Andrew's comments (member since Sep 21, 2007)

Andrew's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

Danse Russe is by William Carlos Williams. Great poem.

Ivy, the reason this debate has gone on so long is that you use language like "prose poets" and "not true poetry." Gregory and David J used the same kind of language, "the only true poetry" "real poetry" "what they do is prose" etc.

If you ask me, for one, and I think many other people here:

Why isn't there more rhymed poetry in this group?

The answer wont be "because it isn't real poetry" or "because what you write isn't poetry" or "what you think you know about poetry is false".

You might get: because rhymed poetry is old fashioned. Because rhymed poetry is outdated. Because rhymed poetry is too conservative.

The only reason the debate has been as emotional as it has been and has gone on as long as it has is because you and other members of the rhymed orthodox branch
deride and dismiss what the rest of us do and care about.

I don't write prose poetry. I don't write false poetry. I am not a "poet."

as electronic storage capacity becomes virtually infinite maybe we'll see the folks at google and microsoft come up with a word processing feature that saves changes automatically and stores time-cataloged versions of all our files... until then, ruth, i think you've got a brilliant approach.

ruth you bring up an important topic: we all too frequently hit the save button but all too infrequently save drafts as drafts. not only is having versions in progress interesting, but sometimes we err in our revisions and it's good to be able to go back to versions, or to located deleted pieces, we otherwise wouldn't have access to.

there's a funny balance between endlessly revising a work that is never finished and never revising at all. haven't you felt that after twenty drafts you sometimes end up with less than you started with? blaise cendrars for one never revised, ever, as a point of pride. and i've seen the pages in keats' notebook where he wrote ode to a nightingale. it's written out in very neat and legible cursive, as if he'd copied it off the blackboard.

ezra pound said of ford madox ford: he never dented an idea for a phrase's sake. there is great wisdom in that observation.

Annette, I thought my poem was quite nice, and though written quickly, I don't find that it feels rushed. It's hardly spew. It actually makes Gregory's case in 14 lines. Can you do better?

Maybe, just maybe, the reason there have been no rhymed poems in the final selections is because there have been no good rhymed poems offered. I hate to be a wet blanket, but just because something rhymes doesn't mean it's good. It seems that there are dozens of poets writing in open forms and only three or four writing in rhymed verse. Given those odds, it's highly likely that a preponderance of open forms would be selected each month.

Just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's good.

To prove my point, I'm going to write a rhymed poem in sixty seconds:

FIELD OF BATTLE-VERSE

for Gregory

I walked into the garden and I said
Let poetry be a field unto which the red
Blood flows as slaughtering goes along
Killing all free versers who belong
To jaundiced faculties of moribund
Self-worth, giving scholarships that fund
More of their pitiable kind.
Hark!! Poetry must mind
It's Ps and Qs, its arrivederchis
And arrivederlas, its qi,
Its wa. It must have strict rules
That repeat, otherwise the fools
Will run off with all the beauty
And go and make it sooty!

awesome. your translation?

Gregory,

Thanks for keeping things civil. I really hate it when people refuse to have an open minded, honest, and polite discussion, even if they feel strongly about what they are talking about.

I think there's definitely a prejudice against "formal" poetry -- though there is a very strong cohort of neo-formalists who wield a lot of influence right now, in the US at least. In fact, to be fair, I'd say there's at least as much prejudice against truly experimental poetry as against hard-line formal poetry. As in most things, most people prefer the middle ground.

That said, I think the prejudice against formalism is justified because, in most cases, the forms that formalist poets embrace have worn out their inventiveness. When the sonnet and the rondel and the villanelle were invented, they served the music of their makers. That's true with many of the great poets you cite. Frost, for example, rarely feels constrained by his forms. Auden (one of my personal favorites) also somehow manages to be remarkably free within his forms. There are many, many others. However, in most cases, I think poems written in traditional forms feel constrained by their forms, not invigorated by them.

Think of music: if Mozart had written like Vivaldi, or Bach had written like Franchinus Gaffarius, not only would they not have been serving the muses well, but we would all still be beating out a 2/2 rhythm on hollow logs.

This the central point of my previous post: the root tradition, the basis, is not represented by what we consider traditional forms. Those are just medieval song forms that were invented to liberate poetry from the Roman legacy, and to maximize the strengths of the new vernacular languages.

What served Old French, however, doesn't necessarily serve contemporary English. For one, English doesn't have the same proclivity to rhyme. It is much easier to rhyme when half your adjectives end in "-a". English also has very different stresses that make for much more complicated meter. The beauty of the King James Bible, of Shakespeare's soliloquies, of Milton, of Coleridge, of Yeats has very little to do with end rhyme and strict metrics. They make the language sing. They manipulate the stresses to create a rough, athletic, energized poetics that, to my ear, is more akin to Whitman than to say Tennyson or Longfellow. Think of Milton, a deeply deeply educated man, who read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Old English not to mention French, Spanish and Italian. To write Paradise Lost, while highly familiarized with the long tradition of European literature, he chose not to employ rhyme. That was 350 years ago!

All I'm saying is, be an adamant defender of the long tradition of poetry. Fight for poetry. But don't confuse a few worn out 12th century ball gowns for the princess who used to wear them.


As for the quotes you cite:

1.) I don't think it's the job of poetry to entertain children or to make for easy reading. Students go to universities to get educated. If they don't like it, let them pick another specialty. If you don't like push-ups, don't join the Marines.

2.) I like rap. And yes, rhyme and rhythm help people remember the words. Like rap lyrics, villanelles and rondels and sonnets were originally sung.

David, we had this conversation already, didn't we? You want to ban all writing that isn't a family friendly rip-off of Tennyson, and you get very emotional when people disagree with you. I wish you'd channel some of your anger into your poems. They'd be much better.

Gregory,

You're making a false distinction. A poem isn't good because it rhymes and it isn't bad because it doesn't. There are numerous qualities that make a poem good or bad (including subjective taste). Rhyme is just one of them. In the two and a half thousand years of recorded poetry very little of it is written in an "abab" rhyme scheme. Most of the traditional forms that some consider to be the true formal architecture of poetry were innovations created by the first vernacular poets trying to distance themselves from the Latin tradition. The rondel, the villanelle, the sonnet etc are not the necessary condition of poetry. They are thousand year old experiments made by poets who were often vulgar and often wrote frankly about "undignified" themes like sex and war. The poetry they were trying to escape, like this one say:

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid lubet iocari
et solaciolum sui doloris,
credo ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor:
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas!


was not only not written in the so-called "traditional" form of poetry, but it was itself an innovation over older and distinct forms. Poetry is constantly reinventing itself. The reason there has been such a backlash against "rhyming poetry" is not because the great multitude of the unwashed have lost the sacred path, but because after 800 years of aping medieval song forms (to the point that by the 1850s poetry had become a sodden and nearly worthless parody of itself) very astute and extremely talented poets like Whitman and Rimbaud and yes Dickinson (whose near rhymes are as much a mockery of an evangelical allegiance to old forms as Whitman's free verse was) realized that poetry needed an injection of vitality. Poets like Ezra Pound and Guillaume Apollinaire and EE Cummings and Blaise Cendrars and Hart Crane weren't trying to kill poetry any more than Cervantes (or Dostoevksy or Melville or Flaubert) was trying to kill the novel. Like Cervantes, they were just trying to reinvigorate it.

But again, it's a false distinction to insist that rhyme = good and no-rhyme = bad. Plenty of both is bad, and plenty of both is good. What sets the good and the bad apart is far more complicated that formal structure. My impression, and I believe I share it with a lot of people, is that much of the formal poetry being written today is tone-deaf and riddled with cliches. In fact, I think you'll find that EE Cummings and Robert Frost have more in common than Robert Frost and some third-rate neo-formalist. Cummings and Frost were both writing beautiful poems. A third rate neo-formalist is doing little more than stuffing a corpse into a suitcase.

Ruth, it's not my poem. It's Richard Cronshey's. I'm just plugging his own poetry for him. You should give it a read. It's quite good, although, don't tell, it doesn't rhyme!

Between Hank Williams and John Donne The Shadow Falls
And I Am The Shadow, from Richard Cronshey's new book The Snow and The Snow has been published in Zone. Check it out at:

http://zonefornone.blogspot.com/2009/10/...

Greg,

Peter says, no they don't rhyme.

-Andrew

Greg,

I'll ask Peter. Give me a few days for a repost.

-Andrew

I'm quite fond of Julia Idlis and Viktor Ivaniv, whose poems made-up part of La Nueva Poesía Ruskaya -- a Spanish, English and Russian presentation of new Russian poetry Zone Magazine hosted in Buenos Aires in December 2006. I'll post one poem from each, but again, the beauty of the Jacket feature is its breadth. Guest Editor Peter Golub has put together a very comprehensive overview of poems written in Russia in the last ten years. Many of them are in his excellent translations. Additionally, there are interviews with leading figures in today's Russian poetry world, as well as essays on how new Russian poetry both derives and deviates from its Soviet predecessor.


Untitled
By Julia Idlis
Translation Peter Golub

And there were no living, nor dead along the banks of the river, only the ancient fishermen growing stone-faced; each with his magic wand in an outstretched hand, watching the sun melt in the distance.

And each one silent and crude; below a mass of feathered fish, and each one wept, the hand closed tight, and said:

Old man, who looks upon us from the heavens, you handed us willow branches, ox sinews, you who disdains us, what will you do, when we stop living? Therefore, we hold two-ended sticks, and death is on each end; they crack and bend, the yokes are almost scale; by them we measure, whose death is heavier and closer to the earth–theirs or ours, and why does the son die daily, drowning on the cross in words of forgiveness in an astral emptiness.

He says: dad,dad, I was swimming well enough, but you took me into your hands, away from the river’s breast, and now I do not know who I am, take pity on me, have mercy, I am still two-thirds holy water.

The father replies: don’t thrash in my arms, I love you, won’t let anyone have you; you will have water salted with fine down, hot unction, a wood frying-pan. Those who hear me will be full of your spirit, with worn-out shoes, washed-out names; but you won’t remember a single one of them, because we all wear the same face, not one of us is without sin, and I with them. Since there is nothing to feed my children, except your flesh.

And there were no living, nor dead in the river, and the feathered fish beat on the golden hooks; the rods whined, bending, almost touching the water; the river stood naked, recognizing its plight. And only one, who saw, the vermillion sun melt away, and there, he dug himself into the soft silt and wet sand, heard a fin idlely beat the air, he lay down quietly, and thought about the cesarean river, watched, hiding in the empty rush, how the spring gives birth to water.


House. From Beneath the Table.
By Viktor Ivaniv
Translation Peter Golub

Like a sweet tree
passing over a sleigh
everything seems to be on tiptoe
and viands for piglets
or does it smell of camphor
or are they slashing open pillows
and the backwards windows
sun falling into stomach

I feel sick they opened vinegar
the voices muffled in the noise
but what’s more embarrassing than a bite
where the flea jumps a stitch is moved
they are pulling
that sleigh and paint something
and bless the dream while the skin peels
a whale for a cheap tabernacle

and the fat priest stands in his kiosk
smelling of honey fish wax
and the girl’s button nose spins
spins in her freckled face
there is an English pipe under the table
and angels sit around the heavens
as they chat but they aren’t rude
awaiting death obediently

dad and I lift up our heads
this is our school
we run home down the stairs...
and from the blood
our big eyes open, I am big
but we are shy
after all our blood drips on the boards
here we are with a busted lip
take out a cigarette
we can even smile
eyes closed tight like gold

there's a lot of really interesting poetry being written in russia right now. the contemporary russian poetry community has blossomed in the last decade.

jacket magazine out of australia ran a new russian poetry feature in their last issue. it's excellent.

http://jacketmagazine.com/36/index.shtml

This entire discussion comes down to a logical fallacy. Unfortunately for David J, logic is as true in Australia as it is in the rest of the world. Here is the fallacy:

This discussion started with the statement:

All poetry which uses the words "fuck" and/or "cunt" is not poetry, but pornography.

Since The Canterbury Tales are poetry, and use the word "cunt," the statement is false.

What would be a true statement, Jon and David J, would be the phrase, "We, Jon and David J, do not like to read the words "fuck" and "cunt" when we read poetry."

I think, David J, you'll find most hypocritical, moralizing Americans will extend you the courtesy of allowing you to like or dislike whatever you please.

What I, and probably most people on earth, even Australians, don't like, is for two sanctimonious and poorly read individuals to tell the rest of us what we ought or ought not read; and to insinuate that Tropic of Cancer, The Canterbury Tales, Ulysses, The Complete Poems of Rochester, The Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres, etc etc, be banned because they contain a thousand year old Saxon word for copulation and a French loan word for that bit of anatomy that is the well-spring of life.

Your problems on this thread, Jon and David J, would all be solved if you didn't try to force your personal tastes into a universal category. Particularly on a website dedicated to the expansion, not contraction, of literacy.

Davis, don't forget the big C. It's Sex Craze.

How's The meth? Maybe we Should get together Sometime and Beat each Other's kids? Every Time I see Miley Cyrus on a Billboard I run out to Home Depot to buy an Electrical cord. Ever Beat your Kid with An electrical Cord? It's almost as Good as Porn; Almost. Certainly better than Literacy.