"I thought he said to 'Leave it to the French'!"
EASTER COMES EARLY
Before the hills clothe their dry banks with green,
The cold ground's morbid grip begins to break,
And blue crocuses start to sprout their sheen;
The past falls away like dead limbs that shake
Off maples and oaks in dry wind's take.
As sap rises in trunks, so warmth does in me;
It lights a fire that burns for its own sake,
Watching birds cry 'havoc' from tree to tree.
After the fall's abyssal seres the scene,
The tiny feathers weave their bobbins' stake;
They cross the shorn limbs' riot, as they glean
What they may while hungry hearts and loins quake.
The bulbs push petalled flame in spiralled rake
As dancers' flowing waves lip spuming sea.
My draught of wind shudders in their wake,
Watching birds cry 'havoc' from tree to tree.
While I gaze through warping space, the timing's keen
'Twixt hawk and sparrow, both on the make
For prey, neither finding the other mean:
Dart or dagger the same in root's mandrake.
We join in search for our creation's ache;
Whether meal or meaning, our goal's to be.
Truth's nightingale's fraud, though he's no fake,
Watching birds cry 'havoc' from tree to tree.
Chiefs of state and those who want to hold it,
Buy this petty advice (it's yours for free!):
There's no union in nature -- I've polled it,
Watching birds cry 'havoc' from tree to tree.
Copyright (C) 2012 William Mark Gabriel. All Rights Reserved.
I
plan to have some notes later on. For now: "abyssal" is an adjective
without a noun. I want the cracked grammar to go along with the cracked
time-sense in that line. Also, "cry 'havoc'" is not original with me. As
best I recall, it's in one of Pound's translations of either de Born or
Daniel. Neither text is available to me right now (another book
giveaway mistake). They're in, I think, the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, published originally by New Directions.
Till
more comments come, please look at the structure here and compare it to
the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet structure I suggested in my post
Conceited Metaphors (scroll to the Popular Posts at the bottom of this
page for an easy link.).
The Ballad of the Ballade
Yes, it's a ballade
-- with an "e". The reference to birds is a signature trope from the
troubadors, one of whom I believe may have invented the form. It is best
known for the French literary poet Francois Villon, whom I posted on
very early in this blog. The standard translation of his masterwork, The Testament, is by American master Galway Kinnell, also referenced in that blog post (The Forensic Caesura, in the 2008 archive).
Kinnell,
in his introduction, says something about rhyme being a "dead hand" for
a modern poet, and writing ballades made me see where he was coming
from. That B rhyme has got to match a lot of English words! And this is
the shorter form of ballade used by Villon.
I
had to struggle with this one because all my beforehand planning meant
nothing once I started to write! I think English really rewards the
laconic writer (Perhaps French the prolix*? I wouldn't know.), but with
the ballade, you have the English quatrain doubled, with a mandatory
refrain line at the end. So, you've got to use "beefier" ideas to fill
the ballade out, but you have the requirements of much tougher rhyme
scheme and overall form to meet than say, the sonnet. Remember, English,
like German, has fewer rhyme words than any Romance language. For
example, the Italian ballata and ballatteta, similar to the French
ballade, have much tougher rhyme schemes than the French form does. I
doubt the Italian form (or forms -- not sure if ballata and ballatetta
are that different) can even be attempted in English for original
poetry.
This
blog is mostly about form, but the matter of my ballade deserves some
comment from me, too. Though I think it's hard (if not impossible) to
critique your own work usefully, here goes:
I
was tempted to put "Easter" in quotation marks in the title, because
I'm not referring strictly to the Christian festival day so much as the
general idea of springtime resurrection. And though the envoi (that's
the last four lines, my friends) pointedly refers to a natural disunity,
the unity of nature is the dominant theme of the work (I say "work"
because, if you remember, someone else has got to call it a poem before
it gets to be one, at least in my book.). Irony is tough to bring forth,
especially these days, in formal verse, partly because I think you need
swings in diction ("'Twixt" and "on the make", for instance) to really
pull it off -- but the form is so daunting that it can stifle that sort
of thing, or make it come off as really pompous (a perennial problem for
me). I revised "twixt" out several times, only to put it back in,
simply because I needed the "x" to suggest the real theme here. (I'm
serious.) Still, I thought the exercise was worth it, partly because, as
the third of a series of ballades (the other two are too personal to
put here), it needs contextual references to Villon for the whole to
work, at least for me.
So
yes, maybe it's OK for English writers to use French verse forms, after
all. But I still think you need a really good reason to do it.You'll
have to decide for yourself whether or not I had one.
___
*
I meant 'prolix' in the original sense of 'extended', not necessarily
with the negative connotations we have in the word's modern sense.
"Another one?" "Oh, no ... ."
SPRING’S FLUNG
Tide of green refreshes vernal day,
Light within the heart invigors clay.
When the dewy morning leaves its light
Scattered moth-like among blooming hills,
When the clamoring avian mobs indict
Warring tribes of feathers, claws and bills,
When petals' waft perfumes nostril's gills,
Heart prepares the soul to welcome day.
Armies marching joyous, legs of six,
Rank and file, antennae of their race,
Tune their search for royals' daily fix,
While the lucid wings of fighters chase
Semenated draughts in vulvar space,
Prancing minions herd their lust for day.
Blackened soils in molded work for death
Wait, the spoils of wars in air to come;
Jaws of worms, in lively touch, by breath
Take their holy work, the rot to sum.
Each awaits to each his mortal drum:
Worms in earth reverse the thirst for day.
Seeds in dust prepare their jaunt for life,
Whether tendril, rhizome, root inters;
Germination finds its way through strife --
Muddy, desert, flaming, pecked --, refers
Air that crawlers hale from out their furs
Rootward, shroving budded fruit to day.
Spirit's fond when sap is furling green,
Equal night recurs that winnowed heart
Find its tender shadow's blossomed mean.
Dark our pater: heaven's living art
Lumes its presence outward, hallowed dart.
Thickened blood's as sweet as sapping day.
Lord Penumbra hides the fire unknown
By his crowning, capsuled heat its shade;
Soul the mirror, breath the flesh, the bone --
Question answering by nothing made.
Finding searches end, beginnings laid,
While our hate of hatred lights the day.
Copyright (C) 2012 William Mark Gabriel. All Rights Reserved.
The Bent Ballata
It
turns out that the basic 'ballata' form is not that much different from
some English poems and not all that hard to write. A definition in
Wikipedia may refer to some text-for-music form -- the ballata poems I
found in my old book of Italian poems (The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, edited
and translated by George Kay) do not usually rhyme the way it says.
They nearly all rhyme ABABBa -- or something similar. The little "a" in
the rhyme scheme I'm using refers to a rhyme sound or word or line that
recurs at the end of each stanza, not within the stanza itself. The
'ballatetta' is something I got from what Guido Cavalcanti called some
of his ballata poems in that anthology -- his can be much more complex
with very long stanzas and intricate rhyme schemes.* Wikipedia offers a
link to the Italian text under the article titled with his name.
Cavalcanti was a friend and colleague of Dante.
The
form I used for my effort at a ballata I got from Angelo Poliziano, a
friend and colleague of Lorenzo the Magnificent, also a master at the
ballata. The Wikipedia article says that the 'ballata' is not like the
French ballade, but like some other French form it names. However, the
ballata poems by Poliziano and de Medici in my anthology look exactly
like the French ballade of Villon -- though some of them use refraining
rhyme sounds and words instead of refraining lines, and the verses do
not rhyme with each other. Sometimes the Italian poems use refrain
lines, though. The big difference is that they do not use an envoi
at the end, but use a verset at the beginning. Dante's and Cavalcanti's
ballata poems also use the beginning verset, at least in my anthology.
It's probably not called a "verset". That's just my term for it. Each
one of them introduces the refrain, whether a line, a word or a rhyme
sound.
My
effort -- "Spring's Flung" -- is based on one of Poliziano's (starting
"Ben venga maggio" {'Welcome May' in the translation in my book}), at
least in basic verse structure. I used a meter that I associate with
dance -- trochaic tetrameter. It has a little beat at the end to stop
the line, as I discussed in my post "Trochee Trips from Long to Short
...". The dance angle is something I got from the basic definition of
"ballata" -- "a song for dance". The title of my effort is no conscious
attempt at originality or ironic reference -- I just thought of it as I
finished typing the text into the blog editor. I didn't have one before
that. (Note: I've since slightly changed it and added a what I think is a
made-up word to the verset. I have also corrected two lines in the
first full verse that each had one too many syllables [Egad!])
In
the text itself, I appear to have either coined some words or bent them
so far out of their ordinary usage that they might as well have been
coined. "Sapping", for instance, refers to both growth and dehydration,
in the sense of "drawing out" rather than draining, say, of strength
(although you could think if it that way, if you want to). Also, "fond"
refers to the older definition of "foolish," rather than liking
something or someone. I took "capsuled heat" from a Borges short story
-- though that exact term does not appear it the story, as far as I
recall. And "antennae of their race" is an allusion to Ezra Pound.
I
could say more, but I'd rather just let you have fun with what I've
written. Again, you'll have to decide for yourself whether it's a poem
or something 'bent'.
________
*Poems
that old don't usually have titles, other than their first lines. The
Cavalcanti poem I have been thinking of is "Fresca rosa novella"
(translated 'Fresh new rose', in my anthology) -- which is an exception,
in several ways. It is the only one of his in my anthology not termed a
"ballatetta" by Cavalcanti, and it does
have a rhyme scheme that resembles what Wikipedia has been calling a
"ballata". Maybe it's the author's effort at saying "This is the
authentic ballata of the troubadors" or something like that -- but
that's just my wild guess. The rhyme scheme is ABBABAABCDDEEa for each
of three verses, and the beginning "verset" uses the rhyme scheme of
last four lines of the main verse pattern. The little "a" is the refrain
rhyme at the last part of each verse and the verset, fully a part of
each one's final sentence but metrically a tag. Also, not only do the
verses not rhyme with each other, but, once a rhyme sound is employed,
it is ruled out for the rest of the poem, except for the refraining one
that doesn't appear anywhere else. When I was thinking of "impossible to
do successfully in English", this is the one I meant.
"Put not your trust in princes ... ."
I realize Ezra Pound was a fascist.
While his Cantos,
yellowed and tattered in hardback, sits not forty feet from my elbow
here at the public library (where I've posted all these), so does The Trial of Ezra Pound --
the account written by his attorney after defending him against a
charge of treason. (Pound was found not competent to stand trial.)
I
have been aware of Pound's some 300 broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini
and the Axis powers during World War II for decades, my Poetry 101
professor in college even discussing the issue with us in class, having
been himself a WWII vet in North Africa who'd heard some of Pound's
radio diatribes (if they can be called even that) while there. He
pointed out to us that Faber & Faber remained his UK publisher
during that period, and that some people back then thought it was good
that "the trains ran on time" when Mussolini first came to power.
Shortly
after I became more aware of just how bad these broadcasts were (while
reading an article in yet another public library by {I think, not sure}
Kenneth Koch in the early 1980s), I bundled up most of my Pound-related
books and handed them over to charity.
In the bookstore boom of the late 1990s, I rebought Confucius to cummings, the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, and Rimbaud's Illuminations -- an author Pound put in his pet literary canon, as can be seen in the essay "How to Read" in his Literary Essays. I checked my boxes of books in storage just before writing this, and the Selected Poems
appears to be missing. I'm sure I donated that one all over again. My
relationship to this author is complicated, to say the least.
A
transcript of some of his broadcasts surfaced on the 'net last year,
and what I thought I knew about Pound fell through a trapdoor into
Chaos. I'd had no idea they were that bad. Had I
been foreman of a jury and saw those transcripts, Pound would have
gotten the firing squad. Or I would have resigned in protest. No
problem.
I
want to be as clear as possible: to say I find the reality of Pound's
Fascist background deplorable would be far too mild a word.
Unforgiveable? It all happened before I was born, so I'm not in that
position. I just don't know a word that would fit.
But without Pound's Literary Essays and Personae,
I would not be the writer I am. I probably wouldn't be one at all.
Maybe some of you (many? how would I know?) think that would have been a
good thing. (Could I have just gone to law school instead? Wallace
Stevens did. I don't like Wallace Stevens' poetry. It's not bad -- it
just never grabbed me, that's all. Including "Sunday Morning". I mean,
you'd think ... but no. Sorry.)
Why am I going into all this? "Antennae of their race" in Spring's Flung was not
intended as a compliment to Pound's legacy. (Read the whole verse
again, if you're not sure.) But my interest in Italian poetry, French
poetry, German poetry, and my sustained interest in English poetry and
just plain poetry all derive from his writing -- so that's why he's also
the subject of an allusion in Easter Comes Early -- not necessarily as a compliment, but as an attempt to be
accurate.
In
sum, I'm going to stand by my assessment and advice I first wrote in my
post From C to Shining c in The Art of Definition -- mainly because continued
hand-wringing over the crimes of someone who's dead and gone won't
change anything, except to learn from their mistakes when possible and
to amend them where possible.
I'll
add one more note: also about forty feet from my elbow right now is an
(out of print) slim paperback from those past masters of the slim
paperback: Dover. It's called Early Poems of Ezra Pound. Some of his earliest work stands on its own and deserves to be in its own little collection.
That so much of the rest of Pound's work can be so often troubling is headstone (and lesson) enough.
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