The Five W's (and one H)

One of the best things about loving words, writing and poetry is the unlimited number of ways to convey one simple idea. One of the worst things about loving words, writing and poetry is the unlimited number of ways to convey one single idea.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a reference to the sestina, a kind of poem that I remember writing as a class assignment a long time ago, one of many creative exercises that only the best kind of teacher mandates. Sestinas are tricky for their structural difficulty and to be true to form must consist of exactly six stanzas with six lines per stanza concluding with a tercet. These thirty nine lines are not only supposed to be written in iambic pentameter, but follow a strict form whereby each line must end with only the same six words repeated in a different, but structured (retrograde cross) order.

If this sounds part poem part crossword puzzle, it is but it isn’t. The formula is this:
Stanza 1=123456; Stanza 2= 615243; Stanza 3= 364125; Stanza 4= 532614; Stanza 5= 451362; Stanza 6= 246531. The tercet repeats the six ending words but in three lines in the order of line 1 (6 and 2); line 2 (1 and 4) and line 3 (5 and 3). And if you don’t care to know how it works but want to see one in action, here is a link to Elizabeth Bishop’s blandly titled  but beautifully written "Sestina"

In writing my first sestina, I recall plotting out those crucial six ending words that I would have to use over and over again and how using concrete objects was the easiest way to go in terms of having a product that flowed and meant something. Bishop’s Sestina does the same, using nouns as her finishing lines.

This time I took a different route and, while difficult, was worth the exercise. In doing so I found that the one thing I miss in the adult world of having to work for a living and spent less time on a writing life is not having Mrs. Kernutt’s challenges and creative daily assignments to force me to find more of these kids of assignments.

If anyone else wants to accept the sestina challenge, please forward your poems and I will post them here at Treegap.

Journalistically Speaking

In your new life who
do you go to and how
do you behave when
they ask about us what
do you say in that moment where
you’d rather die than ask yourself why.

Detectives are unsure why
the driver of the pick-up who
careened through six lanes of traffic where-
by striking the cyclist or how
impossibly tragic the timing in what
began as a normal day. Odds are when

we’re not looking, taking a routine ride when
feeling just fine wondering why
the life you chose is not exactly what
you intended and ends up being about who
time is spent with when no one is looking and how
lovely it would be to live in a place where

we take care of each other’s fingers and toes, where
fellow passengers on a train say something when
the unbreathing man in the next seat needs to know how
to get help before he expires and why
hundreds of thousands of commuters who
went in and out of that car all day cared not what

his life meant, more interested in what
the latest news has to say of the weather and where
to get dinner that night and maybe who
to share it with if we’re lucky enough or when
we’ll see someone we love. But why
has it come to this for us and how

unfixable is it? I still don’t know how
to be the new me around you and what
I want to be without you or why
the corners of the fitted sheet never round where
they’re supposed to only when
I make the bed without you. But who

cares that it’s my bed, why not ours instead, or how
it looks to the ghosts who sleep there and what
it means to mummify in sheets where a person lived back when.

Small Things Make A Good Life Great

The Treegap Governess has been on vacation. The hiatus has not been without poetic thoughts, contemplations or ideas about poetry. Rather the time away was a time to live poetry. George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch this lovely passage which perfectly captures how full and beautiful life is wherever you are as long as you attune your ears in appreciation:

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silent.

One of my favorite things recently was watching the two Squirrel Girls eat hand-broken walnut pieces from the doorstep of my parent’s house. At one point when I went to feed the particularly fearless diner, I feared she was going to rush inside the house as I opened the door. These two are characters, one even puts her paws up on the glass door as if she was a pet asking for a fist bump. It’s entirely possible the squirrel thinks I’m insane as I take a few minutes to wonder when she’ll be back, whether or not she’ll pose for my pictures after scattering the walnuts (quickly because I really kind of want to feed her out of my hand but am scared to be bitten), and could sit all day long watching their backyard antics. I can’t help but be fully entertained in watching her jowls kick into overdrive as she carefully picks up a nut piece with two long fingered paws and proceeds to chew quickly, eyes focused straight ahead as she concentrates on her task at hand.

My parents get the credit for becoming the parents of these fun Squirrel Nutkins. It’s their back yard and I was merely a passerby, a willing feeder in an established relationship. But I loved every second of it and can’t help but think that when I came back from my long run that Sunday to find Squirrel Girl standing upright at the front of the house, she was saying welcome back, where have your paws tread and when will I see you again?

In honor of the Squirrel Girls and my parents who feed them, this Emily Dickenson poem presents a thoughtful summation of how I think about friendships.

Number 1073 (c.1865)

Experiment to me

Is every one I meet

If it contain a Kernel

The Figure of a Nut

Presents upon a Tree

Equally plausibly,

But Meat within, is requisite

To Squirrels, and to Me.

A new original poem, a Sestina, will debut on Friday.

The Art of War (Part II): Chroniclers of the Times

Goya's "The Tree Prisoners"

April 30 marked the 35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, perhaps the first war in which art and writing were publicized to reach a broader number of people. Continuing the conversation surrounding the artistry of war, it is with sadness that I believe that poets and artists in countries of military conflict must incorporate their conflicts in question in order to remain relevant regardless of whether or not they have a passion for such art. Goya, like Picasso, was more or less forced to chronicle the situation in Spain and genius poets like Seamus Heaney are forced to take questions from journalists regarding war. There is no longer an art for art’s sake any longer. The gene that makes a poet wake up every day and want to write doesn’t come with a media guide for how to speak or write about a particular war.

That said, journalists nowadays are considered artists in many cases, especially when embedded or of the photojournalist ilk. The writing and photography done in wartime brings out passionate pieces that the line between art and journalism has been blurred since the beginning of time. Here are two poems that strike me as directly offering up material for chronicling war in a most beautiful and direct way:

September Song

By Geoffrey Hill

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Whatever You Say Say Nothing
By Seamus Heaney

I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of 'views
On the Irish thing'. I'm back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,

Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'?
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree,'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.' '
They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably. .
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

II

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite's a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome's
a happy man this night.' His flock suspect

In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make

As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow

When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight

But that would be to ignore other symptoms.
Last night you didn't need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)

On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering-
The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke-while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait

To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.

III

'Religion's never mentioned here,' of course.
'You know them by their eyes,' and hold your tongue.
'One side's as bad as the other,' never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung

In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the 'wee six' I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

IV

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja -vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bit and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

 Eddie Adams' famous photograph from the Vietnam war