A falcon on a wire
Against the laden sky
Scanned his brown empire
With a black-ice eye.
Nothing beneath him stirred
In that sunless instant
But my heart, for a keen-eyed bird
Blind to me, or indifferent.
(I suppose this is kind of an anti-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins poem, although I harbor no anti-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins sentiments whatsoever . . . I would also welcome some better rhyme than instant/indifferent)
20 comments:
Very nice. Having spent the last month reading Beowulf and Sir Gawain, I don't expect rhyme anymore, so I didn't notice any difficulties with yours. I love hawks. I almost have a wreck whenever I see one.
I've also been thinking a lot about your poem about the starlings, since they are everywhere in the fields. I keep meaning to find it and print it, but I'm always busy reading Beowulf or Sir Gawain.
AMDG,
Janet
I love hawks, too. We have a couple of what I think are peregrine falcons, or some other smaller hawk, hanging around the vicinity of the rail trail near our house, and I've often seen them hunting when I've been out walking the dog.
The rhyme could stand, though something like "inconstant," if only it made sense, would be better purely from the rhyming standpoint. You want as much of the sound to match up as possible . . . I used to have a much looser philosophy of rhyme, but I find more and more that I'm really bugged by -- not half-rhymes, because I don't care about the vowel sounds, but it drives me a little bit crazy when the words are clearly supposed to rhyme, but the consonant sounds are off by more than a hair. Seems lazy. But then, I am lazy.
I met a very nice young woman from your area on the retreat. She like to go to your husband's place of employement for adoration on Sunday afternoon. She works in a Catholic bookstore that is in an Ace Hardware?
AMDG,
Janet
Hm, don't know the bookstore, but I bet people I know would identify it immediately. There aren't that many Catholic bookstores around here.
And the adoration chapel at my husband's place of employment is beautiful. I wish it were closer. We'll definitely have to stop in when you come to visit.
Eek, I don't know that I like having this picture of me show up. This is what comes of messing around with the webcam on the Matrimonial Laptop: what's mine is mine, what's his is mine, what the college issues him is also mine . . . I actually confessed to taking these pictures of myself, in Confession, because it seemed such a vain and silly way to waste my time -- I'm smart enough to think of better time-wasters than that, I think -- but then, there they were . . . I dunno. I don't mind so much having a photo on my profile, since the anonymity thing's a bit of a charade anyway, but I'm not so sure I like it showing up every time I post a comment via Blogger. Hm.
I read that the other day and thought it was really fine, and only later did it occur to me that it had no attribution and therefore might be yours. Anyway, it is very fine.
Once upon a time I thought I was going to revive rhyme and other formal elements, mostly abandoned at the time (early '70s). When I realized I wasn't going to be able to do it, I tried to blame it on the times. It does seem much, much harder to write to anything like modern taste (which, in the end, is my taste, however I might kick against it) using rhyme.
I'm glad you put the picture up, even if you take it down later. I like to have some idea what the people I'm conversing with online look like. I always develop these mental pictures (I expect everyone does) and they're usually all wrong. The only reason I put the pic on my profile was to keep people from doing that with me. Well, that, and I also thought the pic was kinda funny.
Hm, I don't know that that's true, about modern taste. There are a number of good contemporary poets writing in rhyme even now -- more so than in the early 70s, when so many major mid-century poets who'd begun in form and then turned away from it were writing at the top of their game: W.S. Merwin, James Wright, etc. I find, though, that the poems of theirs which come almost effortlessly to mind are the formal, early ones. I've always loved Wright, his later work included, but the poem I always remember is "Saint Judas," which is a devastating poem, and is in rhyme and meter -- in fact, it may be a sonnet, though I can't remember right now. I'll have to go look it up.
I don't like Adrienne Rich especially, but one poem of hers sticks in my head: "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers." Rhyme and meter.
And I love a lot of comic verse, particularly that of Wendy Cope, who's an English poet. Her poems are hilarious, and they're hilarious largely because she nails the form. Rhyme and meter are perfect, and that's part of the effect. I'll have to dig some of her things up, too, and post them - her "Waste Land Limericks," parodying Eliot, are priceless. She also has a very funny parody in which she rewrites "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in the manner of William Wordsworth -- I don't have the book it's in, and I can't remember it all, but it's got crags, and a lonely voice ("Baaa," it spake), and the last line is, "I recollect with joy that inky pelt."
So all that's influenced my ear greatly. A classmate of mine in the writing program at Utah used to wear a t-shirt that said, "Free verse causes cancer," and we all thought he was nuts. Of course he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and the rest of us didn't -- but I think he might have been more right anyway than we were giving him credit for.
Yep, that is a funny picture. I mean, there's not a fainting snowman in it or anything, but it is amusing.
And I do like to see what other people look like. I began by wanting to be very private and anonymous, but since I write -- occasionally but rather publicly -- under my own name, it's a little silly to pretend.
I really like the "indifferent." Maybe you could change the "instant."
Poetry to order for me.
AMDG,
Janet
Oh, and thank you. I meant to say that before I said anything else.
Yeah, Janet . . . want fries with that?
I like "indifferent," too, and I can't think of anything better. Yet, anyway.
And I have tried to change the other line, too. "Uh . . . inerrant? Fire hydrant? Uh . . . deterrent . . . errant? (see "inerrant," above) . . . " Nothing really works, that I can think of.
Anyway, you're still the winner of a Luxury Holy Week For Two At My House.
mysicar. Can't pass that one up. That's how I felt in the car yesterday with the sun in my face for four hours.
AMDG,
I didn't mean formal structure, esp. rhyme, is impossible or anything, just that it doesn't come as readily, partly because modern taste has not been as receptive to the tricks (inversions and such) and un-colloquial-isms that older poets used to stretch the resources of the language. I can't offhand think of many 20th c. poems more than a couple of dozen lines or so in length that use rhyme. I can't imagine something as long and fluent as Eve of Saint Agnes in our dialect.
I don't know Wright's work at all but love Merwin, especially his crazy stuff ca. 1965-1975. My acquaintance with modern (post-WWII) poetry came pretty much to a screeching halt sometime in the '70s.
I haven't seen that much of his poetry, just heard him read it, but David Mason comes to mind as a poet who's writing formally in a contemporary voice, and also frequently, I think, in long narrative poems. I can't say that much about it, because I haven't read that much of him myself, but he's part of a generation of poets working back into form from the places where the 60s and 70s took American poetry.
It's been a long time since I read Wright much, but I loved him in grad school. He definitely went the "breaking the formal mold" route, though some of his most haunting and desperate poems do make use of rhyme, albeit in quirky ways. I'm thinking of a particular one, and the title escapes me right now, as titles often do, and I can't remember how long it is, though it's not a tiny little lyric . . . short lines, jerky rhythms, and these strange rhymes which kind of come out of nowhere, in a terribly sad and despairing poem.
Mark Strand once said dismissively to me that he thought Wright was "sentimental," but I don't think that's right . . . I sometimes think that in Strand's poetic universe a bone that stoops to have flesh on it can be accused of undue sentiment. I like his work quite a lot, and some of it is beautiful, but I always find it cold. He's someone who can also use rhyme with facility, though I haven't seen it that much in his work, and only in short pieces. As far as I can remember, anyway . . .
Several springs ago, I was on the tractor, thrashing the buffalo grass behind the cross fence, when I was startled by a projectile entering my field of vision above and in front. It was grey, about the size of a softball, and falling fast. I flinched. It hit the ground about thirty feet in front of me and bounced once. I recognized it as a dove by way it bounced, having bounced a number of them myself over the years.
It was deceased. An ex-dove. It had shuffled off the mortal coil. I stopped the tractor and walked over to it, wondering, first, who might have thrown a dead dove at me, and, seeing no one, whether it had suffered a sudden stroke or heart failure at altitude.
As I was wondering, a light snow began to fall. Feathers. Lots of them. Obviously it had suffered some violent end. One moment it had been winging its course in peace and the very next it had simply exploded, its lifeless corpse following a ballistic trajectory that brought it directly over my head.
As I was puzzling in turn what might cause a dove to explode in flight, another object passed my peripheral vision, this one bigger than the last. I flinched again, figuring perhaps the sky was falling, after all. This appirition slowed and alighted in a tree behind me. It was an explanation, in the form of a peregrine. Not a very large bird but intensely serious, with disproportionately large, muscular talons that were orange-yellow in color. The expression it wore said "My lunch. Do you mind?"
That's funny, Steve. And appalling. I've been seeing a bird around here that I think may be an osprey.
I heard Strand do a reading once--back in the '70s, a phrase which is unavoidably frequent when I discuss anything having to do with modern letters. I thought there was something slightly off-putting about both him and his work, and coldness may have been an element of that.
I believe the phrase "New Formalists" came along a few years after I went off on another career track. I remember running across it and thinking "good for them."
Yep, that's an amazing hawk story. All my hawk experiences have been a little more purely voyeuristic: when we lived in Salt Lake, occasionally I'd hear all the songbirds in the yard go quiet, and when I looked out, there would be a hawk sitting sternly on the back fence, while all the little birds cowered in the snowball bush.
And for a while when we lived in Memphis, there was a redtail which hung around our back yard -- our house backed up to the highway, with a wide easement between our back fence and the big noise wall, and we had a lot of little wildlife in which the hawk was intensely interested.
And now we have these hawks which hunt over the rail trail . . . there's a section which is flanked by undeveloped land eaten by kudzu, which is good cover for the kind of prey the hawks are after. I love watching them.
Oh, I did once see a hawk standing in a driveway with something -- squirrel, maybe -- pinned beneath its talons and still struggling. I was driving down the street near Holy Rosary in Memphis, and I think I had to stop to look at it. Can't remember if I had children in the car at the time.
Mac: the whole reason we lived in Salt Lake City for eight years -- well, the reason we went there to begin with -- was for me to study with Mark Strand in the creative writing program at the University of Utah. I found him a very uncomfortable person to be around, though I did learn some things from him, and he was generous with his help for a time. I had a poem in The New Yorker in 1993 wholly because he had told me to send it there, and to use his name. She never read anything else I sent her.
So he was quite helpful in many ways, but I never felt at ease with him at all, or in that whole scene, come to that. It's a phase of my life about which I can't actually remember a huge amount of detail, which is odd. I remember vividly all kinds of things having nothing to do with graduate school or writing; it was some years after I left the program that I really began to write poems again (for the first time feeling that I had something to say). Of course now I'm not writing that many poems, though I am writing a lot of prose . . . which I should be doing before people get up . . .
Peregrines come through Texas from Mexico about this time every year, following perhaps two-thirds of the birds in North America to summer quarters. I see them fairly often, now that I know to look. Never so close again. Usually the are mere specks in the sky at two or three thousand feet, scanning for anything passing below them. They are magnificent birds, and, watching them hunt, one understands why kings and princes went to great expense to adapt them for entertainment back when there were kings and princes, before facebook and cable TV.
"I had a poem in The New Yorker in 1993 wholly because he had told me to send it there, and to use his name."
Ha. Suspicions confirmed. I remember--yes, back in the '70s--concluding that if I ever did anything as a writer it would be as an outsider, because I could see that things mostly worked this way and knew I would never be able to play the game. Getting into the New Yorker used to be pretty much the pinnacle before publishing one's first book. I recall an acquaintance who did get that far, but was never able to capitalize on it. Might've had something to do with his being a hopeless drunk.
It was definitely a game I tired of quickly, and I never played it that well to begin with.
I think, though, that there are more and more "outsiders" doing things. The loose association of "New Formalists" would be one sort of outside game, though I'm not really up on that one much either. I do know some people who I guess would fall under that rubric.
But mostly I just stay out of the way of it all. I'm just not comfortable at, say, writers' conferences, though the last one I went to, five years ago, was fun in lots of ways: the West Chester Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania. This is a gathering of formalist-type poets, who are mostly not famous the way that the Mark Strands of the world are famous, though Dana Gioia was there, as I recall.
I had gotten asked to be on a panel discussing the relationship between poetry and religion, and I was terrified, because I didn't know anyone there except the person who'd asked me to be on the panel and, as it turned out, one other poet who had been my teacher and mentor as an undergraduate. I just wasn't sure how to talk about poetry and religion to an audience I wasn't going to be able to gauge until I was sitting in front of them, which was quite nerve wracking. I don't think I've ever agonized over anything so much in my life as that little paper -- I rewrote it in my hotel room the day I got there, in a notebook . . . I was a wreck, and although the paper itself went over okay, I was pretty much tongue-tied at discussion time. Our panel generated the most heated discussion -- we might as well have talked about sex and politics while we were at it, and the other person I knew, besides the panel moderator, got up and walked out of the room in a rage, and every time we spoke for the rest of the weekend, all he could talk about was what a jerk he thought the panel moderator was, which was just deranged . . . and I kept thinking, "I am a housewife. WHAT am I doing here with these people?"
Once the panel was over the conference got a lot more fun, and people were very nice. But -- sheesh. I just can't do that stuff all the time.
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