Let's All Write A Chant!

As I may have mentioned before, I have creative written my way through the Handbook of Poetic Forms once before in my early 20s.  I am not sure if I was as strict about doing every one as I am in this go 'round of the project, but the Chant is a form that I actually remembered from the first time.  I had written one about a night when I was probably talking to a girl and a rainstorm suddenly happened.  The repetitive line was, if memory serves, "And the skies open up when we speak."

This was somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain when I arrived at writing a poem in this form and, as synchronicity would have it, at the same time I was reading the story of Noah from the book of Genesis from the 1599 Geneva translation of the Bible (for fun).  The line jumped out at me "The windows of Heaven were opened."  So, I decided to write my chant as sort of a reflection on the relief of annihilation.

Ron Padgett says that chants have no fixed form, but do feature repetitive lines, words, or phrases.  He pays particular attention to a revival of the chant form in poetry with a sort of modern primitive feel among some poets in the 1960s.  There is a suggestion of power or weightiness to the repetition.

I understand the draw of this.  Although I am now about as urban as they get (and, hopefully, urbane as well) I do have the vestigial remains of roots in modern primitivism from my younger days.  The example of chant that immediately sprung to my mind is a song by Faith & The Muse (a favorite of mine in the years of my life which always remind me of that Paul Verlaine line

"What have you done, O you there. Who endlessly cry,. Say: what have you done, there. With youth gone by?")

So, here is my chant poem.

And The Windows of Heaven Were Opened
by Paul Mathers

This lifeless dry rock face a-craving for weeping and
the windows of Heaven were opened.
The earth was congested with cruelty and
the windows of Heaven were opened.
All eyes were clouded and fogged out of sight.
The heat of mid-day burnt fully at night.
The people grew cagey and ready to fight and
the windows of Heaven were opened.

All creation groaned from its caverns beneath and
the windows of Heaven were opened.
The blood-spattered dust demanded a fee and
the windows of Heaven were opened.
We stood on the hills, we stood in the vale,
watched darkness pour in and beginning of hail,
and soon we'd be sleeping in the eye of a whale and
the windows of Heaven were opened.

The task of atonement makes one quite alone and
the windows of Heaven were opened.
The sins on a ship or the sins on the loam and
the windows of Heaven were opened.
We huddle in mansions, we huddle in caves,
we huddle in gutters, we huddle in graves.
We count up our losses and ignore that which saves and
the windows of Heaven are opened.

Let's All Write A Blues Poem!

We have now reached one of the forms that absolutely terrifies me. It seems like embarrassing myself is an inevitability here. It's not that I don't like "the blues." I think it's a beautiful form of music that serves as an outlet for a certain type of basic human anguish.

Our textbook offers a quote from Ralph Ellison which I think expresses the spirit of the blues.  He said that the blues "at once express the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit."

I am going to sit this form out on making a video of myself reading an example poem aloud for two reasons.  The first is that the thought of me reading the blues strikes me as going beyond absurd and nearing the realm of the disrespectful.  I am that far from a credible blues man as you shall see anon (or, as you can see by how I finished that sentence out of the abundance of my heart.)  The second is that I feel that this form would be better served by giving an example in the musical form.  Here's Leadbelly:

 

 But we also want to include an example in the form of poetry.  When one looks to the form of Blues Poems, one could not find a better place than the works of Langston Hughes.  Hughes was one of the golden children of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote a great deal of blues poetry.

Morning After
by Langston Hughes

I was so sick last night I
Didn’t hardly know my mind.
So sick last night I
Didn’t know my mind.
I drunk some bad licker that
Almost made me blind.

Had a dream last night I
Thought I was in hell.
I drempt last night I
Thought I was in hell.
Woke up and looked around me—
Babe, your mouth was open like a well.

I said, Baby! Baby!
Please don’t snore so loud.
Baby! Please!
Please don’t snore so loud.
You jest a little bit o’ woman but you
Sound like a great big crowd.

Ok.  So, I'm going to take that as a permission slip from Langston Hughes to use humor in my blues poem.  I've decided that I must needs go meta with my piece.  I am also borrowing from the first stanza from a joke blues poem I posted on Facebook.

The Paul Mathers Style Blues
by Paul Mathers

Oh, I looked in my cupboard this morning
I was out of Earl Grey tea.
I made Kadota Fig Tarts
and the Pinot Grigio wasn't chilled properly.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.
I'm just a nebbish who's feeling devilish,
I've got the Paul Mathers style blues.

Well, I'm a raging neurotic.
I've got my ennui down. 
My existential dread 
is known all over town.
I read the German philosophers 
and tend to agree with their views.
But my poetic cathexis compels me to employ this form,
I've got the Paul Mathers style blues.


The blues, it isn't in me.
I'd rather talk interior design.
The pedant in me recoils
from how I used too many beats in a line.
I've bumbled up this form poem.
I'll never be a Langston Hughes.
And that's why I'm a'wailin' 
"I've got them Paul Mathers style blues!"

Every Bally Poem by Robert Burns

I have to start by saying I feel like I have made it over one hump in this project.  A quick look back at the list of Harvard Classics shows me that while there are still volumes of poetry to come, this is the last in the series that compiles every poem ever written by a single poet.  I have two theses on this volume to make right up front: 1) I enjoyed the work of Robert Burns immensely however 2) I strongly feel that poems are not meant to be read in this manner (looking over at my bookshelf, I'm suddenly acutely aware that I will probably never take down Allen Ginsberg's White Shroud or Cosmopolitan Greetings again except to move.  Why do I even own these aside from the latter being autographed?  Who reads White Shroud and why?), although I'm partly to blame for that.  In the interest of moving this project along, I sat down in long stretches and read the book like a novel.  I think it is generally wiser and more helpful to read a poem or two each day rather than 45 pages of one page poems in a sitting.  It put me in mind of Truman Capote's assessment of Venice which he said was "like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”"

The poems of Burns are, or at least were (the much poorer we), deeply ingrained in Western Civilization.  Like Shakespeare and Milton, a lot of the phrases we say on a daily basis came from his pen.  I share Dr. Eliot's feeling that Burns was one of the greatest poets in the English language.  His mastery of composition makes it seem easy and conversational.  I was always amazed and delighted to come across a great, classic poem in this volume of course (what with all of the loves being like red red roses, auld acquaintances getting overlooked, and all of those murine and homonid plans going agley) but I found that I was equally interested in the vast eccentricities included therein.

A good share of Burns' work are songs, generally rewriting lyrics to existing songs, none of which I had ever heard of before (so the titles read along the lines of "Nancy's the Cutie o' the Glen- to the tune of 'There's a Wee Clootie in a But an' Ben.'"  P.S. Not an actual Burns title.  It's a composite.  Like New York magazine does.)  So it's kind of like reading the lyrics to a new Weird Al album when you're past the age of knowing all popular music.  Except to the lyrical content of Burns I would employ the adjective "clever" rather than "novelty."  

He also wrote a lot of mean-spirited epitaphs for people he didn't like.  It would take an extraordinarily charming human to prevent this from being the very pinnacle of déclassé.  Burns is almost that charming.

The most inscrutable pieces, which left me clamoring for an editor, are the pieces which comment on long forgotten "current events."  I know enough from my travels in Great Britain and my vast library of Sir Harry Lauder recordings to make sense of Burns' often thick dialectical writing.  I know enough of history to hirple along with him when he brings up Wallace or Charles James Fox.  But even living in the golden age of the internet was no help when he starts naming a provincial minister who held some unpopular point of doctrine.

My knowledge of Burns' biography lacks coordination, I'm afraid, and the introductory note gives the briefest of flyovers.  I do know that he was censured by the Kirk-session for an unwedlocked intimacy with a young lady.  I sensed a somewhat jaded view of religion in Burns although I did not sense a falling away from faith, which served to draw me closer to Burns.

I think I like Burns best when he writes benedictions.  He was very graceful in these.  This passage from a lament for James, the Earl of Glencairn very much put me in mind of my friend Rob who passed away almost a year ago now:

"The bridegroom may forget the bride

Was made his wedding wife yestereen;

The monarch may forget the crown

That on his head an hour has been;

The mother may forget the child

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;

But I'll remember thee, Glencairn,

And a' that thou hast done for me!"

As we become more distant from one another even as we grow more global as a culture, the poems of Robert Burns are one of those literary treasure troves caches growing dusty from misuse.  This is a tragedy we all share.  I cannot recommend highly enough that you get a volume of Burns and read from it as often as you can.

Just limit yourself to a half dozen poems or less a day. 

Me reading The Soul of The Wine by Charles Baudelaire

   

Let's All Write a Ballad!

Yes, I am still working through The Handbook of Poetic Forms in spite of the half-year's worth of simmering on the back burner.

Our next tasting of vinum daemonum is the variety known as The Ballad.  This is an ancient form.  Let's spend a moment unpacking the history of the form before we glide into composition.

Early ballads were folk songs, likely originating in the borderlands of Scotland and England.  Their subject matter would often include the supernatural or mythological, love, and heightened emotions (which is code speak for "probably someone dies.")  Here is an example from the folk/celtic/goth fusion band Faith and the Muse with an interpretation of the traditional ballad The Unquiet Grave:



Of course, there are examples in the evolution of the form of the ballad being employed for more exclusively social justice messages as American folk music enthusiasts are probably well aware.  There are variations on the form in the Western Canon, notably Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol (both of which I highly recommend) falling more in line with the "heightened emotion" subject matter.  Needless to say, the ballad in the literary form is not necessarily set to music, although it can be and certainly, as with all poetry, must needs be composed on the tongue.

I should also mention the hodiernal prevailing understanding of the ballad in popular music as a love ballad which may conjure up images of a stadium full of waving lighters or, more likely, the sort of song at a concert during which bathroom lines increase in density.  Often in popular music the understanding of the subject matter is simply distilled to love songs, however I would point out the Ballad of John and Yoko by The Beatles as a notable and well known exception.  I would also remind Nick Cave fans of his album of traditional Murder Ballads (and anyone who has never heard it, I would highly encourage to seek out that astonishing album with all speed.)

The traditional form is four line stanzas.  Lines 1 and 3 have four beats; lines 2 and 4 have three beats and rhyme.  Here is my modest contribution to the artform:

The Ballad of Frogs and Fate
By Paul Mathers

The Moirae, tired of their task
a-spinning yarns of fate,
and for a moment of respite
needed a surrogate.

By need they called the closest beast
to occupy the thing.
They gave some local frogs the job
to spin and cut the string.

The Moirae gone, the frogs spun out
two lovers at a lake
and planted in his jealous mind
a cuckolding mistake.

When he espied the kerchief that she
used to wipe her tears,
He thought it a gift from a beau,
confirming all his fears.

His rage deaf to her protesting
he pushed her in and down.
His hand firm on her pretty head
His true love he did drown.

Despairing of his loss of love,
a rock tied to his shin,
he bid the wicked world adieu,
and threw his body in.

The Moirae back, the frogs relieved,
as reward for their aid,
the Fates offered to send the frogs
where ever they would say.

The frogs went to the lake where the
two lovers bodies lie,
to wait for the two corpses to
attract a swarm of flies.

Paul Mathers reads Paul Mathers

Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire

Let's All Write An Alphabet Poem!

Once again, this is more of a poetry exercise than a poetic form. 

There are many forms and ways of producing an alphabet poem.  Ron Padgett writes "The Alphabet Poem is one that uses the letters of the alphabet as points of departure for lines or whole poems."  He gives examples.  One is to start each line with the successive letters of the alphabet.  Another is to employ letters of the alphabet prominently in each line like so:


Or sometimes you'll find versions with the letter repeated often within the line.  As you may well imagine, I'm not going to do one of those as it falls very close to alliteration, which we've already done.  I think my favorite version of the Alphabet Poem suggested by Mr. Padgett is:

"...select a single letter of the alphabet, look at it, let its appearance suggest images and ideas, and write them down..." 

I like the freedom of this form and, to be frank, I'm looking for ways to exit these remedial forms at the beginning of the book.  You'll notice it's been over a week since my last poetic exercise.  I'm starting to feel a little like when I was in elementary school and had a year where my behavior and performance went through the floor until someone had the sense to test me for the gifted student program.  It turned out I was bored.

Actually this section has been quite challenging and it's pushing me to do things I wouldn't have done on my own (which was the main point of this project in the first place.)  But I keep reminding myself that we're going alphabetically and at the very least I know that Ballad is coming soon.

So, here's my alphabet poem:



A is for Human
by Paul Mathers

And it taxes not reason that all began with a word.
Naked we came with letter grades.
Our school invention reflection: a joke,
An offense to the angels.
At death we find our letters of direction
stapled to our forehead.
Those whose deeds take them as low as V or W
directed downward, zilch of oblivion.
If only someone could lend us a capital A
to ascend like a step ladder.

Know Your Contemporary Authors- Brendan Constantine

Brendan Constantine

This is the first in our series of contemporary authors which features a contemporary author that I know personally.  He is not only one of my favorite living poets, he is also one of my favorite human beings walking the Earth.  I see him every few years at poetry readings (or, most recently, a wedding of a fellow poet) and I always come away with some poetic part of my brain recharged a bit.

When I was in my late teens, I became as involved in the Southern California poetry scene as I possibly could.  I went to every poetry reading I could and cultivated friendships with as many poets as I could.  I, of course, was in the Orange County branch of the Southern California poetry scene simply by virtue of the geographic location of my house.  Brendan Constantine belonged to the Los Angeles poetry scene.  There was some bleed over in those two scenes due to proximity and there would be "crossing the county lines" readings, but for the most part, the two scenes had a very different energy.  In my estimation, the Los Angeles scene was more inventive.  That is to say that their scene seemed to me vibrant, tight, and creative.  I was always excited to go to LA poetry readings. 

So, Brendan is a poet from the City of Angels.  He teaches poetry in many diverse venues.  He is one of the west coast's better (and better known) poets.  In 2002, he was nominated as California's Poet Laureate. 

If you ever get the chance to see him read or take a class that he is involved with, jump at it.  If you're anywhere near Southern California, you will have ample opportunity to do so.  He is an active and involved member of the literary community.  Not only is he wildly talented, but he is devoted to the form.  He is also a ferociously lively person.  Poetry spits out of his eyes like sparks.

Also, you can purchase his most recent (I think) volume of poetry from Amazon in print or Kindle editions.  Amazon describes his collection Letters to Guns:

Letters To Guns represents a collection of poems that examine the para-physical natures of love and history, at times re-imagining both. As the poems progress, eight letters arrive written by non-human addressees (a nightgown, a grove of trees, a wooden spoon, others) at random points over the last 2,200 years. They are messages from home and pleas for understanding, warnings and promises of change. These in turn ignite other poems and themes which anticipate the next arrival. Taken together, the letters form an armature, a living skeleton fleshed by real and metaphenomenal experience. Throughout, a variety of styles appear and no single approach to poetry pervades. Singly, these poems should challenge and entertain. As a group they must transform and evolve our experience of sitting down with a book of poems.

You can also learn more and get other works by him from his website:
http://www.brendanconstantine.com/html/home.html

Be more awesome.  Engage with and expose yourself to some of the better contemporary poetry.

Here's a link to a reading by Constantine and an interview section interspersed.  I should probably mention, as I know we have a variety of readers, you may want to herd the children into the nursery or library or conservatory before you listen to it as it contains some words (oddly, mostly uttered by the host of the show) that children tend to pick up and wait to repeat until the middle of Sunday School.  But it is an excellent reading and interview.  Don't miss out on the wonderful reading and, I would add, be sure to catch his fantastic answer to the question of why poetry is important:

http://lightbulbmouth.com/podcast/2-24-2010/part3.mp3

Let's All Write something to do with Alliteration

Again, Ron Padgett's Handbook of Poetic Forms is not so much providing us with a poetric form in this exercise as a poetic device or tool.  However, modesty would prevent me from pointing out that my post on Allegories proved that these can be very profitable exercises.  Apparently, modesty has fled the day.

Padgett asserts, in his description of the device, that alliteration can often serve as a stand in for rhyme (or, in some cases, it's a series of like sounds strung together.  Kind of like switching it into hyper-rhyme.)  It is pleasing to the ear and guides the listener through the poem, slapping them awake with like sounds.  As with rhyme, it repeats a sound through the poem.  Most commonly you will see alliteration in reference to word clusters of the same first letter (think V's entrance into the story of V for Vendetta in the film version as well as throughout the original), but it can also mean clusters of words with similar sounds (as I said: hyper-rhyme.)  Padgett brings up Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Bells.  Since this is a blog where we can play with other things from the internet, I offer this example instead:

Kelly/O'Connor - Moses Supposes @ Yahoo! Video

Hopefully we've established by now that we are playing with words in this exercise (as we sort of are with all of these exercises.)  This exercise is about 1) vocabulary and 2) application of vocabulary (i.e. training the ear to speak.)  I am going to delve in to the "same first letter" version of alliteration.  Since I mentioned V for Vendetta in the parenthesis above, I think I will go with the letter "V" in mine.  We'll call it homage, which is a fancy word for stopping just short of plagiarism.

More formal forms will emerge as we continue through the book, but here now is my piece of alliteration:

V for Verisimilitude
by Paul Mathers

Verily, My voice is veriloquent when I aver
I've a view for verve, vigor and vim,
although my vocation is vocalizing for victuals,
and I've a vociferous vexation over the vile, venal and villainous varlets
who've volunteered their vanity with the volume of a vuvuzela.
Invariably, in velitation with these very venomous vipers
I'm not averse to violence.
My venae cavae volting with vinegar and vitriol,
I ravage the variety of vapid vermin with volcanic volleys,
vacating their vitality to their various Vahallas.






That was WAY harder than I thought it would be.  My esteem for Alan Moore has just shot through the roof.  In fact, you might say my respect for him is now at its vertex.

Let's All Write An Allegory!

And you may find yourself in the same confusion I am experiencing over this poetic exercise.  This is not a specific form of poetry, nor am I about to write a poem, and yet this is an exercise I am drawing from The Handbook of Poetic Forms.  The conclusion I think I am going to go with is "chops."  We're working on our poetic chops and this gets our head into the game, even if it doesn't guide us into a specific form.  Allegory is a means by which we can think poetically about existence.

Not surprisingly, Padgett spends a good deal of this entry talking about John Bunyan.  Bunyan and Plato probably wrote the two most famous allegories. "Allegories are written to explain ideas about good and evil, or about moral or religious principles." Other features include possibly identifying individuals as actual ideas, becoming the anthropomorphism of their defining characteristic. Not even so subtly as Dickens (a dirty man named something like Mr. Filchwater) but with a Bunyan-esque heavy hand (a dirty man named Mr. Dirty.)

To put it even more simply, I grew up reading allegories unawares.  One of my favorite children's book series was the Mister Men and Little Miss books by Roger Hargreaves.  These were short (maybe 30 pages or so), illustrated, moralistic tales about characters who were embodiments of aspects of human character.  For example:

Although they weren't all sanctimonious, finger-wagging stories. There were positive examples as well:

 And some that were morally neutral:

I have a little figurine of Mr. Greedy on my bookshelf to my left.  He is holding a cake and licking his lips in anticipation of eating it all by himself as a motivational tool to keep me from hoarding candy in my office (Laurie can tell you how effective of a tool it is by the candy wrappers she finds in the cubby holes of my desk.)

I also notice that my recent story of the wild boar comes close to this exercise. I'm not even going to attempt form poetry in this case, falling back into the poetic form mindset like a trust exercise.  So, now here is my allegory.


Allegory of the Worm of Regret
by Paul Mathers

The much abused specter of Charles Darwin has borne so much that I doubt a hint of blame from me will make much of a difference. A chance (if you believe in such things) acquisition from a local thrift store of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms was providing me with several days worth of fascinating bedtime reading. As was usual, stuffed with enough asthma medication to hopefully see me through to another day and the mind fuzz of my daily allowance of a single glass of merlot, I soon found myself on the other side of the dream curtain.

Passing through the gates of a city, I was stopped by the gatekeeper who asked me what I knew of worms.  I told him that the Earth may support upwards of 250,000 earthworms per acre, producing humus that might enrich the loam for the purpose of greater organic growth.  He handed me a pair of steel rimmed spectacles and took my own black plastic framed ones which are customary to my appearance.

As I walked the streets of the city, I was at first aghast and disgusted by the citizens who had worms writhing under every inch of their skin. But I soon recognized that when they passed into the periphery outside the sight-line of the lenses of my new glasses, they appeared as normal as any human you would meet on any given day. Upon more careful observation, I saw the worms appearing just outside of the person and burrowing into them: a few here when they spoke hard to their spouse, a few more there when a man hit his faithful dog with his cane when the dog stepped in front of him while they walked.  A boy clearly from impoverished circumstances who was driving a cart full of produce took a corner of a street too tightly. The cart tipped and most of the produce fell to the ground and split open on the cobblestone street. Immediately, hundreds of worms appeared around him and worked their way into his skin.

I drew close to observe the destructive processes.  In direct light and close up, I could see the workings of the worms of regret through his (to me) pellucid skin.  The worms were making a great feast of that bright matter within the young man which I knew to be hope and producing, from their tapered end, a dark material which, if not the matter of death itself, was certainly entirely toxic.

I was seized with a panic and dashed into the town square.  I stood on the edge of the great fountain and implored the populus to listen to me.  I told them that regret was eating them all alive.  I told them that these foul, fourth-dimensional creatures, invisible to their eyes, had fixed points in space-time where they could manifest and feed on them.  I told them that they must eschew regret.  A lady yelled back, "Pah!  You ask us not to feel!  You would have us cut off all emotion and caring!"

Her breath was cold as a tomb and people began to shove me from my elevated position out of the town square with hands like clay six feet beneath the Earth. I was conveyed to the border of the town by a crowd of corpses, the walking dead.

Dismayed, I sat with my back against the town's wall and wept. Through the gates next to me came a sad faced and broken young man in rags who searched the faces of the townsfolk around him desperately. His eyes fell on an old man who was sitting on the stoop of a modest storefront directly across from me. He called out "Father!" and gave a hearty wave to the old man. The old man stood with astonishing dexterity and hastened toward the young man. They embraced and the young man said "Father, I am so sorry..."

But the old man cut him off and with teary voice said, "Let's forget all of that now! You're back now and all is forgiven."

I was at first horrified as thousands of worms began working their way out of the skin of the two men.  I was sure this must surely be the precursor to their immediate death, but the worms, as they came out, fell to the ground motionless and vanished. The two men stood bright, healthy, with life pulsing completely through them, full of hope for their future. I was suddenly aware of the antidote and looked down to see another thousand worms working their way out of my own flesh.

Let's All Write an Acrostic.

Now we come to a form that is very easy to explain.  If you read the letters than begin each line downwards they form a word or phrase.  At least that's the most basic form.  Most of the examples I find online are simply means through which one can deliver obscene messages covertly.  There are variations of every last letter of the line or the first letter of every word.  Famously, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals donated a brick to the newly opened Petco Stadium in San Diego:

I'm not going to write one with every letter.  I'm not feeling quite that clever today.  I'm going to go with the traditional "first letter of each line" variety of acrostic.

I'll admit my snobby hackles raised a little when I read it was this exercise this time, thinking it a poetic exercise for school children.  Then I got over myself and did it anyway.  It was fun, but probably not the best fruit of this project.  I think of it as a writing exercise, a means of sharpening vocabulary application and giving one's creative juices a workout.  I'm not sure it's a poetic form that's ever going to have much of a day and I notice even Ron Padgett was a little hard pressed to find examples of the form to include in his text.   And if I ever do employ the form again, I doubt I'll be showing it to people.

Having said all of that, it was an enjoyable exercise.

So, I just had fun, wrote freely, made a little self-deprecating joke, and played faster and looser with cadence than I'm normally comfortable with.  Here is what it yielded:



Pompous,
Affected,
Upstart!
Lunatic!

Mothers threaten naughty children with his poetry
And he is barred from at least six Ivy League campuses.
They say his acrid smell drives off anything with a nervous system.
He is, therefore, occasionally useful as a natural means of pest control.
Every other quality he possesses is entirely unseemly.
Refraining from naming him would be wisest here, but ultimately
Safe in that no one actually reads him.

New Podcast- Wordsworth!

To answer your first question, it's called a Life Mask.  It was cast by sticking straws up a person's nose so they could breathe through the process and then creating a mold of their face.  All reports are that it was a remarkably unpleasant experience, but it gave future generations the opportunity to see the face of people pre-photography (when I was in Washington D.C. I was able to see Napoleon's life mask, as a traveling museum exhibit and my visit happily coincided.)  This was cast when Wordsworth was in the middle of his long life.  I've heard a rumor that while it was being cast, essayist Charles Lamb was in the room trying to make Wordsworth laugh.  I wonder if this surviving life mask was Take Four or Five or Ten.

Our podcast this week is a reading of William Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.  It is a longer ode and a meditation on existence.  Wordsworth believed in pre-existence before birth, conception, and all that jazz and therefore believed that children had some wisdom that we forget in later years (if you're anything like me, you're thinking of a certain passage from a famous Louie Armstrong song now.)  I'll admit that the reason I've chosen this piece is that I've been struggling with this very thing.  I've been thinking heavily of late on the topic of my past splendid view of life being beaten by experience into a pragmatic cynicism.  How to recapture that ecstatic delight in existence?  Wordsworth may offer up a few thoughts on the topic, perhaps a personal conclusion one might find helpful.

As usual, you can listen to it here:



Or, you can go download it for yourself here:

http://www.archive.org/details/ReadingTheClassicsWithPaulMathersPodcast13

A Brief Retraction

In my poetry post "Let's All Write A Triolet" I repeated a piece of information from Ron Padgett's book Handbook of Poetic Forms.  It was this:

"A triolet (pronouced "tree-oh-lay")..."  

or so says Ron Padgett.  Apparently there is more than a little debate on this topic.  Stephen Fry wisely offers both pronunciations in his poetry textbook.   I was simply repeating information provided by Mr. Padgett (I assume not pronounced "Pad-jay") completely unawares of any controversy existing on the matter and if pressed would probably have assumed that it is a French form and you know how the French are with their "et"s.

But it turns out that the Oxford English Dictionary, which many (me included) refer to as the end all authority on matters of the English language, lists the "rhymes with 'violet'" pronunciation.  I am more than willing to retract and recant when I feel that I have related spurious information.  I think anyone with intellectual honesty ought to be capable of admitting to and correcting their missteps for the sake of truth.  I hereby retract my earlier pronunciation guide.

I would, at the very least, point out that it is a matter of some debate, but still I must go with the OED.  I am truly sorry if I've caused anyone to embarrass themselves at a cocktail party.  I hope that no one will eschew Padgett's otherwise solid text over this little oversight.

Let's All Write an Abstract Poem

Well, I start this project in alphabetical order and already Mr. Padgett is pulling no punches in his Handbook of Poetic Forms.

Abstract poems, in the words of Edith Sitwell, are experiments in "patterns of sound."  The consensus meaning of the words in our shared language is unimportant or at the very least peripheral in favor of the sound, the feel of the words, the composition on the tongue.

The painting above is by Mark Rothko.  I saw a Rothko at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and it took my breath away.  Any scans or prints do not do the work justice.  First of all, if you walk into a room with this on a plain wall in front of you something like eight foot by ten foot, it demands your attention.  The brushwork breathes.  As a print, it looks kind of like a paint swatch you get at the hardware store.  In reality, it is an abyss of color into which you could fall screaming.  The point of a work like this is not that it is secretly about something, like a Magic Eye trick, that only very intelligent people can pick up on.  The point is what happens to you when you are before this magnificent thing.

In high school, I had a tremendous crush on a certain girl who did not reciprocate those feelings.  I was quiet and goofy looking, but given her apparent desire to project the image of an intellectual without taking any actual steps toward being one, I think she must have thought associating with me was a necessary evil. I read Somerset Maugham of my own free will and used words like "ameliorate" in casual conversation. So, she organized a tea party/poetry reading to take place in the backyard of her parent's large house by the beach. I had never written poetry before and had no idea what I was doing. I sat down and wrote what I thought poetry must be like. It turned out, assessing with the benefit of hindsight, I was, in fact, writing abstract poetry, stringing words together for the love of the sound of them. I remember the girl scolding me after the poetry reading about what she called "trap poetry" which was poetry that was written to sound like it was about something, but really wasn't about anything at all. I have no idea where she got that although there was precedent that would suggest she was making something up to appear smarter than me. In other words, I had to be carefully taught NOT to do this form of poetry naturally.

What fools these mortals be. It's not up to the gods to bake bricks. And several other quotations hastily swished around my palette to remove the flavor of that unfortunate trip down Regrettery Lane.

Padgett recommends a few possible ways to explore. He recommends replacing the words of an existing poem with other words or saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and then stringing other words around it in like manner. He mentions the Dadaist sound poetry, which I would also recommend looking up.

I, on the other hand, decided to just jump right in. I'm going with rhymed couplets because I am most comfortable in life shut into a prison cell while holding my own key to the lock. Seeing as to how it's abstract, I start free associating about Ionesco and away I go.


Wensleydale Rhinoceros,
great aireydales and phosphorous.
Bleeding mead and stark repast.
Bold blue air at mooring mast.

Gingham robes flop up the stern.
Mark the tortoise tries to learn.
Here I strain my yellow tweezer.
Great bear gains his lalochezia.

Shovel covens in the eye.
Counting ounce florescent dye.
Hoping opals on the mend.
Rubble couplet to abend.

Let's All Write a Triolet

This week, we're going to write a shorter form.  In my opinion it's an easier form as well.  First of all, it's another one of those forms which makes the poet look good.  Second, it's short.  Look, I know a lot of writers will talk about agonizing over short pieces, spending days over a comma placement, and all that jazz.  Spending ten years on one haiku.  I know that that can happen and, believe me, I understand the importance of scrupulous editing, attention to form and flow, and putting very hard work and planning into your writing.

This just happens, in my opinion, to be an easy form to work with.  This is actually a very good thing, especially during dry spells for writers.  I am in total agreement with Ray Bradbury who wrote,

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world." 

I strive to live like that.  I too strive to write every day in some capacity.  Some days you sit down to write a long piece you've been working on and it's like the glue has coagulated around the spout.  Slamming down a few triolets or haiku or something usually gets the juice flowing again.

A triolet (pronouced "tree-oh-lay") is a form in which the opening line recurs thrice within the poem. The first line is also the fourth and the seventh line.  The second line is the same as the eighth line.  It is an eight line poem.  As usual, don't let the diagram scare you as it will make a lot more sense when you read my example at the end of this post.  In this diagram, A and B are the other lines, A1 marks the repeating of the first line and B2 will mark the repeating of the second line.  So it goes like this:

A1
B2
A
A1
A
B
A1
B2

Got it?  As usual, I will boldly write my own modest example below and all of you are then free to write your own triolets.  Work with it; own the form for yourself.  You can post yours here or on Facebook or not at all and keep it to yourself or roll it up and tie it to the leg of a pigeon.  A good way to start one of these is simply to write two lines about something going on around you.  Maybe your cat is snoring at your feet or thunderclouds are on the horizon or your olive tree is blossoming.  Just throw something out there and I think you'll find the rhyme structure will compose the poem around your first two thoughts for you.  As usual, have fun.


Saturday Afternoon Triolet
by Paul Mathers

We move the furniture to paint the walls
Then stall on account of the humidity.
We found the light switch was poorly installed.
We move the furniture to paint the walls.
The tv stand is heavy, the dust appalls.
Living room rearranging with timidity.
We move the furniture to paint the walls
Then stall on account of the humidity.

Let's All Write A Sonnet!

The sonnet is a form that has been employed for about 800 years, give or take some lapses in popularity.  It's an easy form to describe and possibly one of the best examples of form aiding the poet's capacity for expression.  Simply put, there are very good reasons why it is such a popular form.

Specifically, we are going to write a Shakespearean sonnet.  Or, rather, I am anyway and that's the type I'm going to describe here.  If you feel drawn to write a Petrarchian sonnet or a free verse sonnet or any other kind of sonnet, don't let me stand in your way.  The form was adapted into what became the Shakespearean sonnet to aid in English usage.  As Stephen Fry puts it, in Italian, every other word ends in -ella or -ino.  The Shakespearean gives more variety of rhyme.

So, here's how it is done.  Fourteen lines sectioned like so: eight lines, then six lines.  The rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg.  Traditionally, the topics are love or philosophy, usually on one specific thought or subject within those topics.  You make an observation or description in the first eight.  In the latter six you reveal what you think of it and what conclusion you come to on the topic.  Or, if you're like me, you just try to at least get it on that dart-board.

I must confess that I have a devil of a time with rhymed couplets, which is part of why I'm doing this exercise.  If you're like me, form poetry is a difficult thing to begin with, but so often I have found that the difficult things are the things worth doing.  I'm always afraid when I embark to write in rhymed couplets that I'm going to come out with a trite Hallmark card.  I look to W.S. Gilbert and Shakespeare.  I would encourage all of you to look at as many other sonnets as you can before starting this exercise (there are so many.  Shakespeare and Petrarch obviously, Ted Berrigan, Lord Alfred Douglas, Donne, Milton, Spencer, Browning, Millay, e e cummings, and many many more.)  First of all, it always helps to fill your brain with greatness because then greatness is what will be in your brain.  Second, and more importantly, it also helps to see another writer having fun with the form.

As usual, I will go first.


Sonnetic Advice to Some Young Men
by Paul Mathers

You gentlemen who wish to assign roles
to gender, strict as algebraic forms,
remember the variety of souls
it takes to see the ship survive the storm.

If you should wish to find a love that's lasting
and you've a rigid list of traits you'd rather
you may as well just call up Central Casting.
To you what's inside one is like another.

For when you come to love another person,
The person is the thing you come to love.
So, make sure that that crush that you are nursing's
A person you could stand to keep abreast of.

Unless it's someone you view as a friend
you're doomed to have your love overextend.

Let's All Write An Elegy!

In the interest of full disclosure, I do have a personal reason for these "working out our poetry chops" exercise posts. I am writing a libretto for an opera.  So, exploring forms and tightening up my skill are both on the menu, as well as the reasons I outlined in last week's Sestina post in regard to why we are doing this.  Although, having said that, we are going to depart briefly this week from strict forms and focus a bit on themes.

We are about to write an elegy.  The elegy is one of the old forms of poetry.  It is, put simply, a poem of mourning (which should go far in explaining why humans have been writing them for so long). Although there was a long period where people wrote elegies on the subject of love, don't let's muddy the waters that we are preparing to bathe in.  Ron Padgett clears this up (and defines the difference from an epitaph) by saying that an elegy is mourning for something that is past, gone, or lost.

There is a classical elegiac form:  Four lines stanzas, iambics, rhymed abab at the end of each line.  I am not going to be using that form strictly speaking, but it always helps to have these things in the very back of one's consciousness when writing these things.  Which is how I tend to do it myself.  I get the key concepts and try to park it somewhere in the same zip-code as those concepts.  I think next week I'll try to work within a stricter form and see what we come up with there.  You are certainly welcome to write an elegy in the classical manner if you so choose.

The looser view of the structure of an elegy traditionally begins with the thesis, that which is being mourned, then the lamenting portion of the poem, and finally some form of resolution over that which is mourned.  Keeping that in mind, let us write an elegy!  Again, you can post yours in the comments here, or on Facebook if you would like, or keep it to yourself, burn it, bury it in a mayonnaise jar in the backyard, sell it to The New Yorker, whatever you want.



Elegiac Memory
by Paul Mathers

Mourn we now the little glories lost.
The ticking sands of dailiness
that make up a life, discarded for more
dazzling, flashy peaks of moments,
no more real or valid than the mundane.

Child tired on cold medicine held
over mother's shoulder facing me
one row up in church. She watches me
my double chin wagging in baritone hymnody.
Absolutely fascinated for the moment.

I recall once telling six year old niece
that she wouldn't remember this conversation.
She would grow, recall childhood home,
that memory like a sieve on the beach
which holds stones like death and amusement parks
and a few odd large grits of sand
like when I looked in the teacher's lounge
Mr. Crabtree's sing-song voice saying
"You don't belong over here!" Thirty years gone.
Why is that still in my brain?

But this conversation would be lost forever.

"Had I but time--as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest--O, I could tell you."
Theology may exist as the dim hope
that someone reliable is keeping track.
These grasping lost moments pile on my chest,
the weight of years like my high blood pressure.

The brutal oddity of my singing
viewed through child eyes on cold medicine
Is already gone for her. Not for me
as I write it here for you, pick my toenail,
prepare to mow lawn, cough, hiccup,
smell lentils, sound of Laurie playing Billie Holiday,
look at the ceiling fan's rotating
shadow on the wall from two rooms over
dot dot dot

New Podcast- The Dream by Lord Byron

This week's podcast is a poem, The Dream by Lord Byron.  It's another piece about sleep which seems to be an emerging motif in my podcast material choices.

The piece is said to have been inspired by view from the Misk Hills in Nottinghamshire in England.  So, if you're fabulously wealthy or happen to currently be in North Central England, you can go there and see what he was on about.

Although it's not uncommon for one to take bits of dreams and put them in works of art.  There's a wonderful story by Robert Louis Stevenson which posed the question over whether or not that is a form of plagiarism.  Maybe I'll get to that piece one of these weeks.

So, here is one of Lord Byron's great poems.




And, as always, you can follow this link to download it for yourself.

http://www.archive.org/details/ReadingTheClassicsWithPaulMathersPodcast8

Let's All Write A Sestina!

I thought we might do something a little different on my blog today, something interactive, a project, something for us to do together.  This stemmed from me feeling convicted by the words of Oscar Wilde in my most recent podcast (which you can download here) about making art versus merely talking about art.  Also about histories of art.  So, we're going to loosen up the poets within on my blog today and we are going to write a Sestina.

First, I think I should probably address those of you in the audience who don't want to write a poem by answering two questions: Why should we write poetry and what does it accomplish?  Life is not about how many credits you can earn and what you do with the limited options of goods and services to obtain with those credits.  That's called survival.  Any poet can tell you how little money poetry yields.  So, already there's a bit of a wild and dangerous side because the value of poetry is something not monetary.  We're closing in on it.  Poetry is, in fact, the opposite of money.  Money is the root of all kinds of evil, so, the opposite would be...

Good.  Okay, I'm overstating slightly.  So, let's get into the more practical side.  Aside from depth of spirit (which in and of its self should be convincing enough.  Which is better: "Oh, splendour of sunburst breaking forth this day when I lay my hands once more on Helen, my wife" or "Hey, Sweetcheeks, wake up and lookit dat sunrise.  Ain't that something, huh?") here are

Three Good Reasons Why You Should Write A Sestina:

1.  It is a mental exercise.  It will require you to think in ways you don't normally think, similar to solving a puzzle or playing a game of chess, but with an original product from your own creativity to show for it at the end.  It is an exercise in discipline, structure, planning, perception, vocabulary, and will require you to look at the world in ways you don't usually.  Form poetry is a wonderful thing.  If you're anything like me, I think you will also find that the form walks you through the process and, in the end, makes you look good.  Thanks, Form Poetry!

2.  You are going to die.  Sorry for the spoiler and even more sorry if you're hearing it here first.  So, now you stand at a crossroad.  Either you can take the path where one day you will die never having written a Sestina or you can take the path where you will die but once you wrote a Sestina.  I believe we should try to experience that which does not do us or others harm.  Which is why I once ate squid ink pasta.

3.  Laurie and I were pulling weeds earlier (actually, she was pulling weeds and I was standing in the shade telling her about New Journalism) and Laurie mentioned how keeping the yard lovely is like keeping one's hair clean to discourage lice.  Or, as a youth pastor I knew used to say, there are two kinds of people: moths and cockroaches.  One is attracted to light and the other to darkness.  If you take steps to make your little corner of the world beautiful, even if you're just attempting to, it is a small vote against the tide of ugliness pouring in.  Which is a nice way of saying that people who don't care tend to hang out in places where it looks like people don't care.  Will planting zinnias keep you from being burglarized?  Well... maybe and I'm only half joking about that.  It may be a drop in the ocean, but remember, the ocean is made up of many many many many single drops.  Within a lifetime ones actions could add up to equal an ocean.

So it is with art.  You are making something beautiful in the world that wasn't there before.

I would also point out that none of those three things require you to actually show your Sestina to anyone if you don't want to.  You are more than welcome to post your results here or keep them to yourself if you prefer.  If you're shy, we're all friends here and promise to be kind.  But I do urge all of you who could possibly be reading this to do this exercise.  I promise you it will be more fun than you expect and most likely more fun than whatever else you were going to do this weekend.

SO,

How To Write A Sestina:

As you may well expect, I do have two book recommendations before we get started.  The first is Handbook of Poetic Forms by Ron Padgett.  It's a simply technical guide for poets, written by a poet.  It goes through poetic forms, tells you how to write them and then gives an example.  Once, about a decade ago, I went through and wrote one of each to learn more about as many poetic forms as I could.  It's a great tool for people who want to write poetry and I think everyone should own it.  The second book is The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry (Yes, that Stephen Fry.  One of my living heroes and one of the several people in this world whose jobs I wish I had.)  His book is similar to the Padgett text although is a bit more focused on, in his words, "unlocking the poet within."  Simply put, if I were giving gifts I would give the Padgett text to someone like my friend New York Rob (were it not for the fact that he originally gave it to me) because he wants to write poetry and I would give the Fry text to Laurie who thinks she doesn't like poetry.  This is meant to be encouraging, not condescending, but it is my belief that there are two kinds of people: people who love poetry and people who don't know that they love poetry yet.

The Sestina, as Fry points out, is complicated to explain, but great fun to write.  In my experience, it is way more fun to write a Sestina than you will expect.  We have six stanzas with a tercet at the end.  That will make sense in a moment.  First, pick six words.  They can be whatever you want, but make sure they are words you want to work with in a poem because you're going to get a lot of use out of your six words here.  They don't have to be related, they can be any words you like, but you may want to avoid conjunctions.  Or do whatever you want.  I'm just giving out advice here.  Now, for the sake of this description, assign to each of your words a letter (A,B,C,D,E,F) and the chart below is meant to show which word is at the end of each line (you will also be providing the lines that lead up to the word. It's not just putting single words in different orders.)

Stanza 1:
A
B
C
D
E
F

Stanza 2:
F
A
E
B
D
C

Stanza 3:
C
F
D
A
B
E

Stanza 4:
E
C
B
F
A
D

Stanza 5:
D
E
A
C
F
B

Stanza 6:
B
D
F
E
C
A

Tercet:
AB
CD
ED

In the Tercet, you are putting the first word around the middle of the line and the second at the end.  Don't panic.  Stick with me here.  I'll give you an example in a moment which should clarify your questions.  As for how long the lines should be, Fry states "There is no set metre to the modern English sestina, but traditionally it has been cast in iambics."  So, know that and do what thou wilt.

Word Processors are a great help here.  Take the chart I've provided above, substitute your words for the letters and fill in the lines of the poem in front of them.  Piece of cake.

I'll go first.  Below is my own and extremely modest effort.  My iambics will be very loose and I have doubts that this will one day end up in the Norton Anthology, but again, one does not write poetry to be a rock star.  I would also say before jumping off the diving board that I have no idea if this is going to be any good or not.  But I'm going to do it anyway so that I will have done it.  Also, we're not doing this for praise.  We're doing this because we must.

I went to Twitter to give someone the opportunity to give me my six words for this piece.  These six words come from Renee Gallo, an old friend for whom I was actually the minister at her wedding.
My words are: iron, shoe, wave, screen, reflect, exit.  Get your six words and a poem should emerge from it.

Minotaur Sestina
by Paul Mathers


I'm left at the maw of the maze in iron.
A solitary roach skitters over my shoe
and the fear of the beast grips me in a wave.
Before me a marble wall screen
Swallowing the meager light reflect
And many miles to go until an exit

Pah! Nothing further from my mind than an exit
With these chains I'll choke the bogey with iron
The last thing I need now is to reflect
how I got here. Four pebbles in my shoe...
I pass through the archway like a rood screen
and cross myself that courage may not wave.

Slightest scuff of my feet travels in wave
so far I'm sure it reaches the remote exit.
And I know there is nothing to screen
my presence from the other. My heart iron,
The command is forward. I kick off shoes.
Heel to toe, down Eastern passage I reflect.

Oh, but vain assurance on myself reflects
As Minotaur's musk wafts from behind in a wave
I turn and the sight to make my heart shoe
Steaming demon beast intent upon my exit
by another means. My wrist armored in iron.
My faculty fooling neither, a smoke screen.

Yet my only hope is that smoke screen.
I howl and all the walls my voice reflects.
I fly at the beast with wrists webbed in iron
And throttle his throat while great head waves
Horns ripping flesh. I effect the slow exit
As the bull-head comes to rest at my shoe.

Chains sloppily saw the head off by my shoe,
Back and forth. A fine mist of blood screens
Over me. I rise to seek my exit.
Decapitated head in tow. I reflect
the shadow of a gross monster and the wave
of the man I've become like a hot iron.

Burdened and wounded, like a fiery iron for my shoe,
I waver in my confidence, that useless paper screen,
as I reflect what I'll be in world beyond this exit.