EthicalDative

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

Can a person swear for joy? It’s what I do. My reflex on encountering a poem that triggers a rush of involvement on first reading is to let fly a putatively disobliging epithet. It’s a reverb from the salutary shock delivered by luminous words arranged in crystalline structures.

I’ve no license to quote Li-Young Lee’s entire poem titled “From Blossoms”; you can read it here. Let me just excerpt constructs from the first 3 strophes, unspooled from their lineation (is that sacrilege?), and quote the last strophe integrally, with its tolling as of a poignant recessional:

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches…

From laden boughs… comes nectar… the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,… to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

The penultimate line, driving a swoop to the impossible, flaunts a specimen of truly purposeful enjambment in free verse.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved