Sonnet from My Forties

     Much have I ranged the kingdoms Stevens forged
     Of deeply penetrating inquiries
     Into, and deft use of, the metaphor,
     And volumes filled 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 splashingly 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.

 Diary Entry

Friday, 16 December 2011, 11:30 A.M.  I have a few small exhibition-bookkeeping chores yet to do that I’m letting go for this weekend so I can concentrate on the stack of reviews for Small Press Review I have to do.  One of them will be of I, a novella by Arnold Skemer that I find excellent but a very slow read, in the best sense of the description. 

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     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.

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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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John Keats

He read of Greece; and then with sharpened eyes,
espied its gods’ dim conjurations still
in breeze-soft force throughout his native isle–

in force in clouds’ remote allusiveness,
in oceanwaves’ eternal whispering,
in woodlands’ shadowy impermanence.

Once cognizant of earth’s allure, he sought
a method of imprisonment – a skill
with which to hold forever what he saw.

The way the soil and vernal rain converge
in carefree swarming flowers, Keats & Spring
then intersected quietly in verse.

The realms he had so often visited
at once grew larger by at least a tenth.

28 December 2005: Several weeks ago, my sometime
poetics foe at New-Poetry, Mike Snider, was kind
enough to send me a (signed!) copy of his chapbook,
44 Sonnets. Its first poem is this:
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Petulant Muse

Another Sonnet? Baby, have a heart…
Try something multi-culti — a ghazal! –
Or let me really strut my stuff and start
An epic — Sing! Muse — oh, we’ll have a ball!

You’ll be important when we’ve finished it –
Just think — your name on Stanley Fish’s lips,
Our poem tausht in Contemporary Lit,
The fame of Billy Collins in eclipse!

And talk about commitment! I’ll be yours
For years! If we get stale, then, what the fuck?
My sister Callie knows some kinky cures
For boredom. You should see … no, that would suck.

Just fourteen lines, and then I get to rest?
I think our old arrangement’s still the best.
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I’d call this a  serious light poem. By that I mean it’s clever
and fun and funny, but intelligent, with some involvement
with consequential Artists’ Concerns. In any event, I love
the consistent tone and the way it dances intellectuality
and academicism into its mix with its references to Fish,
the ghazal (Arabic poem with from 5 to 12 couplets, all
using the–good grief–same rhyme) and to Calliope, the
muse of epic poetry, the Internet just told me (the narrator
I would guess to be Thalia, the muse of comedy and of
playful and idyllic poetry). It feels like a painting of Fragonard
to me, which I mean as a compliment.

29 December 2005: Here are three more sonnets from Mike
Snider”s chap, 44 Sonnets:
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The Fall

When we’d pile in my great-aunt’s Chevrolet
And drive to see the trees turned red and gold,
Grandma would scowl. “Reminds me of death,” she’d say.
“It means that everything is getting old.”

“Now, Helen, ‘ after winter comes the spring.’”
But she’d have none of that. “It came and went
For you and me, Sister.” And then she’d sing
“Go, tell Aunt Rhody,” just for devilment.

I have her picture, nineteen, sure to break
The heart of every man she ever met –
Another from her fifties, in a fake
Nun’s habit sucking on a cigarette,

And both are faithful. Grandma, you were right.
There’s nothing grows in Fall except the night.
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Homework

My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,

How even flaws in this numerical romance
Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.

Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
Than nudge her at her homework while I try
To master patterns made so long before
My birth that stars since then have left the sky?

I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.
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What I know

Always, always, always, I know this first–
My dearest girl is gone, my daughter Lee
I loved not well enough to keep with me–
Of all the things I’ve failed to do, the worst.

Her poet mother’s supple brain was cursed
To learn the language of pathology.
When surgery failed they turned to drugs and she
Began to dream of torture, dreams she nursed

To memories of children murdered by
Her fathers and her mother and her will.
I could not hold her to the truth. She found
At Duke a doctor who decided I

Was fondling Lee. The judge said no, but still
She took my Lee and held her underground.
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I posted these on the date of this entry, then wrote
over the entry, so lost it. I seem to do something like
that every three or four months, I don’t know why.
The remarks I lost were penetrating, I’m sure, but I
remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember
is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and
the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the
aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics–but employing rhymes
(note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s
octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal
sensitively with common human situations and end in
effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–
but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal
music that meter and rhyme can provide.

One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider
a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these,
is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation.
That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows
what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem
was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So
I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor)
of writing verse for astronomy (and the ones of either for
doing homework, or learning in general). And of poems for
the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All
this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the
father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s
toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional,
but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.”
Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the
others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character
studies, too.

In my lost comments, I mentioned the value of formal
verse to its engagents for finding an order for life’s
difficulties–and suggesting that they, like similar difficulties
timelessly made into similar art, will pass. I also referred
to the pleasure an engagent of a sonnet or other piece
of formal verse, when effective, will get from the poet’s
dexterity–like someone listening to a fine pianist playing
Rachmaninoff, say, getting both musical pleasure, and a
kind of (voyeuristic, sub-behavioral kinesthetic) pleasure
from his physical skill at the keyboard. I’m sure I came up
with a somewhat origianl third value, but now I can’t
remember what it was. No doubt, it will become famous
as Grumman’s lost insight the way Fermat’s lost proof did.