That's Embarrassing!

OK, here goes -- a set of revisions for "My Mandolin Sings" posted in this blog on May 6:

As I mentioned at the time, the second verse is a little wobbly in places, but not in so many that I can't live with it the way it is.

The third verse has issues that bother me, some of which I've mentioned. So, here is the first full try (after many cross-outs) of the third verse:

Brooks babbling and firs swirling
The mandolin cries
Tails twitching, wings unfurling
Their natures arise
The woodland spirits calling
By day or by night
Whenever mercy's falling
The mandolin cries.

I post this one with a red face -- because this is actually worse in many ways. Oh, "woodland spirits" and "natures arise" ... ecchh. They don't really mean anything, and they don't connect to anything else in the poem specifically that might suggest what these "natures" and "spirits" are or may refer to.

While it does correct the "-ing" issue with the first try at a third verse and puts the "-ever" word in the penultimate line as the other verses have it, the second try makes so many other mistakes, including even more artificial phrasing, that it "cries" for more work.

I have Try Number Three, and I'll try and post it soon.

Till then.

Regularly irregular

Trying to do this weekly, as I did with The Art of whatever it was (my 2008 posts). However, that may not work out as smoothly. Bear with me, and remember -- we're improvising more now!

I have made some progress on the songform thing. Stay tuned.

Dancing Around It

One of the really dumb, but "good," mistakes I've made deals with a misconception that went on for years before I re-read the original and felt totally stupid.

Back in college, I pored again and again over a book of Ezra Pound's essays, trying to mine them for a metrical poet's secrets. In one essay, he rhapsodizes over the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, especially one classically themed poem (forgotten which) in which (as I now recall -- I may still have it wrong) "cross-rhymes abound."

My overheated youthful brain kept misreading it "cross-rhythms" -- a nonexistent term, AFAIK. And I spent years searching for such things in poems and music.

When I went back to my old school and went into the library and found my old Ez book in the stacks, I went to my favorite essay on Swinburne and -- turned crimson in the face.

Cross-rhymes are used when writing hexameters in English to break up the monotonous sounding lines (probably not at all monotonous in the languages they were meant for, in English hexameters just drone on and on).

"Cross-rhythms" don't exist. Or do they?

See if you can read (aloud) the following verbal masterpiece by an American master about a pictoral masterpiece from a Dutch master in two ways.

The Dance

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

-- by William Carlos Williams

See?

Sometimes it pays to make embarrassing mistakes.

Normally, I'd cite my source for the text. But I found lots of pages on Blogger with both the painting and the poem reproduced.

"Now, how many was that ... ?"

I said at some point that, in this new version of my Blogger account, we will all be learning together.

I may one day wish I'd never said that (because when you learn together, you have to submit your mistakes to open inspection), but -- here goes.

The previous poem is an experiment in what some poets call "songform." What I think they mean by that is writing a (more or less) serious poem in a verse form reserved for music.

What I tried to do with "My Mandolin Sings" is not write strict pentameter or tetrameter lines, but try to parallel my syllable count, verse to verse, like a hymn.

Also like a hymn, I tried to suggest a tune with the action of the lines (while writing the first draft, I had a kind of hornpipe-y version of "Slane" -- an Irish tune churchgoers may know from the hymn "Be Thou My Vision" -- running in my head).

But you can see, I'm sure, that, while the first verse works OK, the second and third ones have weak spots.

I tried to correct a glaring error in rhyming, when I had all the lines in the third verse rhyme with some form of an "-ing" word, by going dialectical. That may turn out to be a "good" mistake. We'll see.

I'll keep you posted (by "post") on my progress, if any.

A work in progress

My Mandolin Sings

Like a thrush on the heather,
My mandolin sings.
Dancing as a tiny feather,
The joy that it brings!
If times be weighed by weather,
I'm lonely or sad --
Whatever my heart's tether,
My mandolin sings.

Her strings fly 'neath my fingers,
How happy our days.
Her high note chirping lingers
In air as she plays!
Deeply as a kitten purrs,
Her low notes uncurl.
Whichever part she prefers,
How happy our days.

Brooks babblin', pine limbs swirlin',
The mandolin sings.
Tails twitchin', wings unfurlin',
As nature it springs.
Whenever mercy's fallin',
By day or by night,
I grant my heart its callin' --
The mandolin sings.

by William Mark Gabriel

Now, the laurel ...

I recently bought an anthology of modern British poets, and I found myself really enjoying reading it.

Many of my favorites from the collection are by someone of my generation, Carol Ann Duffy -- whom the book said is the most popular poet in the UK.

I guess you could say she's "in charge" now.