POETICKS

While reviewing my 2011 blog entries, I came on the following “final version” of my life’s-work sonnet, and was astounded that I could have thought it good:

     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.

The following struck me as much better:

     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.

But “broad-skied” bothered me.  Nice thought, but I didn’t like the repetition of the d-sound, and “broad” seemed to me low in lyricality.   So, once again I improved it:

     Sonnet from My Forties

     Much have I ranged the large-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.

I don’t think I’ll live long enough to improve it more than thirty or forty more times.

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I’ve always had a horrible fear of failure.  I was thinking about that just now as I tried to steel myself to go to war with the Russians.  I’m Greece in a round of Civilization, the world-domination game I spend such an absurd amount of time playing against my computer.  My spies, who are almost always right, tell me the Russians are very weak, and there are other strong indications that I will win a war against them.  Since I’m slightly ahead of the other nations I’m competing with, that should be enough for me to win the game as a whole.  And, good grief, no one will know but I if I fail!  Yet I feel the same way I feel in a tennis match I’m playing in the local seniors league, or when I’m about to submit a poem somewhere.  I’m reminded, too, of the way school tests made me feel, even ones I knew would be no problem for me.  Oddly, I don’t much feel it with these blog entries of mine.  I don’t know why that should be.  I’m submitting specimens of my thinking to strangers.  I guess the fact that my judges are invisible, mute, and few keeps me from thinking about them.  Another factor I just thought of is that no one is keeping score, there’s no definite way I can fail.  Well, unless a few of you made nasty comments about my entries all of a sudden.  But nobody has for ever so long.

Happy pills or alcohol would probably solve the problem.  Unfortunately, anything that would make awareness of failure impossible would also make awareness of success impossible, too.  My temperament is such that irrational hope of success will always trump equally irrational fear of failure, for me.  Even though my greatest feelings of success have been of anticipated success, almost never of actual success. 

Note: after I posted this, I felt a sense of triumph.  That made me realize a trick I learned so long ago that I use it automatically without thinking about it: giving oneself games to play that are almost impossible to lose, in this case, my game of getting a blog entry done every day.  That’s a great lesson for those of you looking for terrific self-help methods!

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I’ve done it again: lost track of something important to me, this time four or more copies of my April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now.  As usual in such cases I can’t imagine what I did with them.  I feel I’ve looked everywhere they could possibly be at least twice.  This time, though, I have no deadlines hanging over me, so am going to try to do something about it: I’m going to put my house in order.  So don’t expect much here for a while.

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