I looked at the blog this morning, and suddenly realized how "grand" it looked. There I am, sitting in an old leather chair in the Goodwin Library at the Oxford Union, looking as if I am waiting to hold court. Sorry. That was not the impression I wanted to give. I picked the picture because I am, and have always been, in love with books; and, as you can see in the picture, I am surrounded by them. The setting at Oxford was not meant to impress you; I can tell you, it impressed the hell out of me just being there. I have been asked, from time to time, what those five days in Oxford were like. My best response to this question is that it was like academic Disney World. And it was. But this blog is not about those five days, although I found myself writing during those days as much as taking pictures. It is my desire that this blog be exactly what the words under the title say, a continuing conversation about poetry.
I would like to post an entry every day to hold up my end of the conversation. However, the very nature of conversation involves dialogue, not monologue. As I write this now, I realize that there is a distinct possibility that I will be talking to myself. I am willing to take that risk. For me, the other purpose for this blog is to force me to continue writing, something I believe is important for every writer. And with the advent of retirement, it is a habit I would like to develop now, rather than try to develop later. But, given the choice, I would much prefer it to be a dialogue.
I will try to keep up my end of the bargain by posting daily observations, when possible, about life, nature and poetry, a favorite poem or one of my own attempts at writing. Maybe one of these posts will encourage you to respond. I hope so.
I wish I could say that one of the great journalists or essayists from the world of literature inspired me to begin this blog, but the plain truth is that I got the idea from watching "Julia and Julie", a movie about a woman who challanges herself to cook all of the recipes in Julia Childs' Cookbook in one year, and writes daily blogs to chart her progress. Hardly "grand." But inspiration is inspiration, no matter where it comes from.
So I end today's post with a hope that this will be the beginning of a great conversation. Only time will tell.
An Ongoing Conversation on Poetry
Oxford Union Library, Oxford University
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
A Poem is a Stone
To begin this blog, I offer a poem that was inspired by Dylan Thomas' own words, words that would be the inspiration for this blog and that, in a very simple way, define my view of poetry.
A Poem is a Stone
Christopher Bogart
A Poem is a stone
Skimmed over still waters
Leaving concentric circles
In its near perfect wake.
A Poem is a gentle breeze
That rustles dry leaves,
Releasing them from distant trees
And sending them on their journey
To the frozen ground below.
Poems are brief gusts of wind
On brittle branches, tapping tattoos
Against frozen window panes
In vain attempts to enter.
Poetry is symphony.
Its sonorous sounds
Resound
Like the lone bow stroke of a cello,
Excite
Like the flight of slender fingers
Plucking willingly on heart strings,
Borne
On the throaty notes of an English horn.
Poems pound the brain
Like mental rain,
Forming puddles in the mind that
Slowly saturate the soil,
There to boil in deep wells of thought
Bought by the sounds.
That abound
Around words.
Published in Spindrift
A Poem is a Stone
Christopher Bogart
A Poem is a stone
Skimmed over still waters
Leaving concentric circles
In its near perfect wake.
A Poem is a gentle breeze
That rustles dry leaves,
Releasing them from distant trees
And sending them on their journey
To the frozen ground below.
Poems are brief gusts of wind
On brittle branches, tapping tattoos
Against frozen window panes
In vain attempts to enter.
Poetry is symphony.
Its sonorous sounds
Resound
Like the lone bow stroke of a cello,
Excite
Like the flight of slender fingers
Plucking willingly on heart strings,
Borne
On the throaty notes of an English horn.
Poems pound the brain
Like mental rain,
Forming puddles in the mind that
Slowly saturate the soil,
There to boil in deep wells of thought
Bought by the sounds.
That abound
Around words.
Published in Spindrift
Ars Poetica
When asked what motivated him to read and eventually to write poetry, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas responded “Because I have fallen in love with words.” It was the sound of words as well as their meaning that attracted him to language. That combination of sound and meaning is the very essence of poetry. All writers use words to explain as well as to define; but a poet, by the very nature of his craft, is forced to an economy of words. The poet carefully selects words both for optimum sound as well as intensity of meaning. Poetry then is a true distillation of language. And the English language provides fertile ground for both.
Through the words left to us by the Angles and the Saxons, and the Vikings, their hard consonants gave the language power that explodes on the tongue. The softer sounds of these consonants, a gift from the Frisians and the Celts add nuance to consonant sound. The Latin of the Roman occupation of Britain gives definition and exactitude to our words, while the Greek words the Romans also brought to the island, allows us to create words for concepts, the “isms” and “ologies” of our language. When the Norman French invaded in 1066, they added words that offered alternatives to common nouns and verbs, softening the sound and adding a musical quality to the language. Shakespeare, through 154 sonnets, 37 plays and various poems expanded the language by adding words from all of these sources, freeing their sound as well as deepening their meaning. English then becomes an elastic and flexible language, whose nuance in meaning is reinforced by the breath of its sounds, sounds that crackle with the tap and snap of the hard consonants, as well as the slide and elide of their smooth vowels. As Dylan Thomas explains in his Notes on the Art of Poetry
…before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.
This intensified use of sound is found in the techniques poets use to heighten what the listener hears when poetry is read aloud. Poetry, after all, was written to be read aloud. Techniques like alliteration, assonance and consonance, simile and metaphor, rhythm and rhyme are what ultimately define poetry, giving it not only the musical qualities that make it both memorable and memorize able but expanding the horizons of its meaning as well.
Today, students are taught that the only ingredient a poem needs to make it a poem is rhythm. This rhythm does not always have to be, or even ever have to be, a proscribed meter; but simply the cadence of the language. Narrative poetry can be just as rhythmic as the lyric poetry that is eventually put to music to become the lyrics of song. A poem also needs a point or focus. Whether it be to capture the falling of a single leaf as it drifts down from the branch of a tree, to describe the feeling one has when one first sees the tall marble columns of the Parthenon, to tell the story of an important or personal event in the life of a child, a king, or a country, to sweetly or bitterly remember a past memory, or to plead for peace in a time of war, poetry is the lens through which these impressions are given description, explication and voice.
Each generation of poets finds different methods and forms to capture these impressions. Each generation develops new standards from which these forms take shape. But no generation of poets should impose the tyranny of orthodoxy on the continuous flow of what a poem really is. While the sonnet is a form of poetry that usually contains fourteen lines, Petrarch, Spencer and Shakespeare all wrote them differently. A century later, John Donne wrote sonnets with more than fourteen lines, and chose his own meter and rhyme scheme. Today, when sonnet writers are not using one of these forms, they are inventing forms of their own, using their own cadences to capture their own particular impressions of life. Yet each is rhythmic and each has a purpose.
It is in the rhythm of the line, its sound and its meaning, that should encourage the reader to approach poetry, to read it and to remember it. For poets, more than novelists or playwrights, should be the true craftsmen of our language. As Dylan Thomas puts it “The joy and function of poetry was, and is, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”
Through the words left to us by the Angles and the Saxons, and the Vikings, their hard consonants gave the language power that explodes on the tongue. The softer sounds of these consonants, a gift from the Frisians and the Celts add nuance to consonant sound. The Latin of the Roman occupation of Britain gives definition and exactitude to our words, while the Greek words the Romans also brought to the island, allows us to create words for concepts, the “isms” and “ologies” of our language. When the Norman French invaded in 1066, they added words that offered alternatives to common nouns and verbs, softening the sound and adding a musical quality to the language. Shakespeare, through 154 sonnets, 37 plays and various poems expanded the language by adding words from all of these sources, freeing their sound as well as deepening their meaning. English then becomes an elastic and flexible language, whose nuance in meaning is reinforced by the breath of its sounds, sounds that crackle with the tap and snap of the hard consonants, as well as the slide and elide of their smooth vowels. As Dylan Thomas explains in his Notes on the Art of Poetry
…before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.
This intensified use of sound is found in the techniques poets use to heighten what the listener hears when poetry is read aloud. Poetry, after all, was written to be read aloud. Techniques like alliteration, assonance and consonance, simile and metaphor, rhythm and rhyme are what ultimately define poetry, giving it not only the musical qualities that make it both memorable and memorize able but expanding the horizons of its meaning as well.
Today, students are taught that the only ingredient a poem needs to make it a poem is rhythm. This rhythm does not always have to be, or even ever have to be, a proscribed meter; but simply the cadence of the language. Narrative poetry can be just as rhythmic as the lyric poetry that is eventually put to music to become the lyrics of song. A poem also needs a point or focus. Whether it be to capture the falling of a single leaf as it drifts down from the branch of a tree, to describe the feeling one has when one first sees the tall marble columns of the Parthenon, to tell the story of an important or personal event in the life of a child, a king, or a country, to sweetly or bitterly remember a past memory, or to plead for peace in a time of war, poetry is the lens through which these impressions are given description, explication and voice.
Each generation of poets finds different methods and forms to capture these impressions. Each generation develops new standards from which these forms take shape. But no generation of poets should impose the tyranny of orthodoxy on the continuous flow of what a poem really is. While the sonnet is a form of poetry that usually contains fourteen lines, Petrarch, Spencer and Shakespeare all wrote them differently. A century later, John Donne wrote sonnets with more than fourteen lines, and chose his own meter and rhyme scheme. Today, when sonnet writers are not using one of these forms, they are inventing forms of their own, using their own cadences to capture their own particular impressions of life. Yet each is rhythmic and each has a purpose.
It is in the rhythm of the line, its sound and its meaning, that should encourage the reader to approach poetry, to read it and to remember it. For poets, more than novelists or playwrights, should be the true craftsmen of our language. As Dylan Thomas puts it “The joy and function of poetry was, and is, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”
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