Artefacts of youth

[pecunium]

In my younger days, I wrote poetry. It't not that I'm against it now, and I still dabble in it, mostly in the form of haiku, but the passion for condensed emotion seems to have left me.

Worse, in the varied movements of my life, all my verse has disappeared. By pleasant happenstance, tonight I came to possess some of it again. Most of it is trivial. All of it, however, is mine. I felt inspiration, and I worked at it.

Reading it is evocative, to me, of where I was when I composed it. Some of it brings the weather, and the season back to mind.

So, I offer a piece of it up for your delectation.

Garlands

Sofly flowing over the hills
Mustard blossoms fill the rills
with the puffy gold of spring

Childish voices, shouting, one and all
O'erfill the valley's spacious hall
setting robins on the wing

Winter no more wields his knife
The world is full of blushing life
every lover now a king

Takes the mustard in his hands
Softly builds the loving bands
and gives his lass a golden ring

31, March 1993

Comments

[waterlilly.livejournal.com]

That's very good, actually. And I wouldn't say so if I didn't like it. Most people's poetry, especially the rhyming kind, is about as good as kids' refrigerator art, as in only your mother would like it, and she has to. I have a degree in English, and I have been in more than my share of poetry writing classes with workshops. I know good when I see it, mostly because it's rare.

You used the words well. There aren't the kind of awkward full stops that rhyming poems often have, where you can tell that someone gave up and threw in a word because it rhymed. This has a good flow, and a sense that it's all what you meant to say.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I thought it was pretty good, and managed to avoide the urge to edit (there was a single word I almost changed but decided not to.

I read a lot of poetry. For years one of the standard books I traveled with with the Oxford Book of English Verse.

But of the poems which fell back into my lap... most were topical. Poems written for/about specific people. Like old love letters, they didn't all wear so well.

And my preferences in verse shaped them too. Get into the Romantics, and I start to lose interes, get past them, and it's only a few poets I like (and a lot of those are poets of the Great War).

So there are a lot of archaisms in my verse (being fond of Herrick, Herbert, Shakespeare, Donne and the like... throw in Houseman and... well things can get turgid).

They might be better than they look to me now, after all for me they have baggage.

I think that one took about a week to finish. I can recall the inspiration (mustard covered hills, in the San Dimas area), and the desire to make it a swell and stop piece; much as a good haiku has a sudden change of view, I wanted to give a sense of time, and then a piece of place.

I like rhyme, and structure, though it took me a while (well, into my earely twenties) to realise this. Form forces concision, which concentrates meaning; few are as gifted as cummings, and fewer still can pull a Whitman.

My personal opinion is that the "emotional" view of the Romantics, combined with the structures of Whitmanesque free verse is why so much of modern poetry is crap. The public has come to think the voice of the poem is that of the poet, and lots of those who try their hands at it make the same mistake.

As a result much (if not most... certainly at the slams I've been unhappy enough to attend it was most) is self-indulgent crap, where the amount of angst the poet has for the subject is substituted for craft (which is despised, in lieu of "feeling) and art.

Someday I may be able to recover the hardest form I ever did (self structured, and, in it's way, harder than a sestina). It was self-indulgent, but that I made it work, through two passes of the form, is worth showing off, embarrassing content or no.

TK

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

That's beautiful. I could see it in my mind's eye.