Blogs

In the "you kids get off my lawn" Department for Old Fogies,
I offer up a venerable pet peeve:

How often have you heard or read (usually by its enemies), that
metrical poetry is so dull and mechanical in its treatment of
stresses that it sounds like a metronome was used to write it?

I've come across dozens of examples of this complaint through
the years, and have now decided to--finally--do something about it.

All right, I confess: I'm a hopeless romantic and rabid fan of the great American songbook--especially the great composers and lyricists like Rodgers and Hammerstein. Color me an unrepentant geezer, but I have always been enamored of the lush beauty of the love songs in many of their musicals.

Still in the Touchstone mode (and blogging up to speed at a glacial pace):

A. E. Housman is a personal obsession, a poet who finds his way

into my work (and life) often enough that I should be asking rent

of the old fellow.

One of the many pieces (and how closely it comports with

Frost's "Fire and Ice") that have long held my utmost

admiration is his "Eight O'Clock":

He stood, and heard the steeple

Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.

One, two, three, four, to market place and people

Touchstones

What are the poems one returns to, always taking pleasure?

Or to put it slightly differently, what poems would enjoy the

place of honor in one's Absolute Anthology (no fair including

warhorses, chestnuts, and poems one is supposed to like)?

I'd start with Frost's "Fire and Ice," for its astounding compression

and bite--a coiled spring of mostly monosyllables--snapping those

two dimeter lines in place while avoiding the risk of chiming

Another Touchstone: the utterly remarkable concision

Richard Wilbur could achieve in one brilliant metaphor.

Here is "Sleepless at Crown Point":

    All night, this headland

    Lunges into the rumpling

    Capework of the wind.

Hard to know where to begin singing the praises of this amazing poem, a haiku

that like many others by Wilbur, near-rhymes (here, "land" with "wind"). Perhaps

start by pointing out that all three touchstones so far are very short poems, making

What are the poems one returns to, always taking pleasure?

Or to put it slightly differently, what poems would enjoy the

place of honor in one's Absolute Anthology (no fair including

warhorses, chestnuts, and poems one is supposed to like)?

I'd start with Frost's "Fire and Ice," for its astounding compression

and bite--a coiled spring of mostly monosyllables--snapping those

two dimeter lines in place while avoiding the risk of chiming

(too-close rhyming). The rhymes "fit" perfectly yet catch one

off-guard.