Michael Potts's Blog: Bits and Pieces: Book Reviews and Articles on Writing, Horror Fiction, and Some Philosophy - Posts Tagged "poetry"

Have you been busy at your job or driving and had what you thought was a great idea for a story? Suppose you get lucky and stop what you're doing (and stop your car at a safe place if you're driving), and you're able to write down your idea. Or perhaps you are at a writing conference that inspires you, and you leave, excited about developing the writing ideas you gleaned. You get home, put the ideas aside, and life intrudes. You forget about the ideas, misplace your notepad, or worse, lose what you've written down. All those great ideas--wasted.

I have had that experience many times. It is rare that I have totally lost ideas--usually I find a notepad months later. Resentment at having to be so busy at other things and anger at myself for not following up on an idea soon after developing it invade my thoughts--but such negativity does no good. Further reflection reveals that some of the ideas were not as brilliant as I thought at the time I wrote them down. Sometimes a few lines of poetry are good, and I am able to take off from what I'd written and write a complete first draft of a poem. Story ideas are more difficult--I find if I don't write the story immediately when I have the idea, it is difficult to return to it, at least with a short story. Ideas for novels are easier for me to follow up. Could I, or other writers, deal with busy lives in a way that allows them to develop their ideas into literature.

I first suggest that if you have an idea for a poem, make sure you complete a first draft of a poem that same day. You should at least add a plot outline and notes to your story ideas so that when you return to them, you will be able to continue where you left off. Have a file or some other place you can easily find where you place your writing ideas. Look through them from time to time, eliminating those that are duds and working on an idea you find promising. If I followed my own advice, I would complete many more writing projects. From now on I will try to follow my advice. This advice may help you, but all writers are different. Adjust any advice to your personality, work habits, and style. As long as you are producing quality work, you are doing something right. May all your good writing ideas come to fruition.

Poems 1922-1947 by Allen Tate

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Allen Tate comes from an age when the field of English Literature had high standards, when there was a belief that aesthetic truth was a unique source of knowledge, when most poets were classically educated with knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman poets. Tate was one of the original Southern Agrarians at Vanderbilt University, but later went his own direction. He joined the Roman Catholic Church with the great Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain as his sponsor. His poems are more formal than many today, some based loosely on Greek and Roman forms and others more like free verse but a more constrained free verse than is currently fashionable. Like Wallace Stephens' poetry, one has to get an "ear" for it before appreciating it. Many of the poems refer to Greek and Roman mythology and literature as was common in modernist poetry (think Ezra Pound, for instance). Tate dislikes the modern tendency to reduce humans to "economic man." Consider these lines from "To the Lacedemonians":

When the peace is a trade route figures
For the budget, reduction of population,
Life grow sullen and immense
Lust after immunity to pain.

That does seem to be an accurate portrait of contemporary Americans; consider the reaction to COVID-19 compared to the reactions to the 1957 and 1968 Asian Flue epidemics. The contemporary world desires immunity to pain, disease, and death, which clashes with the reality of the world as it is.

In his splendid poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead," a poem that captures the "concrete universa" since it can be applied to any battlefield, to any bed in which the dead rest, we hear the poet's voice:

In the riven trough the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the causal sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death...

Death and mortality are a constant theme in Tate's poetry -- not only the loss of physical life, but the constant passage of time, the changing of the seasons, the inevitability of old age, and the loss of love. In "The Paradigm," there are the striking lines,

For in the air all lovers meet
After they've hated out all their love...

This seems harsh, though it certainly reflects the lives of some people in "love-hate" relationships, as Tate's own troubled relationships attest.

Tate converted to Catholicism after he wrote many of these poems, but the pre-Catholic poems reveal a man struggling with the idea of a void after death. In "Horatian Epode to the Duchess of Malfi," there are the striking lines,

Now considerations of the void coming after
Not changed by the "strict gesture" of your death
Split the straight line of pessimism
Into two infinities.

In some ways this attitude reflects the classical view of death: pessimism, combined with making the best we can of the life we are given (though even it is subject to Fate). Tate affirms the role of myth in trying to make sense of death in "Retroduction [sic] to American History": "Antiquity breached morality with myths." Ultimately this does not change the fact that, as Tate expresses it in "Causerie", "we know our end / a packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues." His skepticism at the time is seen later in the same poem: "For miracles are faint / And resurrection is our weakest clause of religion." Yet he "waits".... "For the incredible image."

Tate's poem on reaching the age of thirty, "Fragment of a Meditation," begins:

Not yet the thirtieth year, the thirtieth
Station where time reverses his light heels
To run both ways, and makes forward back;
Whose long coordinates of birth and death
And zero i the origin of breath:
* * *
All thanks that mid-mortality is done.

Other poems focus on a sense of place, of ancestry, so lacking in the contemporary world which drives apart past and future and separates people into lonely isolates. There is much richness in these poems, richness that can easily be filed away like slivers of metal in a heap to be thrown away. One must have an eye to see and an ear to hear these poems, in which gems of light sparkle through the splendor of form.



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