First Base

One of the problems with being a self-proclaimed "poet" (and this is true of any self-proclamation) is that you can get together with other self-proclaimed poets and proclaim each other poets.

That is OK in itself. It's basically an informal club, at that point. Unfortunately -- after decades of cultural neglect, abuse or just uncertainty re: poetry -- these kind of "clubs" can become the baseline for what a poet is. That's when you've got a problem.

The problem gets worse when an otherwise good linguistic theory -- the one propounded by I.A. Richards that I mentioned in a previous post ("Ug! Fire!") -- is so open-ended that it lends a false vitality to this impoverished situation.

I recently made a comment on a NY Times blog post about poets and the end of summer (or something like that), and my comment was in verse. The blog wistfully quoted some contemporary poets on the seasonal subject, but one commenter found the whole thing wanting.

My verse comment followed his comment, as a response in agreement. Here it is (tidied up some):

To One Tired of the Tiring

"Mannered and obsolete," I can hear them now,
Smirking over words that form ocean drops
In stale modernist theories, which stops
Any effort past bland themes they allow.
Are there words with secret lives of their own,
Huddled, shrinking from a meek dread of love
In a cold, dripping cave? They cannot move
Beyond the clapping hand of Elite's koan.
Pure faith in the sweet pull of longing's ache
Reveals the lore each limbed harp holds within
Her sweet cascade of lissome Summer's chime.
There, I'd give more than I could dream to take,
In soft dalliance with firm rules' ken:
Every human touch pours out rhyme and time.

"Them" in line one refer to those poets, however sincere, who may be operating from this clubby "baseline," and who don't appear to realize that their work is suffering as a result, while "they" in line four refers to the "modernist theories" that have become a de facto standard.

Frankly, I don't think my effort at a Petrarchan sonnet (with a cheat) is a whole lot better. But it's what I felt at the time, as best I could put it in then, however mannered and obsolete the form may appear.

My cheat is that a true Petrarchan sonnet's octave usually rhymes ABBA ABBA, not ABBA CDDC. Oh well.

Petrarchan sonnets (as I mentioned a year or more ago) are much harder to write in English than their Shakespearean cousins because our language does not contain nearly as many usable rhyme words as Italian does. Sticking with traditional English rhyme patterns works far better.

However, I've tried a couple other ones, and maybe I'll go into some interesting facets of the Petrarchan structure someday. Some people really like them better. An English writer who was good at them (I've mentioned her before, also) is Christina Rossetti. Her brother's translation of Dante's "La Vita Nuova" may also be a good guide for them, if you're interested. I'm not a fan of his original ones.

Maybe I'll even fix the rhyme scheme on this one, if it can be fixed.