Minutes of the Last Meeting

I used to give an assignment -- eavesdrop on conversations, and write down anything that you hear someone say in iambic pentameter. The purpose was to get poetry students away from the idea that metrical poetry has to be forced, or singsongy. I would tell them, at first this will seem impossible, but once you start hearing them, you'll hear them everywhere, and the real problem will become how to turn it off. Your girlfriend tells you, "I slept with your best friend the other night," and your response is, "That's great!" "It is?" "Yes, it's iambic pentameter!"

Anyway, one of the first times I gave this assignment, I decided to do it myself during a faculty meeting. I mean, you have to do something during a faculty meeting, don't you, to avoid going bonkers with boredom? So I started writing down lines, and pretty soon I had two pages of a notebook filled, and...I realized...a poem about academic life.

So here it is.

MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING

It wouldn't interfere with what we do;

I couldn't really poll the entire group.

Very, very briefly, here's the plan--

Elect the chairs of two committees first

(Able to run for these positions first)

Who'll want to lead the faculty towards greatness.

Within the AAC or SAC,

At least two people -- one is not enough –

The faculty at large will vote for chairs,

The AAC, I find, now having done it.

The AAC, last Monday, voted no

—Selected by the faculty at large—

And they pick someone who they think can lead.

Maybe the better thing would be to keep…

We have to somehow pull it all together.

Did everyone get a chance to sign the sheet?

There are seven searches underway

From a variety of different fields --

I know I’m getting questions all the time.

It’s not as academic a position,

The college writing program and the core.

There is the dean search, which is underway

A lot of applications were dismissed

This selection didn’t represent --

I don’t know anything about the search --

Is uppermost in everybody’s mind --

And in the end, of course, it’s Artine’s choice.

How a poem comes together (sometimes)

I just found these old notes on my hard drive while looking for something else. They must have been something I started doing for a class at some time. I seem to have been following the genesis and development of a particularly slippery poem. The notes were apparently originally handwritten, and then transcribed over.  I have no idea how much time went by between one and the next. I'm guessing that the lines of poetry and the metrical notations were the handwritten notes, and the exigeses came when I typed them all up.

FIRST PAGE OF NOTES

I was thinking of writing a ghazal, and since I’ve been thinking a lot about a possible  connection between ghazal and blues, I began with

                the blues

and then tried to fit a couple of lines to it

The first crack of light in the morning was the blues

When all shadows were shadow, that was the blues

and at the same time, I written a phrase I liked the sound of

striped like snakes

and I started thinking of light – morning light, maybe morning light across a bed, striped like a snake, and the next line I tried was this:

She woke up in the morning with her arms around the blues

The morning light lay like a striped

SECOND PAGE

that seems to be as far as I got with that thought. I was in the process of deciding I didn’t want to use “blues” as the monorhyme end word in a ghazal. The next couplet I tried was (brackets around works that were crossed out):

Morning [began] started like a [striped] snake across her bed;

When all shadows were shadow, the dark was her bed.

So I’d gotten rid of two things I really thought I wanted to work with, the blues and “striped snake.”

The next thing I was going to get rid of was the ghazal. It wasn’t working for me; I didn’t feel it. But I still liked the formal regularity of the line, and I knew that the lines and rhythms I was hearing were formal. I decided to try a villanelle.

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

When the shadows clustered into shadow

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

Then, on the back of the page, a bunch of scattered notes. I was trying to find rhythms that I liked.

  -     /     -        /    -    /      -   /       -    /

day slithered like a snake across her bed

   /        -         /  -    /       -   /      -     /

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

    /     -       /      -     /   -    /    -

Shadows clustered into shadow

and a bunch of possible rhyme words for the B rhyme:

shadow

meadow

arrow

tallow

and under the list of rhyme words, another line:

hair like snakeskin stretched across her bed

which seems to mean I was moving away from the snake-as-sunbeam image, and this is maybe an example of letting a fine isolated verisimilitude go by.  I think snake-as-sunbeam may well be a pretty good image. But I was allowing myself not to be locked into it, to look around for other possibilities.

So here’s what fills up the rest of this page:

Like a snake she’d let into her bed

which I guess I hated. I hate it now, looking at it. The metric pattern forces the line to sound stilted and awkward – “LIKE a SNAKE she’d LET inTO her BED” -  which puts that horrible, ugly stress on TO. So under it, I have a note for the stress I want:

/    -   into bed  (DA – duh INto BED)

and under that, a line that fits the meter:

Like a snake she’d followed into bed

which I also liked better as a plot line, but I seem to have abandoned it. I go on to try a couple of other lines, using one of the “B” rhyme words. I didn’t have the whole lines, just this much:

-    /     -    /   pretended she was dead

/  -    /    -   , made her skin like tallow

and then filling out the lines (indicating words crossed out, words stuck in, and in the third line, a stressed syllable that had to go in, but I didn’t have yet):

For two days, she pretended she was dead,

                         felt

[made] her arms ^  like clay, [her] breasts like tallow,

Hair [hung] like snakeskin   /   across her bed.

Then, on the back of the page, a couple of lines that don’t seem to be going anywhere, and I think I knew they weren’t going anywhere:

When she was seventeen and newly wed,

 What men were   /    -    pierced her like an arrow

PAGE THREE

By now, I had the beginnings of a poem:

The day slipped like a snake across her bed,

And when the shadows clustered into shadow,

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead.

She showed her arms like clay, her breasts like tallow,

Her skin shed like a snake’s across her bed.

And it was working pretty well. Except I didn’t like it. I liked the image of breasts like tallow, but “arms like clay” didn’t do much for me. It seemed to be just there for the meter, to fill out the line. “They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead” seemed like a nice line. It was metrically regular. It said something interesting. Why didn’t I like it?

Looking at it again now, I do kinda like it, and I like the formal poem that’s starting to take shape. But at that point – and I hope my instincts were right – I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the form, and I really didn’t like the meter. I wanted to break free of it...into free verse, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s why they call it free verse.

PAGE FOUR

So I changed “wasn’t dead” to “was alive,” and I broke it into two lines, to shake myself loose from the metric regularity:

To show them she was

alive, she wriggled free from

her skin, like a snake, and now

her new breasts were soft, like tallow,

So I’d completely and finally abandoned the snake-as-sunlight image. Too bad, maybe. Or OK, maybe. Anyway, I needed to start stripping things down. I knew I liked the image of breasts like tallow to suggest a new, moist, not-quite-formed body emerging from the shed outer layer of skin. Here’s the next start:

To prove to all three of them she was

alive, she shrugged free from

her skin, like a snake, and when

she turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

[and her hands]

[and] her hair was downy, and white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was fast, she had

pads of air under her feet.

[and] She could move in any direction,

she could spin and dance like a leaf.

I tried out the “three of them” to see if they’d open up an interesting plot line, but they didn’t, so I let them go. This was pretty much the last hand-written draft.

That's the end of the notes I have in this file. If there were more intermediate steps, I don't remember them. But here's the finished poem.

PROOF

They asked her to prove she was real,

so she shrugged out of

her skin like a snake, and when she

turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

her hair was white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was sudden, she had

pads of air under her feet.

She could move in any direction.

She could flip and scoot like a leaf.

She turned into shadow with the shadows.

  

Poem online

A poem at Halvard Johnson'sOn Barcelona website.

Donald Hall on Poetry Readings

From an interview with Hall for the Woodstock Times, several years ago.


“Reading poetry aloud makes a difference in one’s relationship to one’s words,” Hall says. “When I started writing, I thought of poetry exclusively on the printed page, though I was always very much aware of the sound of words. Poe was my first influence, at the age of 12 – then Stevens, at 14. Even when I was writing with no sense of words to be spoken out loud, my throat would move as I wrote.

"But reading one’s own poetry out loud to an audience was unheard of back then. Frost did it. But Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore – they virtually never read out loud

 “So I was writing for ‘sounded print,’ not for the spoken word. Then one day when I was about 27, an agent for lecture tours called me. I was flabbergasted. He wanted to me schedule a tour of reading poems to people…on stage…in public?

 “I started out by reading with my hands at my sides, in a high-pitched monotone. Then I started to think more about what it meant to read poems aloud. When I was young, I’d thought about being an actor—it was between poetry and acting for me—but acting is only a part of it. As a teacher, teaching other people’s poems, I had always tried to implant a voice in the poems I was teaching. Now I started to think about that voice. I started to think about how poetry sounded out loud. What was at one time writing theoretically for voicing, has now become writing actually for voicing.

 “This can do good things for your poetry, but it can do dangerous things, too. I remember a time—it was in 1959—when I was working on a poem, and there was a key word that I knew was wrong. ‘Ah,’ I heard myself say, ‘but in a reading I can make it sound right.’ And, fortunately, I caught myself. ‘Uh-oh,’ I remember thinking. ‘Watch your ass. This can be dangerous.’

“There are other dangers in thinking about reading poetry aloud. You don’t want to be writing for the applause of college students. You don’t want to limit yourself to writing poems that can be understood in hearing, although there’s nothing wrong with writing some poems like that.

 “On the other hand, there are ways it can help. I go through many drafts in writing a poem. I write every day, but an individual poem may take me a year or more to finish. I don’t start reading a poem aloud until the late stages of revision, so all of my initial relationship is to words on a page, but when I do start reading it aloud, sometimes I’ll find my voice will drop when I get to a certain word, as if I subconsciously didn’t want anyone to hear it. That’s a good signal to me that I should be taking another look at that word.”

An audience at a reading, Hall notes, should remember that “it’s different from reading a poem. Basically, you want to listen for pleasure – pleasure in the sounds of the words, pleasure in the moment – with no thought of interpretation. Just take it in, and let it flow through you.

“I compare listening to spoken poetry to learning a foreign language. At first you hear words and translate them into your own language. Then, you get to the point where you can make that leap to thinking in the other language. To get the most out of a reading, you need to make that leap – to turn off the translation machine, and just listen to the flow of that spoken language. You don’t want to be writing a critical essay in your mind as you’re listening.”

Descort: Dupree Variations

Here's the complete descort, composed for Lewis Turco as an example of the descort for the fourth edition of The Book of Forms.

DESCORT: DUPREE VARIATIONS

Betty told Dupree she wanted a diamond ring

Betty told Dupree, I want a diamond ring

Dupree told Betty,  I’d buy you most anything

Just sleep

little Betty

see what tomorrow brings

Go to sleep my little Betty

see what tomorrow brings

Now it’s only

Dupree

If history and legend have it right,

A man will risk it all to please a mistress.

We know from witnesses that Dupree’s night

Was fueled by coke and weed; his mood was listless,

Then near berserk; at last, by early light

His eyes were bloodshot and his hands were restless.

His mind was fixed. He took a .44,

To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

His mind was fixed. He took a .44,

The frame was cool and dry; the grip was warm.

To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

No use to try and hold him back—the door

Clicked softly shut behind him. Like a charm

Or talisman, he held his .44.

You knew that this would be a night for gore.

He smashed the glass with gun and bloodied arm,
And blindly crashed into the jewelry store.

He scarcely seemed to care what lay in store,

And, heedless that he’d triggered the alarm

He grabbed the ring, and waved his .44.

He killed two cops, and wounded several more.

Then, weary in his soul, and sick of harm,

Threw down the ring, and fled the jewelry store.

The law all vowed they'd even up the score.

Dupree beat west, and hid out on a farm

With no companion but the .44

And stalked by nightmares of the jewelry store.

Sheriffs and troopers and Highway Patrol,

Squad car and motorbike, horseman and hound,

Chasing Dupree like a fox to its hole,

Bloodlust won't cease till they run him aground.

Radio says that Dupree has been found,

Betty just listens and says a soft prayer,

Bull horns bark orders and SWAT teams surround,

Dupree walks out with his hands in the air.

Betty asked the sheriff, where will they take Dupree?

Sheriff said Your man's gone down to Atlanta jail.

Betty went to visit, his face she could not see,

They said Your man killed cops, you cannot go his bail.

Oh, please, Mr. Jailer, give him this note for me.

Sail on,

Dupree, sail on.

I don't know where you're bound,

just wish it didn't have to be

so long.

Exigeses of the individual verses to be continued.

Descort part 4

    Sheriffs and troopers and Highway Patrol,
    Squad car and motorbike, horseman and hound,
    Chasing Dupree like a fox to its hole,
    Bloodlust won't cease till they run him aground.
    Radio says that Dupree has been found,
    Betty just listens and says a soft prayer,
    Bull horns bark orders and SWAT teams surround,
    Dupree walks out with his hands in the air.

I moved to a ballade for the next stanza, which moved away from the blues, and brought me to a very different moods. There are many ballades, but the one that always sticks in my head is Edmund Rostand's, from Cyrano de Bergerac -- the part where Cyrano improvises a ballade as he duels with a churl, ending

Qu'a la fin de lenvoi, je toiuche!

There are various translations, but I still like the one voiced by Jose Ferrer in the movie:

Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!

There's certainly room for this sort of boast in the blues, although not in Betty and Dupree, and not quite in that language:

Going to Black Mountain, with my razor and my gun,
Going to Black Mountain, with my razor and my gun,
Gonna cut him if he stands, shoot him if he runs.

The rest of the scansion story -- and here it gets really boring, unless you're a poet, or even if you are -- it's hard to imagine Gregory Corso reading this and not throwing his laptop across the room in disgust. Well,  it's hard to imagine Gregory Corso having a laptop, or any circumstance under which he would not have thrown it across the room. But back to scansion. This particular ballade was written in dactylic tetrameter, which means it goes DA-da-da four times. Except, of course, it doesn't go DA-da-da four times. It only goes DA-da-da three times, and then ends with DA. Or anapestic tetrameter, which means that it doesn't quite go da-da-DA four times, more like one DA and three da-da-DAs.

That's called a catalexis, and that's a term I only learned recently from R. S. (Sam) Gwynn, who...well, the expression is, has forgotten more about scansion than I'll ever know, except that he hasn't forgotten anything about scansion. Anyway, a catalexis occurs when you truncate one of the metric feet,  either at the beginning of a line or the end. I first fell in love with this gambit reading W. H. Auden:

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardon him for writing well.

Before I learned about catalexes, I would just have described that line as either truncated iambic or truncated trochaic, but what I loved about it is that there was always a tipping point, where the line subtly moved from one to the other:


TIME, // that WITH // this STRANGE// exCUSE,
PARDoned // KIPling // AND his  // VIEWS,
AND will // PARDon // PAUL // ClauDEL,
PARDon // HIM // for WRIT // ing WELL.

Anyway, my favorite poem employing that galloping anapest is Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix":




And I think Dupree takes on a little of that rollicking British hunting song quality in this stanza.

More Descort

The Byronic stanza, of course, had ended with a couplet, and I decided to take that couplet, sandwich a third line in the middle, and make it a villanelle stanza. But you can't really give the flavor of a villanelle in one stanza, so I had to write the whole villanelle.

Here the question of form dictating mood gets a little wobbly. Certainly it's possible to write a comic or sardonic villanelle. The form is wonderfully flexible, and if you don't believe me, look at the new anthology edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Eizabeth Mali. (I'm in it -- not with this one -- but there are lots of real poets, too  -- using that famous question that was put to Carl Sandburg -- "are these real poems or do you just make 'em up yourself?")

Anyway -- forms that use repetition can be playful and not so playful, and of course the blues goes in both directions too.

I think there's a real connection between the blues and the ghazal. But use repetition, both come from Africa, and both frequently make use of the poet/singer's name. I don't think there's much likelihood of a cultural connection between the blues and the villanelle, but as Joseph Campbell pointed out, we're all part of one big mother myth, and there are many cross-cultural correspondences.

So I found myself going back to the grim fatalism of "Betty and Dupree" with the villanelle, but I also found myself being more literary -- the villanelle pushed me that way, as a blues would not.

His mind was fixed. He took a .44,
The frame was cool and dry; the grip was warm.
To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

No use to try and hold him back—the door
Clicked softly shut behind him. Like a charm
Or talisman, he held his .44.

You knew that this would be a night for gore.
He smashed the glass with gun and bloodied arm,
And blindly crashed into the jewelry store.

He scarcely seemed to care what lay in store,
And, heedless that he’d triggered the alarm
He grabbed the ring, and waved his .44.

He killed two cops, and wounded several more.
Then, weary in his soul, and sick of harm,
Threw down the ring, and fled the jewelry store.

The law all vowed they'd even up the score.
Dupree beat west, and hid out on a farm
With no companion but the .44
And stalked by nightmares of the jewelry store.

Descort part I

At the encouragement of Lewis Putnam Turco, for the fourth edition of his Book of Forms, I tried my hand at writing a descort -- a form characterized by its infidelity to any one form. Each stanza is written in a recognizable form, but a different one. Lew said that he had never actually seen one, so my entry didn't have much competition.

A little research into the form: there is actually a wiki entry on it, in which the invention of the descort is credited to Garin d'Apchier, whose exact dates are lost to history, but he did write the first descort, and I would share it with you, but it, too, is lost.

 
Gautier de Dargies, for whom we do have approximate dates (ca. 1170 – ca. 1240 -- he lived to be approximately 70, a ripe old age in those days), is said to have written three descorts.

Dargies has his own Facebook page, which I am the only person, as of this writing, to like.

Here's one by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (1180-1207). It's  written in a variant of the form -- each stanza is in the same verse form, but in a different language. And it's quite beautiful. English translations are interspersed between the verses.

Eras quan vey verdeyar
Pratz e vergiers e boscatges,
Vuelh un descort comensar
D'amor, per qu'ieu vauc aratges;
Q'una dona.m sol amar,
Mas camjatz l'es sos coratges,
Per qu'ieu fauc dezacordar
Los motz e.ls sos e.ls lenguatges.

Now that is see becoming verdant
lawns and bowers and woods,
I want to begin a contrast
about love, on whose account I am distraught;
for a lady used to love me,
but her mind has changed
and therefore I sow enmity
among the words, the sounds and the languages.

Io son quel que ben non aio
Ni jamai non l'averò,
Ni per april ni per maio,
Si per ma donna non l'o;
Certo que en so lengaio
Sa gran beutà dir non sò,
çhu fresca qe flor de glaio,
Per qe no m'en partirò.

I am the one who have no good
nor ever shall I have it,
either in April or in May,
unless I have it through my lady.
True, in her own language
I cannot describe her great beauty,
fresher than gladiolus' flower,
the reason of my persistence.

Belle douce dame chiere,
A vos mi doin e m'otroi;
Je n'avrai mes joi' entiere
Si je n'ai vos e vos moi.
Mot estes male guerriere
Si je muer per bone foi;
Mes ja per nulle maniere
No.m partrai de vostre loi.

Fair, sweet dear lady,
to you I give and give up myself;
I shan't have my whole joy
unless I have you and you me.
You are a most treacherous enemy,
if I die through my good faith;
but still, there is no way
I shall part from your dominion.

Dauna, io mi rent a bos,
Coar sotz la mes bon' e bera
Q'anc fos, e gaillard' e pros,
Ab que no.m hossetz tan hera.
Mout abetz beras haisos
E color hresc' e noera.
Boste son, e si.bs agos
No.m destrengora hiera.

Lady, I surrender to you
as you're the best and truest
that ever was, and sprightly and valiant,
if only you weren't so cruel to me.
Most fair are your features
and fresh and lively your hue.
I am yours, and if I had you,
nothing would be lacking to me

Mas tan temo vostro preito,
Todo.n son escarmentado.
Por vos ei pen' e maltreito
E meo corpo lazerado:
La noit, can jatz en meu leito,
So mochas vetz resperado;
E car nonca m'aprofeito
Falid' ei en mon cuidado.

But so much I fear your anger
that I am in complete despair;
for you I have toil and torture
and my body is racked:
at night, when I lay in bed,
I am awoken many a time;
and since I gain no good for myself,
I have failed in my intent.

Belhs Cavaliers, tant es car
Lo vostr' onratz senhoratges
Que cada jorno m'esglaio.
Oi me lasso que farò
Si sele que j'ai plus chiere
Me tue, ne sai por quoi?
Ma dauna, he que dey bos
Ni peu cap santa Quitera,
Mon corasso m'avetz treito
E mot gen favlan furtado.

Fair Knight, so precious is
your honoured thrall
that every day I despair.
Alas, what shall I do
if she whom I call my dearest
kills me, I know not why?
My lady, by my faith in you
and by the head of Saint Quiteria,
you have taken away my heart,
and stolen it by most sweet talk.

English translation follows each stanza.  The original is in Provençal, Italian, French, Gascon and Galician respectively. In the envoi, the five languages are mixed together.




I did find one contemporary descort, in Drunken Boat. it's pretty good, and for some reason is unsigned.


Anyway, that's enough for one blog entry. I'll get to mine next time.