it's confined to a part of the country we don't intend to visit.

5) I've slacked off on the photography over the last few days. So here is one I took some weeks ago, that I rather like.

Snippets

1. The weather forecasters are warning us of a possible 20 cm (8 inches) of snow at sea level in the next few days. That must be why a certain clothes retailer has invited me to preview their new spring collection. I'd rather look at warm woollen jerseys. Which universe do these people live in?

2. I have been using library elf to remind me to return my library books on time. I can highly recommend it. Unfortunately today I picked up the wrong pile of books on my way out the door to work. The books due back today were left sitting on my desk at home. I figured it's cheaper to pay the fines for returning them two days late than to pay for petrol for a special trip to the library.

3. Our local newspaper is running a contest for Montana poetry day. It's for haiku on any topic. The prize is a complete set of all the nominated poetry books. I might enter. I just wish they wouldn't insist that the haiku have three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. See this article in Wikipedia which explains why.

NaPoWriMo #26 and 27

I was having a lazy day yesterday, and didn't write anything. Acutally, I was planning to try and write a villanelle using a line from my poem from the previous day - "waking from a dream of flight". It seemed like a good idea, until I realised that I didn't really have anything more to say than I'd said in the short poem, and anything I added would be just padding.

I feel that writing metrical rhymed poetry is akin to being able to draw accurately for visual artists. If you choose to write unrhymed, loosely metred verse, or to paint abstract paintings, it should be because you choose to. It's good to know that you have the technical skills in the background if you want them. So from time to time, I try to write rhymed metrical verse - not usually to my satisfaction, but I enjoy the challenge.

So, the first poem today is for the prompt "circle", and the second is another attempt at a villanelle, using an incident from my eldest daughter's childhood. I'm not really satisfied with the last stanza. And it doesn't quite read smoothly in places. Still, it's a lot closer to what I want to be writing than the one I posted on Thursday. I skipped the previous prompt, "improper". On the whole though, I wouldn't have been able to write a poem a day without the help of the prompts which you can find at Poetry Thursday

Circles

Nothing is as round as happiness
It is the shape
of a ball, a balloon,
a bubble,
a hula hoop,
a dog chasing its tail
in circles on the sand

Nothing is as round as happiness
except sorrow
the shape
of a stone


Villanelle for Deborah

Deborah has seen a dead bird in the gutter
Its eyes are dull and it is gathering flies
She wants to take it home and put it in water

I have one eye on the time and the other on the weather
and therefore I am trying to hurry her by
when she stops to inspect the dead bird in the gutter

She still thinks a kiss can make a graze better
Daddy mended the moon and set it in the sky
and flowers last forever in water.

When you are three, it's the small things that matter:
blowing bubbles, watching them fly
and stopping to see a dead bird in the gutter

I'm not quite ready to tell my daughter
today's flowers are different from yesterday's
not everything can be cured with water

No manual prepared me for this: I mutter
some excuse to hurry away
She looks over her shoulder at the bird in the gutter
still wanting to save it by giving it water.