Sunday, May 31, 2020

Beliefs

Two things I hold, and both are true:
The law itself can be unjust
And doing what it says to do
Should not be done on simple trust
Lest we should see the world combust
As it is now; and those who died
Deserved the law, which would entrust
Their fate not to the cops who lied
After committing homicide
But to the courts--which have, of course,
A history that has denied
Justice itself, and favored force.
The law's unjust: then add this flaw
The law won't even follow law.

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Dear White People

The only ones from whom I ask for peace
(Not ask for peace--demand) are those who cause
Its absence. That is us. This will not cease
Until we change, and recognize: the laws
We hold to, and the order that we know
Bring violence. We cause hurt every day
And act surprised when those that we lay low
Refuse to stay there. They are not OK.
They do not owe it to us to pretend
They do not owe it to us to be quiet
They do not owe it to us, now, to end
What we sustain. The system made the riot.
The system's ours. The riot too. So we 
To make the peace must change society.

Face Heel Turn

I once thought I could make a revolution
If only in the little sphere I own;
But I, alas, had not the constitution
To turn the world around. Now I am grown
Sadder than I was, and wiser too
(Although it may be only cynicism)
And must believe whatever I may do
Will be beat down by constant criticism.
That should not matter, but I find it does
And in that finding disappoint myself.
The person that I once hoped that I was
Would not put dreams away high on the shelf
But wear them everyday. I should return
To doing so, but fear what I would learn.

Friday, May 29, 2020

Rioters

I have nothing to offer you but tears
Except my voice, and that is also torn.
A pain that roots in near and distant years,
That hurt you well before we all were born
Cannot be answered in an instant. Yet
If we believe the world cannot be mended
We will not work to mend it. I can't let
This go by me unmourned. It is not ended
By my mourning. It will not go quietly.
It will not go in peace, though peace will lie
Where it has left. In our society
We are too quick to let too many die
And then condemn those who would stop the death
As though order and property drew breath.

Short

Some days seem short
Until you try
To make report
Of what and why
You did that day
And then find out
You cannot say
It all without
And endless list
Of facts and such
Even the gist
Is still too much. 
Today was not
That kind. It's shot.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Sonnet Analysis: Ezra Pound

It has been a while since I did one of these, hasn't it? Today I take a look at "A Virginal" by Ezra Pound (text from The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, ed. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland).

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;
As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green as the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.


Triumphs:

I want to focus here on three particular elements of this poem that drew me to it when I decided to analyze it. All three are technical in nature (as befits a blog about writing sonnets). One is Pound's choice of rhymes: not so much the rhyme scheme although that is interesting in and of itself--I'll talk more about it in the Imperfections section because I'm not sure it works--as the complicated nature of the actual rhyme-words themselves. They tend towards feminine endings (lately, brightness, sheathe her, branches). This, along with the archaic style of the poem (archaic even for the time it was written--see Pound's other much more famous poems) creates a sense of the poem being almost overstuffed or overfull, whether of thought or emotion or what-have-you. 

This effect is heightened in the first and ninth lines (the start and the start of what would be a traditional volta) by the two strong caesuras in the line, which is related to the second element I want to emphasize: those two mirrored lines. I cait two caesuras (after the second no and the me) but it could even be three: no, no! has a strong spondaic rhythm that almost asks for a pause between the words. The effect of the pauses, I think, is again to make the line and thus the poem feel longer and more full than it actually is. The effect of the repetition, both within the line (no, no) and across the two lines is both to pull all parts of the poem together (across the volta) and to mark the strong sense of rejection that this poem gives off. This is not a traditional love poem, because the persona addressed does not seem to be the object of the romantic love in the poem--it is left extremely open exactly who is addressed, but it is emphatically not the her or this lady of the key lines here. 

The third technical element I want to draw attention to is the use of similar sounds and especially consonance across the poem, including variant forms of the same words: "sheath" in line 2 becoming "sheathe" in line 8, "no, no" in lines 1 and 9, "half in half" in line 8, the repeated "white" in the final line, but also more generally all the s-sounds, all the b-sounds, all the h-sounds (and also all the long a-sounds). This, in my opinion, makes the poem glide: it sounds like a coherent whole because the sounds of it are so consistent. This is powerful when combined with the overfullness and ambiguity noted above: somehow this sonnet feels like a single, unified idea despite at the same time feeling like it contains too much and reveals too little. It's a strong effect.

Imperfections:

I don't have a lot of imperfections to point out here: some things that might feel like weaknesses in a slightly different poem are here folded into the emotional impacts noted above, especially in terms of ambiguity. I might object in other cases to the ending of the sonnet, which I don't find especially compelling--but the very ambiguity of the value of "white" in the final lines works, I think, because of the rest of the poem's effects (or perhaps I've just read too many romance novels about rakes recently and "white" is not intended ambiguously--but I think, in this poem, I prefer it so). 

The major imperfection I want to draw attention to is, as with the triumphs, technical. As noted above, I'm not entirely sure I find this rhyme scheme works for me. It's a little hard to categorize: "brightness" and "lightness" should rhyme with "nearness" and "clearness" but they don't quite because of where the emphases fall in the feminine endings; similarly "savour" and "hours" look at first like they are trying to rhyme but don't. On the flip side, "aether" and "sheathe her" don't rhyme in my pronunciation of English, and yet they do here. This can, viewed one way, contribute to the ambiguity of the poem, but for me it feels more awkward than effective. I'm also just generally not a huge fan of Italianate sonnets (which this definitely is--a hard end-stopped turn at line 9, and a complex rhyme scheme [EFGGEF] in the volta) that don't embrace the power of the AB rhymes in the octave fully. Nor am I that fond of the volta's rhyme scheme itself, since the visual connection of the -our[s] rhymes, for me, flattens it out into almost a series of rhymed couplets. From my angle, then, while the word-work of the poem is strong (see Triumphs), the structural work makes poor use of it. Still, it is fascinating, from my perspective, to read a traditionally-shaped sonnet from Pound, a poet so known for eschewing traditional forms.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Shame

The knee upon the neck
Should be a metaphor
At worst, deployed to check
Excessive force. Race war
Should be a term we use
Only to make a case
About how whites refuse
To face how we treat race.
We shouldn't have to see
White officers kill blacks
As normal as can be
And then cover their tracks.
Yet every day we do;
Black Lives Matter too.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Lingering Threats

There is no reason for this mild malaise
Except the obvious. We are all stuck
Inside, and will remain within for days
Emerging when we must but thunderstruck
By the new world we will emerge into.
That new world is the old world minus us:
The clear canals, the woods refilled anew,
The climate still fucked up. For all the fuss
About how much we claim to not be doing
We can't deny our impact has remained:
The screwup we have made is still unscrewing
And all around lies a world still pained.
Perhaps that is the reason we're off-kilter:
The world still needs an antihuman filter.

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Ideal Dog

If I were to let my dog
Do everything she wanted to
She'd lay in place, a furry log
Until the mailman was in view;
She'd run around with fur afire
And bark and make an awful mess
Then suddenly begin to tire
And flop herself in homelessness.
She'd jog on down the road, then stop
And sniff the center of the street;
She'd chase a squirrel--and then she'd drop
Everything to come and greet
My wife and I. So if she spent
Her days like this, what's different?

Saturday, May 23, 2020

American Exceptionalism

There was a time when I believed
My nation could still operate;
When I would have become aggrieved
If any said it wasn't great;
When I considered it our due
To be exceptional; when I
Thought we were better-run than you
And that I knew the reasons why.
I was a child then; but now
I find my understanding grows:
I don't believe I should kowtow
To one who still believes he knows
Our country is somehow well-led:
We have a hundred thousand dead.

Shelter In Place

The church is an essential space
For all the folks who worship there;
It is the place they learn to care
For everyone of every race.
It is the perfect sort of place
To learn that God is everywhere:
That every inch of earth must share
In holy sempiternal grace.
If you cannot conceive a church
(A synagogue, a mosque, a shrine)
Without the people gathered in
It's you, not they, who thus besmirch
The name of holy, or divine:
To threaten lives is always sin.

Friday, May 22, 2020

Content

Deep in the darkness, down where no one dwells
Except the animals, who shouldn't count,
I found a mystery. Now, that shit sells:
They love when secrecy is paramount,
When no one knows what they will know but you.
Take careful notes. Pretend to be opaque.
Don't let them see what they're about to do
And they will thank you. For your own sweet sake
Act like it matters, even when it doesn't;
Then they will think you're made of solid gold,
That every word you said was true (it wasn't)
And that your stories aren't threadbare and old.
Or you can just yell loudly. That can work
But sometimes they will notice you're a jerk.

Ordinary Spies

I watch her when she doesn't think I do;
Not through the windows, or by secret means,
Like hidden cameras or a pinhole view,
But by observing when her head's in screens:
When phone, TV, and laptop take away
Awareness. I look up when she looks down
So I can see her when she is at play,
Her thumbs akimbo and a little frown
Creasing her forehead. I watch to see
The million ways that she is still the same
As when we courted. She won't notice me
Because she is absorbed within a game
But sometimes she'll look up, and catch my glance
And that is what I know of true romance.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Clutter

Nobody thinks
Of anything good
Not that I could
With these time sinks;
Everyone drinks
(Not that they should)
I think I would
Except that beer stinks.
Quarantine seems
A half-world haze
With no law left.
Now all is dreams
In empty days
Meaning bereft.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Tale

Tell me a story of the older days
When people cared about society.
Allow me to pretend that there could be
A grassy lea on which the cattle graze
Without fracking beneath; a subtle haze
Floating in the air pollution-free;
A civic discourse individually
Considered--not the constant blaze
Of flame-war. All of this, alas,
I do not think I ever really knew
Despite the promises our teachers swore.
Perhaps there was a time it came to pass
Or maybe they in turn once missed it too
Nostalgia passing on forevermore.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

AO2.0

Consider, if you will, the fanfic writer
Trapped in a maze of others' words and phrases;
Trying to express somehow a tighter
More carefully constructed set of mazes;
Honing a blade already sharp as sky
Until reality itself is bitten;
Filling in unanswered how and why
In ways the copyholders hadn't written.
Compare them to those writers who wrote first:
Whose fond creations are their subject matter;
The fanfic writer claims they are the worst
But I believe those boundaries must shatter:
What is a fiction, but a fanfic hurled
Against the horror of the real world?

Thursday, May 7, 2020

Libertarian

If liberty means anything, it means
Responsibility. If it did not
We would be nothing more than libertines
Slowly strangled by our own garrotte.
True freedom lies in true society
In placing others' needs above your own;
We band together best when we are free
And tyrannize the worst when all alone.
With freedom comes no power to do ill
Or if there is, it is a strength unused;
It is not mere extension of the will:
To solipsize is to be self-abused.
Such liberty well-planted ever grows:
The freedom of my fist ends ere your nose.

Simple Fixes

We cannot let these deaths obscure
The other deaths we also could
Avoid. We do not have a cure
For COVID, but I think it would
Be nice, for once, to see a fall
In those kinds of mortality
That we could fix, since after all
So much comes from stupidity.
So much death lies in human hands:
We could do better. Let us drive
Safely on the road; let's eat
More carefully; let the demands
Of coal and gas no longer thrive;
And don't shoot black men in the street.

Monday, May 4, 2020

Hamlet in Quarantine

I thought I could be bounded in a shell
And count myself a king. But I was wrong;
A nut in theory is a notebound song
That needs the touch of instruments to tell
What is in key, and what is tuned unwell.
The worries I have hoarded all along
Return when I'm alone in horrid throng
And make my home a self-sustaining hell.
To rule here, as in hell, is mockery:
I cannot step a foot beyond myself
And every thought repeats what I have thought.
For mere sensation I destroy the crockery
And push my tumblers off of every shelf
Until I drink from mugs my uncle bought.