By all accounts poetry was the first literature of the sundry peoples. It predated writing, so rhyme, rhythm and alliteration helped rhapsodes and minstrels hold it in their heads.

In contemporary lyric rhyme is absent (thank goodness), alliteration rare; rhythm lingers, though not metered. There are notable exceptions. Context clues and clearcut statement give way to in-your-face compression and figure-me-out phrasing. It takes multiple readings to sniff out a gist. Verse texts disdaining syntactic cohesion register as utterance rockets firing aspirational poetry thrusters.

Imagine my surprise when Ocean Vuong described how he first learned to write a pantoum. It’s as if a pole vaulter described learning how to crochet. I’ve encountered “pantoum” perhaps three times in my reading, have looked it up every time. Invariably, I warm to the form’s description until I read instances, then it seems, like the villanelle, too showboaty to take seriously. Or am I wrong?

Witness the psychic boost I glean from the merest modicum of mastery over highly formal Classical Arabic poems. These ingenious monsters predate Beowulf and use language largely still extant! In their thrall I’m drawn of late to test even the chill waters of a Milton or a Pope or a Dryden. Whence this impulse and whither tends it? Point of reference? Port in a storm? Can it be that ostensibly remote poetries have affair with one another and can lend us help we desperately seek in confronting the ostensibly modern?

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved