All posts for the month July, 2013

Mildly Irregular

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Spirit Mountain

“Said to be haunted”

“Source of strength and madness”

Alone on the night mountain

I wait, curious.

Screeches and groans

Tear the night, only I

Know they’re ravens

Not demons.

Harbour lights, town lights, wandering

Headlights shine and

Are gloved into mist

Pale flame of sunrise

Seascape afire

Ghosts? Then within us

But a trickle of

Welsh blood speaking:

Perhaps in the soil

Out of time, sleeping.

That was the poem that started me writing poetry again. Note that it isn’t regular in any conventional sense: it doesn’t rhyme and although the rhythm is such as to make it easy to read aloud, it doesn’t follow a set pattern. So this is free verse?

Not entirely. Notice how similar-sounding words are spaced out – ravens/demons, speaking/sleeping and arguably (in the endings of two successive verses) mist/within us. The speaking/sleeping pair end the poem, giving it something of an air of finality and completion. It’s the first, exploratory verse that has no such links.

Here’s another.

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WOLF

Cry in the night

A wavering yearning wail

Remembered

The pack all know their part

The smell of sickening deer

Bloods their comradeship

Torn flesh is life

Wolf dreams the voices in the leaves

The running of a long-lost mate

The tumbling play of cubs and then

Midwinter snowlock, icy breath

Fairytale devil

Hiding in homely things

Better to eat you, dear

Ravenous, clever

A chalice for our wish to kill

For rape and for rebellion

To turn the world right upside down,

Of chaos, and the homeland’s milk

Of law and lace for all time spilt

Wolves ride our dreams

In each dark wood

A half-remembered beast

Down each sharp slope

They wait, or wander like the wind

To fall on anywhere they wish;

The fearful grope

Of climber on the alp falls short

Because the wolf waits just beyond

But at his fall the wolf will stand

And soon have sport

A child is missing

Sheep are torn

A travelling brother never comes

Folk knew the wolf must be the cause

So hunted it with dog and gun

Until one lonely wolf was left

Searching for any of its kind

Into a trap and hung to rot

So who had killed the lost child now?

Some human wolves must roam the night

And must be burnt to break the curse

To wolves the random rage of men

Is like a maddened hurricane

That picks this up and sets this down

Safety and death in hands of clown

That wail again: no devils of dream

Unearthly through the forest stream,

But wolfpack hunting in the night

And not a tiger burning bright.

There are a number of pairs of similar-sounding words here (leaves/breath, devil/clever and the actual rhyme short/sport) but it’s significant that rhyme or near-rhyme comes in when the poem reaches a greater intensity in the fifth verse (milk/spilt to end the verse) and at the very end ( men/hurricane, down/clown and finally night/bright, imitating William Blake’s epigrammatic style to disagree with him). The poem as a whole is irregular, but if all that remained of it was the last two verses, people would think this was a fragment of a regular poem.

I do this to create a sense of coming together and intensification as the poem progresses. It usually happens without conscious planning: as my mental state intensifies, I find myself rhyming and using more regular metre.

Third and last:

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ESTUARY

The church is early 12^th century. Some two miles from here

The Romans crossed the estuary by a ford

Now long impassable

The shades settle

I am confused by their weight, my questions muffled

By their insistent conversation

As though wings beat in dissonance, we struggle

Before they leave for the drowned land, the sky darkening,

One with a hidden face leaves me a thing

Carefully carved from wood, now pocked by seaworms living

I put it to my mouth, it makes a sound

And at the calling, all the shades turn round.

You can see the same thing happening here. The first verse is almost chatty, not weird at all except in the last line, and free of any such pairs of words. Then as the poem gets stranger there is a process of growing echoing: muffled/struggle; darkening/thing/living (which somehow doesn’t sound like rhymes) and finally, a rhymed couplet (sound/round).

I’ll come back to this and look at how poems can hide internal links and echoes.

Are You Regular?

I’m not posting many poems now. There are three reasons for this:

* I’m not writing so many now as I did, say, a couple of years back.

* By posting my old poems here bit by bit, I’ve got up almost to the present with the poems I think are best. I could go back and post poems I don’t think so much of, but that doesn’t greatly appeal.

* I want to hold back a few good new ones as possible competition entries (not that I’m a great admirer of poetry competitions).

Instead I want to post more ABOUT my poetry. This has gone down well in the past. Now I’d like to try to be a bit deeper and more systematic. I might post now and then about other poets’ writings too.

For a start, I’d like to look at why I write some poems in regular form, some in irregular (“free verse”) form and some starting irregular but beginning to rhyme as they proceed.

Regular rhyme and rhythm can create a dreamlike state. They probably arose out of rhythmic chants at rituals and before battle. At football matches today you can still hear rhythmic chants aimed at uniting those on one side and intimidating or ridiculing those on the other before and during battle. Although rhyme and rhythm are the most familiar tools for this partial hypnosis, the repeating of images or words can have the same effect. Consider the repeated cries of a Fascist crowd: “DUCE, DUCE!” or “Sieg Heil!”

That example points to the dangers of dream-creation, but rhythmic chanting is also used in the most peaceful religions.

At worse, though, rhymes can be predictable, trite, even a little ridiculous, especially if the rhyme seems forced or – perhaps even worse – as soon as you read the last word on one line, you know what its rhyming partner must be.

So let me look at an example of where I think rhyming and regularity work effectively in my poems:

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DEATH AND THE MAGICIAN

One day the magician came to me and said,

The fish are leaping in the yellow stream

The oak has turned into an acorn small

And I saw Death in dream.

And I saw Death in dream, he said,

And Death was very kind

He showed me where the roses grow

Though I’m old and blind.

I’m old and blind and lame, he said,

The sea is out of sight

The shell is empty on the shelf

Through the woken night.

The night is all around, he said,

It closes hour by hour

The voices make me fear, my friend,

Should a proud man cower?

But should a proud man cower, my friend,

I think perhaps he should

The wine is turning sour, my friend,

But the bread is good.

The bread of death is good, my friend,

The bread of life is fine

And now I’ve understood, my friend,

Will the starlight shine?

And will the starlight shine, my friend,

And will the starlight shine?

Now let us touch the vine, my friend,

And we will drink the wine.

I wrote this deliberately imitating ballad form and imagery. Ballads use a lot of repetition, but sometimes with slight changes which move the action on.

The second and fourth lines rhyme throughout. This is a familiar structure. The first verse has longer lines than the rest: the first three lines have ten syllables (assuming “magician” is elided or slurred). The fourth line though has only six syllables and this marks a change of mood and increase of intensity. From then on the poem becomes a kind of incantation and I have seen what an effect it can have on people. For the remaining verses the first and third lines have eight syllables, the second six and the fourth six or five. These variations help to avoid monotony.

The first line (after the ranging first verse) ends repeatedly with “he said” and then with “my friend”. The latter appears first ending the third line, but then is repeated at the end of the first and third lines. This is another form of repetition. The first and third lines contain internal rhymes – rhymes that don’t come at the end of the line such as “good” and “understood”. “And will the starlight shine?” is said twice in succeeding lines of the last verse. The rhythm is regular. Words or images are repeated in the body of the poem – bread, wine and starlight, plus arguably water.

The repetition increases as the poem nears its end, conveying a sense of realisation, or completion.

Don’t try this at home, kids…this kind of method could fall horribly flat. It needs mystery and emotional intensity to work. Very few of my poems are structured anything like as tightly as this one. But then no other has had such dramatic effect every time I’ve read it aloud.

Next time I’ll go on to look at irregular and semi-irregular poems and why that can work too.

6 Comments

by simon7banks on July 4, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Ballad, Discussion, My own poems: discussion, Poetic forms, Poets and poems, Uncategorized

Tagged death, fear, hope, life, old age, Poetry

Posted by simon7banks on July 4, 2013

https://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/are-you-regular/

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All posts for the month July, 2013

Mildly Irregular

Spirit Mountain

Are You Regular?

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