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Why shouldn't we sing along?
Mar. 1st, 2013 01:59 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -2. High today: 3. About 36 straight hours of slush falling from the sky ended around 9 this morning.
Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip....
Made a mostly ill-advised trip to the cottage on Sunday (and then managed to leave my tripod up there, after not even using it! ... but, eh, I'll be extra glad to have it again in a couple of months). Once again, we couldn't walk around on the lake--while it appeared to be firmly frozen over, it was also frozen under a whole pile of slush and water. ( This ) is not what you want to see behind you when you're walking around on lake ice.
At least I got a bug picture. ( This thing ) for some reason was actually ambling around inside the cottage, with the temperature right around freezing. That's two reading weeks in a row we've been up there and seen bugs up and about. No snow mosquitoes this year, though.
( That black-eyed Susan is still there. )
Ruminating some more on poetry lately ... the one thing I can't seem to get away from in trying to write something I might be happy with is rhythm and meter (which are maybe two things, but also one thing--let's just say "meter" for both). (The strange thing about this is that I don't dislike free verse--Purdy, after all, writes free verse. (Frost writes blank verse, but I don't think he ever writes free verse. He's, after all, the guy who's supposed to have said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without the net.) I don't know that you can ever not bother with rhythm, if only little local rhythms, though. "Herschel Monteagle and Faraday / lakeland rockland and hill country....") Yesterday while my students were writing a test I thought I'd try to start a poem by sketching out the meter first--test times are useful for this kind of thing, because there's nothing much I can do except scribble in a notebook--and then find words to fit it--is this a sensible way to start poems? Do people do this? It seems like something you might do as an exercise.... The thing is, when I've written poems I've never paid a lot of attention to trying to get a fitting meter for what the poem is saying; mostly I've started by getting some of the words out, identifying a meter that the syllables approximate, and then writing the rest in that meter. But it seems clear that it's important, if a poem is going to be really good, for the meter to be appropriate to the "subject matter".
Well, actually, first, I was thinking again, as I do from time to time, about writing a poem about the vanishing trilliums ... starting with "Where are the trilliums now in summer", which I didn't really like as a line, but I liked the rhythm of it, so I thought I'd try mapping out a stanza starting with it, and letting whatever words came fall into it ... which eventually got me to this:
Stepping
across the running water
finding
your way from rock to log you
falter
feeling
the cold between your toes and
wishing
you'd never left the shore
Where is
the hand to hold and help you
over
the water you have chosen
now? And
where is
the shore that you had set out
seeking
to find if you knew how?
What if
you found it, lit your fire there,
warming
yourself before you built your
shelter -
would you
remember where you came from,
longing
to go back home again?
Standing
alone in running water
will you
forget why you have come? And
if there's
nothing
to say for what you're doing,
will you
regret what you have done?
Is this anything? Yeah, I dunno, maybe. It's not ideally the way I'd want to go about writing poems--the way I want to do it is to have something to show and show it. The thing about trying to just think of some words, without really having anything in mind from the outset about where you're going with it (although obviously it goes its own way along the way) is that Robert Smith Syndrome always lurks: There's nothing I always never wanted more than you forever.... (And bits and pieces of other things find their way into it--this, and "Record Body Count" ... and, I suppose, a bit of "House with the Laughing Windows", too....)
( Angry kitty demands all the treats! )
Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip....
Made a mostly ill-advised trip to the cottage on Sunday (and then managed to leave my tripod up there, after not even using it! ... but, eh, I'll be extra glad to have it again in a couple of months). Once again, we couldn't walk around on the lake--while it appeared to be firmly frozen over, it was also frozen under a whole pile of slush and water. ( This ) is not what you want to see behind you when you're walking around on lake ice.
At least I got a bug picture. ( This thing ) for some reason was actually ambling around inside the cottage, with the temperature right around freezing. That's two reading weeks in a row we've been up there and seen bugs up and about. No snow mosquitoes this year, though.
( That black-eyed Susan is still there. )
Ruminating some more on poetry lately ... the one thing I can't seem to get away from in trying to write something I might be happy with is rhythm and meter (which are maybe two things, but also one thing--let's just say "meter" for both). (The strange thing about this is that I don't dislike free verse--Purdy, after all, writes free verse. (Frost writes blank verse, but I don't think he ever writes free verse. He's, after all, the guy who's supposed to have said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without the net.) I don't know that you can ever not bother with rhythm, if only little local rhythms, though. "Herschel Monteagle and Faraday / lakeland rockland and hill country....") Yesterday while my students were writing a test I thought I'd try to start a poem by sketching out the meter first--test times are useful for this kind of thing, because there's nothing much I can do except scribble in a notebook--and then find words to fit it--is this a sensible way to start poems? Do people do this? It seems like something you might do as an exercise.... The thing is, when I've written poems I've never paid a lot of attention to trying to get a fitting meter for what the poem is saying; mostly I've started by getting some of the words out, identifying a meter that the syllables approximate, and then writing the rest in that meter. But it seems clear that it's important, if a poem is going to be really good, for the meter to be appropriate to the "subject matter".
Well, actually, first, I was thinking again, as I do from time to time, about writing a poem about the vanishing trilliums ... starting with "Where are the trilliums now in summer", which I didn't really like as a line, but I liked the rhythm of it, so I thought I'd try mapping out a stanza starting with it, and letting whatever words came fall into it ... which eventually got me to this:
Stepping
across the running water
finding
your way from rock to log you
falter
feeling
the cold between your toes and
wishing
you'd never left the shore
Where is
the hand to hold and help you
over
the water you have chosen
now? And
where is
the shore that you had set out
seeking
to find if you knew how?
What if
you found it, lit your fire there,
warming
yourself before you built your
shelter -
would you
remember where you came from,
longing
to go back home again?
Standing
alone in running water
will you
forget why you have come? And
if there's
nothing
to say for what you're doing,
will you
regret what you have done?
Is this anything? Yeah, I dunno, maybe. It's not ideally the way I'd want to go about writing poems--the way I want to do it is to have something to show and show it. The thing about trying to just think of some words, without really having anything in mind from the outset about where you're going with it (although obviously it goes its own way along the way) is that Robert Smith Syndrome always lurks: There's nothing I always never wanted more than you forever.... (And bits and pieces of other things find their way into it--this, and "Record Body Count" ... and, I suppose, a bit of "House with the Laughing Windows", too....)
( Angry kitty demands all the treats! )
