by Neal Whitman Poetry Prof
Last month, your “professor” expressed his belief that good poetry can offer a bit of mystery, but confusion is off limits. This month, I am a “confessor.” I admit that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is outer limits. Lord knows, I tried:
This
year
resolved:
on my bed
lying on my back
will let riverrunwords pour down.
Sometimes you have to let abstract art flow over you.
In case I have confused you, “riverrun” is the first word in Finnegans Wake. My short poem is “fib.” No, not a white lie, but a poetical form using the Fibonacci numbers sequence for syllable count: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. I love to post fibs on www.fibetry.com and love to read all sorts of short poems, which is why I visit Getting Something Read on a regular basis. I have special affection for short poems that are formulaic, which is why I post here a haiku per season. I like to try my hand at two other short forms: Clerihews and Symmetrics.
The Clerihew is named for its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who at age sixteen, bored in science class, wrote his first one:
Sir Humphrey Davies
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in odium
Of having discovered sodium.
Get it? Biographical. Four lines. AABB rhyme.
I wrote my first one for my wife who partners with me on “Poetry Prof” recitals where she plays her Native American flute and takes turns with me reading poems and telling stories.
Elaine plays the wooden flute
Bringing more than a toot-toot.
She fills the room with soothing sounds,
making space sacred where peace abounds.
Strictly speaking, the first line should be name only, as in:
Blossom Dearie
With only reverie
No need for a bee to make a prairie flower.
With a whispered lyric brings acoustic power.
And, of course, here I must thank Emily Dickinson, whose short poem inspired me.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
Elaine and I heard Blossom Dearie back in the 1970s in a mid-town Manhattan jazz club and had always treasured her whispery, almost little-girl, voice. I now warn friends the risk of asking me to write a Clerihew for them: Miss Dearie died two weeks after I wrote my Clerihew (albeit at age 82).
The late (and I believe great) David McCord loved to write Clerihews and also invented his own short form, the Symmetric. Here is one I wrote, note we begin and end with same word; repeat one word in middle line; rhyme scheme is ABACC:
Poet, listen to leaf sound
but keep an ear to the
ground: ground
Shadows will let you know it.
The sun is not for the poet
Here is another Symmetric that supports my theme today, though I broke a rule and did not end with the first word [haiku master Basho said learn the rules, then break them]:
Academics I call obscurist
write for whom they consider
purest: purest
Readers I say make matters worse.
They don’t know their elbow from bad verse.
In homage to short poem expert David McCord, here is his very, very short poem, “Epitaph for a Waiter.”
By and by
God caught his eye.
Is this a “great” poem? Can short poetry be great poetry? While I believe that David McCord was a great poet, do I believe he wrote great poems? Hard to say. Looking for greatness in a body of work, rather than the individual poem is not new. A reporter asked T.S. Eliot, “What book are you getting the Nobel Prize for” His reply: “I believe it is given for the entire corpus.” The reporter’s follow up question: “When did you publish that?”
What makes a poem great? It may be hard to put it into words. Like a great painting, you know it when you see it. Perhaps, greatness in all the Arts (literary, visual, performing) is like the horizon – something we walk towards, but never quite reach. Henry Moore, perhaps the “greatest” sculptor of the 20th century, told future Poet Laureate Donald Hall, “The secret of life is to have a task, some thing you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
To ensure nothing blocked his river’s flow, Joyce shook up conventional punctuation throughout his masterpiece. He even “removed the apostrophe in the title of his novel to suggest an active process in which a multiplicity of “Finnegans,” that is, all members of humanity, fall and then wake and arise.”
Kristina, dear (and GSR visitors, she is a dear, dear person and poet extraordinaire),
Your comment, as always, add, never subtracts. We see, once again, why you were and are a literature professor. In that, you do and should take pride. As for me, am now and will always be a professor who speaks and writes as a common reader. Finnegans Wake, minus the apostrophe, is a long poem I cannot read (well, I can “read” the words, but do not fathom what they “mean”). This month, of course, am extolling the short poem. As “professors” of one type or another, I think we share this common ground: inspiration is an active process. Yes, a principle of respiratory physiology, but also a precept of reading and writing. And, that’s the “long and short” of it.
Amicus poeticae,
Neal
You remind me of a couplet by J. K. Stephen:
Kipling Rudyards
When the Rudyards cease from Kipling
And the Haggards ride no more.
To which David McCord appemded:
Still for us where Cottons mather
In the spring the Willas cather
As of yore.
Kerry,
Thank you for adding. By the way, J.K. Stephen has five great
“shorts” in McCord’s anthology, “What Cheer.” By the way (again!), I have been waiting a long time for someone to ask me if I liked Kipling so I could reply, “I don’t know. I’ve never kippled.”
Amicus poeticae,
Neal
From Have you ever Kippled? …it’s interesting to track how science-fiction words pass into the English language. One that’s been missed by the Oxford English Dictionary SF project — and its spinoff book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction — is “kipple”, a term universally credited to Philip K Dick.
According to Dick, kipple is a kind of low-key, domestic version of entropy: household disorder, kitchen-sink chaos, the dust-bunnies of doom. The classic definition appears in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, famously filmed as Blade Runner:
Not to be confused with a kip. Brit-speak for nap.
Ah, Dale, what do you not know! Went right to my library website and put a “hold” on the Philip K. Dick novel. And, newcomer top GSR, Kerry, please go to Susan Dion’s “rejection” poem and jump right in. The water’s great. Finally, thank you GSR founders and current staffers for your gift: new connections.
With “great-atude”,
Neal