Personal Poetic Ramblings

I've been reflecting on some of my writing and my writing process, and I can't say I'm feeling comfortable with anything anymore. As I've often said to people, it seems that when I had the inspiration, I didn't have the technique, and now that my skills and my techniques are more honed, I just don't have the inspiration (or, one might say, the 'passion,' awkward as that word is). I just can't seem to write anything I'm happy with that isn't just a poetic trifle (like a haiku or a quatrain). I also have to wonder, too, though, how much of this is that I'm suffering from a kind of rut: nothing seems new, or fresh, or inspiring; maybe I've been in the same groove too long. Or, perhaps, maybe I'm losing something.

Life, though, is partially about losing. It gets harder and harder to keep even the better things in one's life and one's memory. In part, we need this, or else the old adage that 'time heals old wounds' wouldn't mean a damned thing, and we'd all likely be paralyzed by past traumas and memories. But it becomes rather sad how much one loses, how diluted our memories and sensations become.

A case in point: years ago (eight, actually), I had an experience that was very meaningful to me, and it seemed at the time I'd never forget it, that I'd remember every detail of it. I wrote about this in a poem called "Out Walking," a poem for a young woman I at that time loved. Yesterday, I was looking at it again, vaguely remembering bits and pieces of the actual event that inspired it, vaguely recalling some of the emotions, but it seemed so un-familiar to me anymore; I knew I had been there, I remember fragments, but so much had vanished into the mists of time. The memory I did have wasn't as profound as it once was, and in fact it seemed foolish, even if I wouldn't have said that not that even a year or two ago.

Part of it, I'm sure, was a poetic failing on my part to capture things better when I wrote it; but another part was simply that fact of living, that even the most meaningful things slip from an imperfect grasp. It's odd, because another poem from that period (called "The Other Man") still recalls all the same emotions it always has, despite being written at roughly the same time (within three months of one another), and despite being equally amateurish in its form. I'm not entirely sure why this is-- whether it's just the natural fading of things from immediate significance, or whether it's part of a kind of callousing on my part. If I'm becoming more calloused to things, if things don't effect me as deeply or as genuinely as they once did, does that point to another reason for my own poetic stumbling of late? I wonder how long it's been since I had that feeling that causes the hair on the back of one's neck to stand up. And it worries me a bit that I have to wonder.

Or maybe it's simply that you can never fo home again, as the saying goes. I don't know.

***

On a more clinical poetical note, I've been thinking about the poetic form known as the "pantoum," a relatively rare form that comes from Malaysia but which found its way to English through French poetry in the nineteenth century. It's a curious form because, more than emulating the movement of song (as, say, the villanelle or the sonnet do), it emulates the movement of dance. In some ways, it is a very simple mode: it relies heavily on repetitions, on the shifting of locations for specific lines, and the form recalls to me the gestures of a waltz. For those who don't know it, each stanza has four lines, rhyming abab; simple enough. But the next stanza is more difficult, much more difficult, because the words used in the second and fourth lines of the previous stanza have to be repeated in the first and third lines of this stanza. So, imagine this structure:

This is the first line
This is the second of the text
This is the third line, looking for wine,
This is fourth, so guess what comes next.

This is the second of the text
But this line is new, shifting the mood,
This is the fourth, so guess what comes next,
Another bad line, dancing in the nude.

But this line is new, shifting the mood,
I wonder what I'll put here
Another bad line, dancing in the nude,
And being so naked it shudders in fear.

And so on and so on, until one reaches the end, and the unrepeated first and third lines become the second and fourth lines of the final quatrain.

The structure is much more difficult to work with than it seems, and I suspect that's one reason it has never been overly popular in English poetics. I can think only of a few poets who've worked with it (Donald Justice, and Mark Strand's "Delirium Waltz" in Blizzard of One reinvents it very nicely), and it's not likely to be taught in undergraduate poetics courses.

So, why is the structure difficult? A few reasons. First, one has to have a strong sense of an ending right from the beginning: two of your four first lines will be your conclusion, so in approaching the form you have to accept that in your beginning is your end, and so your first and third lines, totalled together, have to be able to sum up, or generate toward, a completion of the poem as a whole. This is suprisingly challenging. Second, the poet has to find new ways to contextualize the repeated lines so that they are not merely repeated; like a dancer's steps, they have to be basically the same physical gesture framed in a new performance, to seem as much as possible a new gesture. This tests a poet's mettle with making the familiar new, and does it line after line after line, and all one can use to perform that recontextualization is ONE new line, a line you're obligated to do the same thing with in the next verse. Third, because of the heavy repetitions, one has to find a careful ear for the end rhymes, so as to prevent the poem from moving with leaden feet; one has to find new dimensions and means of rhyming, or else the poem as a whole can become lumbering and metronomic. The end rhymes thus have to have a stronger harmonic sensibility than just a rhythmic one. The tenor of the rhymes have to shift and vary and form a melody of their own. And while this is true of all fixed poetic forms, this is especially true of the pantoum because the form eliminates a lot of the room (and a lot of the possible means) for developing a melody. Very, very tricky indeed. Note, in some circles, this form is known as the pantun, and is more common in French (Hugo and Baudelaire worked with it), I suspect, because French is more assonant language than English.

Anyway, I'm going to wrestle with a pantoum; it strikes me as an ideal form for writing about 'dance-like' subjects, like relationships and time, subjects which are every often about progression and regression, assertion and enlargement, call and response. Move forward, step back, move forward, step back; it enacts a form of poetic attrition, of give to take. It's a form children and amateur poets could work with and find it remarkably easy, though they wouldn't understand the complexities of it, or why their verse would sound very heavy-handed or cumbersome; for skilled poets, it's a challange and a half, and I guess it'll be a test to see if I can get anywhere with it.

Here's an example from the American poet John Ashberry:

Pantoum

Eyes shining without mystery,
Footprints eager for the past
Through the vague snows of many clay pipes,
And what is in store?

Footprints eager for the past,
The usual obtuse blanket.
And what is in store
For those dearest to the king?

The usual obtuse blanket
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

Of legless regrets and amplifications,
That is why a watchdog is shy.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblvioin,
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night.

That is why a watchdog is shy,
Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night
And that soon gotten over.

Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm is dying!
Some blunt pretense to safety we have
And that soon gotten over
For they must have motion.

Some blunt pretense to safety we have;
Eyes shining without mystery
For they must have motion
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.

Tricky, very tricky indeed.