Dancing in the Feets

Meter is not an intellectual practice. Neither is it a philosophical or political one. It is a rhythmic one only. You cannot think it to death. Nor can you build a school or party around it. Although you can dance to it.

What has me thinking this way is a conversation I’ve been having with Mike Snider concerning a hexameter line he has written in an otherwise iambic pentameter poem. He’s defending it. I’m suggesting it needs to be fixed.

Which is an interesting turn of events. Mike is much more the formalista than myself. He’s much more intellectual about the genre than myself. And maybe that’s the heart of the conversation. He’s defending his meter on an intellectual basis. And I’m arguing from a more impressionistic one.

Meter has little to do with the meaning of poetry. Or a poem. Although it can subliminally reinforce or oppose that meaning. Mike wants to reinforce an idea in the poem. And usually I love such a twist, especially when it does so in such an outlaw fashion as adding a foot in a line. But in this case I think Mike is arguing for a hypermetric reading intellectually, when on a more physical level the line feels metrically sound.

When establishing a meter, you establish a rhythm, and in such a dance, the body takes command over the intellect. If there’s a way the body can find five beats in a line, it will. Which is why, I’m not against substitutions and their ilk. The feet will find the foot. But you cannot intellectually convince the body there’s an extra foot (or even less a foot) when it’s begun to dance in pentameter. If it expects five feet, it will find five feet if at all possible. It will always side with the rhythm. You will have to damn well add a stong unmistakable extra foot in order to trip the body up and say hey!

It is projective in that manner. And expectant. Yet mostly rhythmic. But it is not intellectual, philosophical, or political. Which is why any arguments concerning the preference of meter to anything else is in the end a dead end. You can’t argue with the body. Either it likes the dance or it doesn’t. Mike and I will have to agree to disagree on an intellectual level here. But on a more physical one, well let the dance continue.

Primo Levi on Rhyme

Jodie Reyes, that once king of the defunct Haring Makata blog brings our attention to an essay on verse forms by David Caplan in Poetry Daily. I like this:

Rejecting the notion that metrical verse cannot express contemporary existence, crucial figures in the development of postmodernity specifically advocated metrical technique. In a 1985 article devoted to the subject, Primo Levi promoted rhyme's "spontaneous return." As Levi argued, rhyme inspires, not hinders, formal experimentation. "The restriction of rhyme," Levi asserted, "obliges the poet to resort to the unpredictable: compels him to invent, to 'find'; and to enrich his lexicon with unusual terms; bend his syntax; in short, to innovate

I couldn't agree more. It's a good tool that shouldn't be thrown out because the next door neighbor uses one and he's a cranky old bahstahd. Oh, I don't mean you Mike.

Eagle Poems "R" Us

Did you ever start to write a particular something? But it doesn’t go in the direction you want it to. Twice I’ve started poems about eagles and they veered into different directions then I had intended. I will of course try again. It will be interesting to see how many unintentional eagle poems I come up with. Of course I’m hoping that it stops at three. But now I’m beginning to have my doubts.

Eagle Business Consulting Services

An eagle doesn’t drive to work on wings
before it’s had its cup of coffee, dark,
no sugar, with a rainbow trout to go.
An eagle never goes anyplace on a lark,
morning commutes included. Eagles are
notoriously single-minded and even
phone their clients from their cars in traffic
leaving every moment unbereaven.
At work an eagle plunges into its job
feet first seizing the day with its razor-sharp
talons and a thirst for drawing first blood.
Eagles are eagle-eyed. They’ll catch a carp
in the muddiest accounting schemes each time.
They are indeed the brand new paradigm.

As always, any criticism and/or advice is welcome and appreciated although not guaranteed to be followed.

Almost a Blog Post

I’m not sure if you can call it blog-block, because although I have nothing to blog lately, I am writing poetry, which is the ultimate goal of this blog after all. So I may be blogging just poems in the future. Or not. I’m having blog-block.

Almost a Love Sonnet

Over the water, an eagle floats
along the currents of the wind
with all the presence of a man
in love. Its flight is disciplined
by clouds alone.
                           By following
the curve of river, it found itself
direction, sailing to verdant seas
that sow the continental shelf,
and settled in an evergreen
to wait for sustenance, or sounds
made by some passion trespassing.
When either happens, it surrounds
the air around itself with wings
embracing all the lift it brings.

Clairvoyancing the End

I’m not sure if I succeeded in telling this love story, especially since I discovered it was a love story midway through the poem. And this, sometimes, is the value in writing poetry. We discover the meaning of things in the process, even the meaning of an event that happened more than forty years ago, and one that always stuck in the mind because of its novelty. But then you find out the event wasn’t truly novel. It was the same old story. A love story. But of course a child wouldn’t know that or see that that’s the most important kind there is. Or a man for that matter. Stanzas sixteen and seventeen, the last:

that drives me to this day. She never revealed
her expeditions either. And when she died
a few years later I remembered not
a thing about her time revivified
in spirit except to think it far out, weird
that daffodils had suddenly appeared

from out of nowhere in Samara's yard.
But more important things were beckoning
—the revolutions of desire incarnate—
than that pretty plot of reckoning.
The summer of love looked to offer more
than adoration from some distant shore.

(complete poem here)

My Journal: 20-Mar-2005

I took one of my favorite walks on Plum Island yesterday. I parked the car at Hellcat Swamp, the last parking lot accessible to the paved road. I then continued by foot on the dirt road, which was pockmarked with potholes, helping to slow down any passing cars. There’s a quiet land of small trees and sand on one side and dunes on the other. About a half mile down the road, there’s an access road for the Pines Trail, but the road was still drifted with snow. It was easy to walk on though. In the field bordering it were four deer grazing. One lifted its head as I walked parallel to it but at least fifty yards distant. Then she continued her grazing, satisfied that I presented no clear and present danger. I took the lesson in hand, remembering it on the way back when some cars sped down the road despite the battlefield condition. But that was later and this was now.

I hit the Pines Trail. A woman walking past me told me that there was an owl in the pines, although she had not seen it. But the sound was clear. Which reminded me that too often we limit our reality to sight only. The other senses depict other dimensions of the real. To live by sight only is to inhabit a one-dimensional world. I’d say one dimensional out of five, but I suspect there’s at least one other sense, that extra-sensory one, that most of us seldom acknowledge. I stopped at the viewing platform, and sat on the bench, and soaked up the spring sun. The marsh extended miles ahead of me and the bay sparkled blue in the distance. A woman came to the platform about ten minutes later, laughing that I had found her secret place. We exchanged some pleasantries then each returned to the solitude. Mine was a bit forced though, trying to recover the moment. It’s interesting how one silent stranger can overwhelm my sense of privacy. I stayed for another ten minutes then bequeathed the spot to her, and continued on the Pines Trail.

I neither heard nor saw an owl. I trespassed the fifteen feet from trail to road on US property, although the footprints in the snow indicated that I hadn’t been the first. About fifty yards further south, I came to the boardwalk leading to the ocean. I walked through the dunes, sitting for a moment to breathe in the desert winds. Then I walked to the beach. Very low tide. I walked about a quarter mile north, and then returned. Walking north, one sees Plum Island stretch ahead, as well as Salisbury and Hampton, and in the distant, Mt Agamenticus in York, Maine. Walking south, one sees the sweep of Cape Anne capped off by the granite headland of Halibut Point. To the east of course is Atlantic. Its waves were small but strong enough to create their own world. One thing I like about walking the beach is the fact the ocean drowns out all other sounds. Its reality becomes yours and none other.

I retraced my steps for the way back. A great walk that passes through many different worlds. Early spring presents its wilderness untouched yet by most, and we become early pioneers of that new world. In the coming months comes the rest of civilization. Or at least more cars, walkers, and beachgoers. But I got in the car and drove back to civilization. I had forgotten the first law of distance walking. Bring liquids. I bought a quart of Gatorade and drove home.

Stanzas 14 & 15

And then Samara started rocking back
and forth again, her past expression one
again with the current reappearancing
of a normal afternoon phenomenon—
without a ghost of cloud perceptible
within the heavens—indivisible

from space and time or other scientific
certainties the new frontier unearthed.
I never said a word about the limits
she had crossed, or suspicion she had birthed
in my developing terrain of trust
and disbelief, that world of steel and rust


(complete poem to date here)

My Journal 19-Mar-2005

I saw an eagle yesterday morning flying over the river. As I watched, I began to feel I too were flying, that the eagle was showing me a few tricks. First, it is a mistake to believe that your arms are wings. Our wings are our legs and the ground is like the sky. It was a revelation to me and made walking the rest of the day an heightened experience.

Thirteenth Samara

scaring the daylight from my mother’s eyes.
Samara looked at me as if I were
a silhouette of some slight waterspout
effusive still after the temperature
had plummeted below the freezing point,
some living afterthought she could anoint

with holy chrism oil. “Tell Samara
her husband speaks to me in Manitou.
And tell Samara that Nathaniel leaves
her flowers, their yellow petals yet unfurled—
behind the garden shed, beneath the cedar.
He waits until that time when time has freed her.”

(complete poem to date here)

Make Your Mother Sigh

Number 12. “At twelve o'clock a meeting round the table / For a séance in the dark:” Now the narrative returns to its cinematography. Not in anapest though. But what is the modus operandi of the spirit? Who are we to it on a close encounter? If as Thoreau says there is an infinite mind, imagine its take on our limited one. We’re at least three degrees of separation from eternity.

scaring the daylight from my mother’s eyes.
Samara looked at me as if I were
a silhouette of some slight waterspout
effusive still after the temperature
had plummeted below the freezing point,
some living afterthought she could anoint

Complete poem to date here.

Who's In the Middle of Something

This is my third extended narrative in as many months and maybe I’m amazed. I had never written even one previous to 2005. At this point, I’m not judging the quality, although I’m OK with things for now, but the quantity as well as the cohesiveness of it has been realized to date. Although, in this current one, I’m experimenting with a mid-section that veers away from the narrative into some arena that borders on a postmodern interlude for three stanzas. I’m unsure of its success and its relation to the rest. For now, the kid stays in the picture. These next two stanzas (10 & 11) contain the last section of the interlude changing back to a standard narrative stanza. In 10 I’m playing with prescience, meaning, and sound while in 11 I’m reintroducing the narrative gradually, emphasizing repetition and simple rhyme as it slowly regains its oxygen, trying to avoid the bends.

Or enigmatic: “Memory and reeds
whisper paradoxical canoes
innately in dark streams of consciousness.
Centurions with ringside seating cruise
calamities and teardrops. Dragonflies
answer the falconer while right whales rise.”

But that’s not what Samara said it had said
when, as the sun returned from shadow play
she turned her spirited eyes to me, her face
a guise whose wrinkles had disappeared as day
had disappeared from light of afternoon,
as she had ceased her swaying just as soon

What did Samara say it said? Maybe tomorrow. But I should add that I haven’t finished yet, so any talk of cohesiveness is somewhat premature.

Poem to date here.

Stanza Number Nine

Number 9, number 9, number 9. Amazing what an impact two words repeated can have in the background of your mind. Was it the first instance of language poetry in “song?”

Or maybe it was understated, more
discreet: “Their providence is wearing thin.
That threadbare baritone no longer reaches
notes of distinction but sinks its grin
beneath peninsulas of grimaces.
The lone ambassador exhumes Cortez.”

Take this brother, may it serve you well.

(complete poem to date here)

Clairvoyancing Seven & Eight

beneath a totally divergent sun.
But there are days I wonder if there’s more
to what I heard than gibberish amiss—
indigenous, an interlocutor
between the decade and its coming sin,
four months before they slayed its paladin:

“After Dallas tolls the Tonkin Gulf,
resolved to multiply its Nam by blood
in country, while prime cities divide within
proof negatives of X and King, the flood
incites an acid course via LA
then My Lai, bringing to light its auto-da-fe.”

(complete poem to date here)

The Transcendentalist's Prayer

Reading the Journals for The Blog of HDT, today's entry in 1852 blew me away as I read it. There are sometimes when I need to search the Journals for someting to post that day, and there are other times when the passage just floors me. This is one of those times when I had to get off from the floor to post asap. On this Ides of March, a transcendentalist's prayer of spring:

This afternoon I throw off my outside coat. A mild spring day. I must hie to the Great Meadows. The air is full of bluebirds. The ground almost entirely bare. The villagers are out in the sun, and every man is happy whose work takes him outdoors. I go by Sleepy Hollow toward the Great Fields. I lean over a rail to hear what is in the air, liquid with the bluebirds’ warble. My life partakes of infinity. The air is as deep as our natures. Is the drawing in of this vital air attended with no more glorious results than I witness? The air is a velvet cushion against which I press my ear. I go forth to make new demands on life. I wish to begin this summer well; to do something in it worthy of it and of me; to transcend my daily routine and that of my townsmen; to have my immortality now, that it be in the quality of my daily life; to pay the greatest price, the greatest tax, of any man in Concord, and enjoy the most!! I will give all I am for my nobility. I will pay all my days for my success. I pray that the life of this spring and summer may lie fair in my memory. May I dare as I have never done! May I persevere as I have never done! May I purify myself anew as with fire and water, soul and body! May my melody not be wanting to the season! May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful, that naught escape me! May I attain to a youth never attained! I am eager to report the glory of the universe; may I be worthy to do it; to have got through with regarding human values, so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values. It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

from The Journals of Henry David Thoreau 15-March-1852