The Lightening Bug is not the Beacon

A poetic sensibility ought not be mistaken for a lens through which life may be understood. 

The insight of the poet is akin to the light of the firefly, seen across the lawn. Beautiful, fleeting, personally and therefore irrationally reassuring, a sound poem provides this flash, this arresting but momentary and faint illumination. 

But you are likely to trip over the lawn furniture if you guide yourself by the light of the firefly.

Thoughts which occur on the second and third reading of Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox. 

Berlin identifies Tolstoy's "deeply skeptical and pessimistic view of the strength of the non-rational in human behavior, which at once dominate human beings and deceive them about themselves." 

Tolstoy harbored a deep suspicion of the romantic notion that "true knowledge cannot be obtained by the use of reason but only by a kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the universe - the soul of the world - such as do artists and thinkers in moments of divine inspiration."

For David Urias - Murdered in El Salvador June 29 2012

El dió con senderos conocidos

Mostraba confianza su paso

Ilusiones real no presumidos

Varonil su aspecto leve acaso

Dió David con camino familiar

Bajaba en parada habitual

Jamás piensa en sangre bautizar

Ir a hogar humilde y natal

Proyectos bien de paz y comunal

Guardaba en su mente inocente 

Camina alegre pero el Mal

lo rodea atrás y en el frente

Lastimaron al muchacho sin perdón

Y también sin razón a perdonar

Libre de actos malos, fue el don

a todos; pues su reta fue amar

David! Quitarte todo! Bien feo!

al comienzo de tu mero apogeo

*************   translation   **************

He followed well worn paths
His foot fall confident
His dreams modest not presumptuous
His a masculine essence yet gentle

David chose the familiar route
Getting off at the usual bus stop
Never imagining a baptism in blood
Headed for his mother’s humble home

Full of notions of communal harmony
Were his innocent ideas
He walked joyfully but Evil
fully had surrounded him

Mercilessly they wounded this boy
a child needing no show of mercy
Free of evil in himself, he was a gift
to all - his striving: learn to love

Oh David! They took everything from you!
Just as you had begun your ascent

IS FREE VERSE TRUE VERSE FOR BEING FREE? CASE IN POINT

A snippet from William Carlos Williams'  "It Is a Small Plant"

It is a small plant
delicately branched and
tapering conically
to a point, each branch
and the peak a wire for
green pods, blind lanterns
starting upward from
the stalk each way to
a pair of prickly edged blue
flowerets: it is her regard,
a little plant without leaves,
a finished thing guarding
its secret.

My question, raised before, why is this a poem and not simply a well done paragraph, broken up so as to fly the flag of verse?

Here is the same "sentence" but laid out without line breaks. What is lost and what is gained by breaking up the sentence into arbitrary (?) bits, as Williams did?

It is a small plant delicately branched and tapering conically to a point, each branch and the peak a wire for green pods, blind lanterns starting upward from the stalk each way to a pair of prickly edged blue flowerets: it is her regard, a little plant without leaves, a finished thing guarding its secret.


Source & Background:


Poets.org - Happy Birthday June 10, 2012

On the "Imagist Movement" you can visit:

Poets.org A Brief Guide to Imagism

JUNE 5 - POEMS HAVE BEEN RECOVERED, HIS BODY? NO . . .

JUNE 5 - Birthday of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898), poet, dramatist and artist, who was murdered on Aug 19, 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His works were banned in Franco's Spain. G L's body has never been recovered. His poetry and plays have been. Here's a cutting from the poem, with my translation following:

Arbolé, arbolé,
seco y verdí.

La niña del bello rostro
está cogiendo aceituna.
el viento, galán de torres,
la prende por la cintura.
Pasaron cuatro jinetes
sobre jacas andaluzas,
con trajes de azul y verde,
con largas capas oscuras.
'Vente a Córdoba, muchacha.'
La niña no los escucha.
[. . .]

Stemma O Stemma
both dry and green

A lovely girl
out picking olives.
The wind, rigid lover,
grabs at her waist.
As four riders passed
on Andalusian ponies,
wearing outfits of blue and green
and long dark capes,
they said 'Come to Cordoba, little lady.'
She paid no attention to them.
[. . .]







(Translation by RBC)

The Restless Simulacra

The restless simulacra in my mind,
The piquant and horrific mix and meet.
Kaleidoscopic images unwind,
Make loves of losses, victories defeat.

With slight adjustments, just the merest twist,

My brain creates the past I would review.

The sum of spent events comes down to this:

What’s said and done I constantly renew.

Kaleidoscopic colors can enchant,

The reds, the greens, the yellows do enthrall.

More somber hues, though true, I can recant,

Since truth is true if willingly recalled.

The present from the past - a common view.

Our memories we invent - more likely true.

______

This poem was first published on-line in Syndic #6, where a reading by the writer may also be found:

Three by RBC

Remorse by Siegfried Sassoon

Now here is a poem with legs, not necessarily the best by Siegfried Sassoon, but a poem with limitations - pace, meter, rhyme - something of the essential features that mark out a poem from a paragraph.


Sasson was one of the famous WWI British poets, who fought, was wounded, sent home to recover, then back to fight some more and yet survive:

Remorse *
by Siegfried Sassoon

Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,
He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows
Each flash and spouting crash,--each instant lit
When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes
Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,
"Could anything be worse than this?"--he wonders,
Remembering how he saw those Germans run,
Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:
Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one
Livid with terror, clutching at his knees. . .
Our chaps were sticking 'em like pigs . . . "O hell!"
He thought--"there's things in war one dare not tell
Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads
Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds."

* Counter-Attack and Other Poems, by Siegfried Sassoon (Dutton and Co. 1918, p. 54) 

What's the Diff Xween Free Verse & a Pungent Paragraph or Two?

This excellent poem by Marie Howe has been floating around on the web for a couple of years. (See Sources below)


Does it answer the question:  What's the difference beween free verse and a pungent paragraph or two?

PRACTICING

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each others’ mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off – maybe six or eight girls – and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and Now you be the boy.

Concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats. 

We sucked each others’ breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair … and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was — a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song 

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire
just before we made ourselves stop.

SOURCES, MORE FROM THIS POET:

LGBT Poets: Kissing and Telling
http://thenewgay.net/2009/04/kissing-and-telling.html

Marie Howe

http://www.mariehowe.com/

Marie Howe On What the Living Do After Loss

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141502211/poet-marie-howe-on-what-the-living-do-after-loss

Marie Howe

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/marie-howe