While hunting this morning for an essay of mine that had something in it I wanted to tell Richard Kostelanetz about, I came across a copy of Jake Berry’s zine, The Experioddicist, and found a version of the sonnet of mine I wrote about in my Of Manywhere-at-Once. I spent months on it, never getting it right, then continued working on it on and off–until now, never getting it right. I often thought for a while I had. That’s the case now. The version in The Experioddicist isn’t quite right, but I immediately saw how I thought I could change it so it was: here’s the once again final version:
Sonnet from My Forties
Much have I ranged the broad-skied latitudes
That Stevens festivalled his inquiries
On truth and the imagination to,
And reams used up in vain attempts to reach
The heights that he did. Often, too, I’ve been
To where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps
Toward high-hued sensibility begin
In Roethke’s verse, or measured the extent
Of wing-swirled, myth-electric, royal light
That Yeats achieved, or marveled down the worlds
That Pound re-morninged windily to life,
but failed as dismally to match their works.
Yet still, nine-tenth insane though it now seems,
I seek those ends; I hold to my huge dreams.
Okay, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m not so enthusiastic about it. I changed line 3 from “On truth and metaphor in due course to” to “On truth and the imagination to,” a definite improvement. The first stanza still doesn’t quite do it for me, but the rest of the poem seems fine–or would, I’m sure, if I hadn’t read and reread it some many hundreds of times. Needless to say, it’s in the old-fashioned mode of Hopkins/Yeats/Thomas and probably over-rich–certainly to today’s taste. It’s somewhat redeemed by its use of reversed rhymes (which are full rhymes, not alliterations). It still sums up my life in poetry, though–alas.
* * *
Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 5 P.M. A non-productive day, although I did try to get a few things done. Mainly, I spent a couple of hours getting a copy of terms that are for use in my “Mathemaku for Scott Helmes”–twice, the second time because I needed them a different size. (Actually, I plan to have a full-size version of the work, and a smaller one, so I can use both sets of terms.) Earlier, another round of tennis, which went fairly well for me, for a change. A second breakfast with teammates at the nearby McDonald’s followed. Later I had a doctor’s appointment to get through and some grocery shopping to do. I got some new medicine for my continuing urinary problems. Right now I’m weary, as usual. I feel, as I often do, that if I could just go to bed and go to sleep for twelve or thirteen hours, I’d be a new man. But, although I’m more than sleepy enough than I should need to be to go to sleep, the chances are I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, nor stay asleep for even as much as an hour if I did.
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