My brother doesn’t think free verse is poetry. The penalty for abandoning rhyme and meter is to be left outside the house of the Daughters of the Earth and Sky. How long has it been since a poet invoked the aid of muses anyway?
My reply to his disdain for free verse is Billy Collins. I’d begin with New Year’s Day
New Year's Day
Everyone has two birthdays
According to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
The day you were born and New Year’s Day--
A droll observation to mull over
As I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
That is being transformed by the morning light
Into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the
Annunciation
This one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered the tin diving bell
Of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
As the joyou anniversary of my existence
Probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
A tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child,
In a colorful room this morning—
I would welcome an extra birthday
One more opportunity to stop what we are doing
For a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more might be a small consolation
To us all for having to face a death-day too,
An X in the square
On some kitchen calendar of the future,
The day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
By a burly, heartless conductor
As it roars through the months and years.
Party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
Billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
My brother insists, striking with a structured piece, rippling with rhymes, and mouthfuls of meter.
For a moment, Billy falters, nearly moving to his side with The Effort. He nearly surrenders the effort to speak with this.
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers that are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts-
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
Here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under separate roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
and the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows, the drizzle and the
morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the chalkboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their hats on backwards--
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
. . . .
I see Billy faltering and I'm discouraged, then I find Billy's piece, Despair, so off it goes to my brother—
Despair
So much gloom and doubt in our poetry
Flowers wilting on the table,
The self regarding in a watery mirror
Dead leaves over the ground
The wind moans in the chimney,
And the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
Would make of all this,
These shadows and empty cupboards?
Today with the sun blazing in the trees,
My thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,
Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
Could hardly be restrained,
and to his counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.
. . . .
My brother laughs, but this English-major-turned lawyer clings to his meter and rhyme, in tune with Billy's poem, he wisecracks that he preferred the rhyming verse of his Wa-Hoo's brother, Woo-Ha. I rejoin Billy, who ended his book with The Envoy.
The Envoy
Go, little book,
Out of this house and into the world,
Carriage made of paper rolling toward town
Bearing a single passenger
Beyond the reach of this jittery pen,
Far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp
It is time to decamp,
Put on a jacket and venture outside,
Time to be regarded by other eyes,
Bound to be held in foreign hands.
So off you go, infants of the brain,
With a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:
Stay out as late as you like,
Don’t bother to call or write,
And talk to as many strangers as you can.
. . . .
My reply to his disdain for free verse is Billy Collins. I’d begin with New Year’s Day
New Year's Day
Everyone has two birthdays
According to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
The day you were born and New Year’s Day--
A droll observation to mull over
As I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
That is being transformed by the morning light
Into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the
Annunciation
This one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered the tin diving bell
Of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
As the joyou anniversary of my existence
Probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
A tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child,
In a colorful room this morning—
I would welcome an extra birthday
One more opportunity to stop what we are doing
For a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more might be a small consolation
To us all for having to face a death-day too,
An X in the square
On some kitchen calendar of the future,
The day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
By a burly, heartless conductor
As it roars through the months and years.
Party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
Billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
. . . .
My brother insists, striking with a structured piece, rippling with rhymes, and mouthfuls of meter.
For a moment, Billy falters, nearly moving to his side with The Effort. He nearly surrenders the effort to speak with this.
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers that are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts-
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
Here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under separate roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
and the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows, the drizzle and the
morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the chalkboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their hats on backwards--
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
. . . .
I see Billy faltering and I'm discouraged, then I find Billy's piece, Despair, so off it goes to my brother—
Despair
So much gloom and doubt in our poetry
Flowers wilting on the table,
The self regarding in a watery mirror
Dead leaves over the ground
The wind moans in the chimney,
And the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
Would make of all this,
These shadows and empty cupboards?
Today with the sun blazing in the trees,
My thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,
Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
Could hardly be restrained,
and to his counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.
. . . .
My brother laughs, but this English-major-turned lawyer clings to his meter and rhyme, in tune with Billy's poem, he wisecracks that he preferred the rhyming verse of his Wa-Hoo's brother, Woo-Ha. I rejoin Billy, who ended his book with The Envoy.
The Envoy
Go, little book,
Out of this house and into the world,
Carriage made of paper rolling toward town
Bearing a single passenger
Beyond the reach of this jittery pen,
Far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp
It is time to decamp,
Put on a jacket and venture outside,
Time to be regarded by other eyes,
Bound to be held in foreign hands.
So off you go, infants of the brain,
With a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:
Stay out as late as you like,
Don’t bother to call or write,
And talk to as many strangers as you can.
. . . .
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