The Rogue Sonneteer Part 4

Does it work the other way?

Here's another comment in verse I made to a blog post that I read about a month ago. The question in the post asked if social media actually improve the users' lives in any real way, or does the phenomenon actually provide a false sense of sociability?

Here's my Petrarchan reply (fixed up considerably):

More Came

If, in this web of copper and concrete
And carbon, we could join our yielding souls
Any other way, I'd find this, our wholes
Inside these cubes of labor's being, sweet.
A blown kiss, or a gently waving treat
Tenders our memories' store more than touch foals
Taste or sense of soft-urging pressure's goals:
Greater longing, sooner blown down the street.
Still, love for love owns nothing we see;
Though nothing replaces skin on skin impressed,
Our nows deny it, even when framed art!
Electrons current our sharp need: the heart,
Despite its pumping pleasure, finds rest.
As ever, we bring what we send, thus free.

Again, I ABBA CDDC'd the draft I posted then. This is the (more or less) finished result.

What's odd to me is that this one seems to contradict the previous comment-poem I posted below, which actually was posted later in Blog-time.

Hmmmm ... .


Waking up in Eden

I finally finished Paradise Lost.

I was trying to make it in 90 days, just as a goal, but I missed by a month-plus.

Starting at 80-100 lines a sitting, I eventually settled on a pace of one book of the epic per week, and except in busy times, I kept to that. But as I got deeper into the story, I found that I could read much faster. The final book, for instance, I read in two brief sittings on a Saturday.

That last book, save for its poignant final lines, seems mostly a Biblically oriented set-up for Paradise Regained. Though I felt that it fit the overall narrative smoothly, the final book contained no stirring moments for me.

But I was surprised to find that the epic as a whole contained many such moments. I grew up thinking of Milton as a staid Puritan whose epic poem was some theological exegesis hung out on a spare "Adam and Eve" narrative to dry. That was not the case, except for the aforementioned Book XII.

I also remember being told in school that Satan was thought of, at least by some revisionist critics in the 1970s, as a kind of epic hero -- a sort of Bad Odysseus. But that's only defensible in the first four or five books. After that, Satan is clearly a supporting character, and Adam is the epic hero -- if a tragic one.

Overall, I found a few places for the parochial Milton, but so few they could easily be set in the context of his place and time without detracting from the story. I suspect he first fell from favor for his diehard Puritanism and devout Euro-centrism back when I was a student. If his reputation in the English literary canon sagged as a result, I'm for putting him back up there -- now that I've read his greatest work as a middle-aged adult.

Many speeches in the poem foreshadow the poetic literature to come. Adam, lamenting his fallen state while awaiting God's judgment, sounds like a modernist in the throes of existential alienation. Also, I see the style of the Romantics in Satan's daring flight to freedom and in the many rhapsodic descriptions of Eve, as well as in her speeches.

There's more: the archangels spout Milton's moral and teleological (teleology is the philosophy of purpose) viewpoints, and both concepts and language balance out like Pope and the Augustans. The Victorians (Hopkins loved Milton) owe Miltonic diction and prosody such an obvious debt that ... well, why go on?

There's something else I mentioned in "My Summer Reading:" the Koran containing some of Satan's backstory that could have influenced Milton. The Muslim holy book also views Adam as a prophet, a knower of divine wisdom. In Paradise Lost, Adam's savanthood quietly emerges as the poem marches toward its concluding verses. There truly is something here -- but exactly what, I can't say, except that I think this great, lost poet of the English Civil War (and after) deserves some careful consideration along those lines.



What You Say!

I used a term in the previous section that literary critics employ in discussing poets and their work. A poet's "diction" is simply choice in language and phrasing.

To critics, diction is an important first reference in a poet's work, because that's what readers first encounter, especially when the poet is otherwise unknown to them.

But I'm putting it last because, for us, diction is more of a destination. Diction -- the term harkening back to poetry's roots as an oral medium -- is essential to your watermark. It's what people normally see lying directly behind your work, rather than those responses to innermost thoughts and experiences that create the watermark's stamp itself. The difference would be like that between the corporate logo and what (and who) made it.

I recall reading several years ago a book, Poetic Diction, that obviously went into detail about this subject. The thing I recall most distinctly is that the writer saw a profound difference between the phrases "prophets old" and "old prophets."

The first phrase, and its characteristic adjective/noun inversion, is -- of course -- Milton's. The diction critic was saying that the Miltonic phrase resounds with ancient echoes, while the term "old prophets" merely calls to mind elderly soothsayers. Milton's choice helped create his personal stamp.

All your work really is a set of choices. When those choices become so recognizably well-defined that readers know it's you almost immediately, you have your watermark.

And now you also have what I've been offering all along: poetry is the art of that definition.

The rest is up to you: lame habit or taut insight, loose usage or creative tension, string of cliches or a whorl of innovations.

It's all up to you, my friends. God speed.


One More Before I Go

I think I've neglected a particular type of poet in The Rogue Sonneteer..

Since I began Measure for Measures with the cafe society of Open Mic Night in mind, I'd like to try and make full circle by addressing certain members of that diverse group before I close the portion of the project.

Poets who "slam" or write for performance are gaining in popularity, and it's easy to see why. Fast, competitive (in slams) and full of streetwise energy, the slammers and "performance" poets (more than just slam poetry without the competition) cook their creations with rapid-fire rhyme and pulse-pounding rhythms, then season with a dash of irony and a pinch of salt-of-the earth wisdom.

Their Milton and Shakespeare are Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. Far-fetched? Maybe. But, like Milton, Kerouac wrote an epic poem -- Mexico City Blues. And like the Shakespeare of the sonnets, Bukowski wrote a sequence in memory of his lost love, Liz, many of them in The Roominghouse Madrigals.

Whether Kerouac and Bukowski are anyone else's guiding lights is another question. But, based on my (limited) exposure to slam and performance poetry, these men's best-known work created the ground that performance artists stand on and formed the very air slammers breathe.

Like the slammers and performance poets of today, Bukowski and Kerouac were strong individualists who seemed to thrive on being misunderstood outsiders. But, unlike some slammers and performance artists I've heard, they stayed in control of their works' imagery (when it could be controlled), and their diction was rock solid, when solidity was needed.

In short, they were good writers. The misunderstanding surrounding both of them is that they were labeled "beat" poets. Instead, they were both surrealists. While I believe this is the key unlocking the riches hiding inside their edgy verses, I'll leave that task to literary critics. What's important for slammers and performance poets alike is that Kerouac and Bukowski were writers in the American "hard-boiled" tradition, poets of the New World surreal and visionaries of the post-war era who gave testimony with unparalleled tragi-comic candor.

That candor, I believe, included their personal faults. Still, they communicated, and they "kept it real" -- even when life around them got very, very unreal. And I think they stayed true to themselves and to their experiences, however ugly or misshapen those experiences, or however faulty their lives, ultimately became.

In the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free, they were. You can do the same. Just don't expect it to come easy. And remember, there is always a price to be paid, whatever course you choose.

I'll be seeing you. Look for me in the cafe during Open Mic. I'll be the middle-aged paunch at the back table, sitting by himself and listening.

Make me smile.


Footnotes

90th Chorus

I thought I was a phantom
me, myself,
Suffering. One night I saw
my older brother Gerard
Standing over my crib with wild
hair, as if he had just
pee-visited the pail
in the hall of snores
and headed for his room
was investigatin the Grail,
Nin & Ma's bedroom,
Who slept in the same bed
and in the crib alongside.
Oily is the moment so
that phantom was my brother
only in the sense that cotton
is soft,
Only in the sense that
When you die
you muffle
in your sigh
the thorny hard
regret of rocks
of life-belief.
I knew, I hoped, to go be saved.

from Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac, Grove Press, New York, 1990. Copyright 1959 by Jack Kerouac. (text indentation not preserved by blogger.com)

"Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful."

from Manifestoes of Surrealism by Andre Breton: Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, trs. Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1972, p. 14. Copyright University of Michigan, 1969.