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

One of the killed young British poets of WW I.

March 18 Birthday of Wilfred Owen (1893 - Nov 4, 1918), one of the young, British, killed poets of WW I.

. . .
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Three bright and lovely children is enough

Three bright and lovely children is enough

for effacing and unassuming me

well nearly since life can be quite rough

be nice to have a bit of sound money

a big house too couple of friendly dogs

a yard and garden two cars on the street

or better a garage don't think us hogs

bad weather makes them rust under your feet

plazma telly three compu’s a great room

not grand just great so we can all enjoy

view of the woods land quiet as a tomb

essential as we read on download toys

three children lovely completed life I boast

that other stuff? no - ’xcuse off to the Coast

What is the purpose of poetry?

What is the purpose of poetry? Not that hard to figure out. Is it?

"When criticism becomes a pursuit separate from poetry, those who follow it are apt to forget that the legitimate ends of the art for which they lay down rules are instruction and delight, and these points being obtained by what road soever, entitled the poet to claim the prize of successful merit."

Walter Scott

Memoirs 
also 
The Dramatic Work of John Dryden


Scott was a literary heavyweight, much neglected these days.

EZRA POUND on WALT WHITMAN

A PACT I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -  I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root -  Let there be commerce between us.  Source: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-pact/ Why did Pound ever "detest" Whitman?

Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect" 1913

"It is better to present one Image in a lifetime 

than to produce voluminous works."

"Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have 
never themselves written a notable work."

"The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are 'all over the shop'. Is it any wonder 'the public is indifferent to poetry?"

"A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise 
if it is to give pleasure, it need not be bizarre or curious, 

but it must be well used if used at all."

"That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye 

of the reader will lose nothing by translation 

into a foreign tongue; 

that which appeals to the ear can reach 

only those who take it in the original."

"Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation, 

as compared with Milton's rhetoric."

"Read as much of Wordsworth as does not 

seem too unutterably dull."

"Don't mess up the perception of one sense 

by trying to define it in terms of another. 

This is usually only the result of being 

too lazy to find the exact word."

"Rhythm. - I believe in an 'absolute rhythm', 

a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly 

to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed."

"Symbols. - I believe that the proper and perfect 

symbol is the natural object . . ."

"Technique. - I believe in technique as 

the test of a man's sincerity . . ."

"Form. - I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, 

that some poems may have form as a tree has form, 

some as water poured into a vase."

" . . . a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, 

and therefore not properly rendered 

in symmetrical forms."

 "I am constantly contending that it took two centuries 

of Provence and one of Tuscany to develop 

the media of Dante's masterwork, 

that it took the latinists of the Renaissance, Pleiade, 

and his own age of painted speech to prepare 

Shakespeare his tools."

"It is tremendously important that great poetry be written, 

it makes no jot of difference who writes it." 

" . . . no one produces much that is final . . ."

"As for 'adaptations'; one finds that all the old masters 

of painting recommend to their pupils that 

they begin by copying masterwork, 

and proceed to their own composition."

"As for 'Every man his own poet', the more every man knows 

about poetry the better. I believe in every one writing poetry 

who wants to; most do."

"I believe in every man knowing enough of music 

to play 'God bless our home' on the harmonium, 

but I do not believe in every man giving concerts 

and printing his sin."

"The mastery of any art is the work of a lifetime. 

I should not discriminate between the 'amateur' 

and the 'professional' [. . .] but I should discriminate 

between the amateur and the expert."

"If a certain thing was said once for all in Atlantis or Arcadia, 

in 450 Before Christ or in 1290 after, it is not for us moderns 

to go saying it over, or to go obscuring the memory of the dead 

by saying the same thing with less skill and less conviction."

"All that the critic can do for the reader or audience 

or spectator is to focus his gaze or audition."

 "Surely it is better for me to name over the few 

beautiful poems that still ring in my head than 

for me to search my flat for back numbers of periodicals 

and rearrange all that I have said about 

friendly and hostile writers."

SOURCE:

" A Retrospect"

&

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/pound.htm