The question was 'If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?' I was rather surprised by my answer: 'I wish there had been more poetry.' Did I mean art generally or poetic sentiment? I'm not sure, but...
The other day I pulled a slim volume of poetry out of my bookcase (only 'Collected Works of...' are thick), this one by John Ciardi, Person to Person, published in 1964, right about when my poetic sensibility was formed. I've always had a soft spot for Ciardi as Boston born, translator of Dante, author of the classic school text 'How Does A Poem Mean?, a question I've asked myself over and over.
There's lots of information online about the man and his career: he knew how to criticize and be criticized; he wrote lewd limericks with, of all people, Isaac Asimov; he ran a writers colony and was fired from same, he gave popular broadcasts (still available) on word origins...the standard.
But where I need to find you is in these poems in this book, and not just the man but the poet, the experience or thought capturer, the word-net maker, the singer.
There's a formality in your poetry that I appeals to me, rhyme schemes overt or covert, metrical patterns even if fragmentary, references recognizable as landmarks, a flow, a trackable logic of heart/mind, a pleasure in reading aloud, an incentive to read a second time, a voice: these are perhaps old-fashioned tastes, satisfied not just by old-fashioned poetry.
You've got some memorable lines, Mr C.:
'Because I am given to working, I work./Because words find me, I go to find/words, the food of my kind. I walk/by nowheres to the luck of a word, its found/wild honey. A good night is a forest/in which bee-trees are, the sweetness and the blackrust/ of dead wood bled together...'
'There is some danger in anything. Generally, however,/courage is superfluous to eternity and fear irrelevant.'
'...And thought is not/fact, nor measurable. It is simply there./ An enclosing condition. A dimension taught/the sourceless light. An aspect of air.'
No, these aren't actually the ones I want, but as I look, I find myself getting drawn into poem after poem, finding that this line leads to that and so toward a completion that rings in my head after I've reached it.
You wrote elsewhere, 'One sees a wizard of a poet tossing his words in the air and catching them and tossing them again--what a grand stunt! Then suddenly one may be astonished to find that the poet is not simply juggling cups, saucer, roses, rhymes and other random objects, but the very stuff of life. And discovering that, one discovers that seeing the poet's ideas flash so in the air, seeing them performed under such control, is not only a reward in itself, but a living experience that deepens every man's sense of life. One finds himself more, alert to life, surer of his own emotions, wiser that he would have been without the experience. And he thought he was just watching a show.'
Here's one I like:
From Adam's Diary
In the planetarium of an apple tree
I shook some spiral nebulae
and sent some systems reeling, just to see
how that might be. Just between time and me,
to see how it might be
to shake a universe--or an apple tree--
and see what fell, and think how it would be
if any of what fell was me.
None of it was--that day. But I could see
it all would be. Some day. Whatever tree.
The rhyme's a tad obsessive but the last two lines have all I love in poetry--a lilt, a quick step, a flip, ah!
I like your company, seeing what games you get up to, your turns of phrase, your wry insights, the way you twist things and turn them inside out, but which make a kind of better sense when you do. Reading a poem, or working my way through it, I'm not sure where you're taking me or what you have up your sleeve, but I know I'll be introduced to something in a new way.
This looking at things aslant is perhaps what I wish I could have been introduced to by my family growing up. What different it would have made I can hardly guess, perhaps it doesn't matter--there's so much in you and others to sing along with.
The other day I pulled a slim volume of poetry out of my bookcase (only 'Collected Works of...' are thick), this one by John Ciardi, Person to Person, published in 1964, right about when my poetic sensibility was formed. I've always had a soft spot for Ciardi as Boston born, translator of Dante, author of the classic school text 'How Does A Poem Mean?, a question I've asked myself over and over.
There's lots of information online about the man and his career: he knew how to criticize and be criticized; he wrote lewd limericks with, of all people, Isaac Asimov; he ran a writers colony and was fired from same, he gave popular broadcasts (still available) on word origins...the standard.
But where I need to find you is in these poems in this book, and not just the man but the poet, the experience or thought capturer, the word-net maker, the singer.
There's a formality in your poetry that I appeals to me, rhyme schemes overt or covert, metrical patterns even if fragmentary, references recognizable as landmarks, a flow, a trackable logic of heart/mind, a pleasure in reading aloud, an incentive to read a second time, a voice: these are perhaps old-fashioned tastes, satisfied not just by old-fashioned poetry.
You've got some memorable lines, Mr C.:
'Because I am given to working, I work./Because words find me, I go to find/words, the food of my kind. I walk/by nowheres to the luck of a word, its found/wild honey. A good night is a forest/in which bee-trees are, the sweetness and the blackrust/ of dead wood bled together...'
'There is some danger in anything. Generally, however,/courage is superfluous to eternity and fear irrelevant.'
'...And thought is not/fact, nor measurable. It is simply there./ An enclosing condition. A dimension taught/the sourceless light. An aspect of air.'
No, these aren't actually the ones I want, but as I look, I find myself getting drawn into poem after poem, finding that this line leads to that and so toward a completion that rings in my head after I've reached it.
You wrote elsewhere, 'One sees a wizard of a poet tossing his words in the air and catching them and tossing them again--what a grand stunt! Then suddenly one may be astonished to find that the poet is not simply juggling cups, saucer, roses, rhymes and other random objects, but the very stuff of life. And discovering that, one discovers that seeing the poet's ideas flash so in the air, seeing them performed under such control, is not only a reward in itself, but a living experience that deepens every man's sense of life. One finds himself more, alert to life, surer of his own emotions, wiser that he would have been without the experience. And he thought he was just watching a show.'
Here's one I like:
From Adam's Diary
In the planetarium of an apple tree
I shook some spiral nebulae
and sent some systems reeling, just to see
how that might be. Just between time and me,
to see how it might be
to shake a universe--or an apple tree--
and see what fell, and think how it would be
if any of what fell was me.
None of it was--that day. But I could see
it all would be. Some day. Whatever tree.
The rhyme's a tad obsessive but the last two lines have all I love in poetry--a lilt, a quick step, a flip, ah!
I like your company, seeing what games you get up to, your turns of phrase, your wry insights, the way you twist things and turn them inside out, but which make a kind of better sense when you do. Reading a poem, or working my way through it, I'm not sure where you're taking me or what you have up your sleeve, but I know I'll be introduced to something in a new way.
This looking at things aslant is perhaps what I wish I could have been introduced to by my family growing up. What different it would have made I can hardly guess, perhaps it doesn't matter--there's so much in you and others to sing along with.
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