So, yesterday, Kellie, Sarah, and I took a hike to a place that was new for Sarah. However, Kellie and I have visited several times. It's a place called Steele Falls. From our house, to get there, you take the Gunner Pool road off Highway 5, and shortly after you pass the right turn to Barkshed, you take a left onto Green Mountain road. The Steele Falls trail is about half a mile toward Green Mountain on the left side of the road. A green steel gate marks the beginning of the trail. You really can't miss it. Anyhow, my few pictures from yesterday will accompany this blog. Above is a picture of some mossy rocks right below Steele Falls. Don't forget to click on the pictures to enlarge them. Some great details come into focus when the pictures are bigger.
The picture above is where the small spring-fed stream plunges over the rocks and splashes some fifty feet below.
Anyhow, I was noticing the other day that I only had seven unique visitors to my last post. Last year about this same time, I had around thirty to forty unique visitors for each post. I realize that the tremendous drop in the number of visitors is probably my fault. I have not been a regular blogger. Well, today, I promise that I will post a blog a week with poems, pictures, and commentary. How about that? Maybe, I will get a few of my regular readers back.
Now, I think that I will post another picture, then a poem, then another picture, and some commentary. The next picture is the source of the spring that seeps slowly down a wash before plunging over the rocks at the falls.
Here is the poem!
A Traditional Sonnet Lamenting Prosetry
(Otherwise known as Prose Poems)
We used to dance with dragons, flirt with fire,
And sing our tales of heroes for all ages.
We loved chaste ladies free of crude desire
And wrote about our wives on different pages.
Then, we thought we would teach a thing or two
Of reasoning and wit absent passion,
But fancy showed that style would never do,
And we brought wild visions into fashion.
Through it all we rhymed and kept a beat,
Rememb’ring that our sister art is Song.
We cropped our lines and counted out our feet
And figured we would do it all along.
Now, what passes for poems, well, who knows?
They seem deep and real life, but mostly prose.
The picture below is the same spring source as above, but I reached my arm up in the hole in the rocks as far as I could.
So, let's talk about the poem above. Any of my regular readers knows that I am not a fan of contemporary poetry. I have already let my subscriptions to most poetry magazines run out, and my subscription to The American Poetry Review is running out soon and will not be renewed. Why? There is no poetry published in poetry magazines. They publish prose that is so personal that it is impossible relate to it.
Anyhow, readers of poetry should relate to my sonnet. The first couple lines refer to early Western poetry such as Beowulf (Anonymous) and The Fairie Queene (Edmund Spenser) who do have fire-breathing dragons in their works. Then, I quickly pass to the platonic lovers/poets whose unrequited love for chaste and pure women inspired them to great heights. Petrarch had his Laura, Dante had his Beatrice, Milton, his Eve, Sidney and Swift, their Stellas. These men wrote about women as untouchable icons, but what you will not find in any of these poets is personal information about their private lives. While Milton does mention his wife, he does not provide details. I am not even sure what she looked like. The next two lines summarize the Augustan age, otherwise known as Neoclassicism or the Restoration period. Then the next two give us a brief look at the Romantics and what they stood for in their art. All of my favorite poets in the 20th and 21st century have essentially been romantic even if their works are tinged with angst and alienation.
In the typical sonnet turn after line eight, I begin talking about how we, poets, have traditionally constructed our poems to mimic and imitate song. Our lines are, by necessity, short because you have to say them aloud or sing them. Most ballads prefer the tetrameter, but the sonnet does stretch the line out to pentameter. Poe's The Raven stretches the poetic line about as far as it can be stretched. Check it out. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven
Line twelve posits the understanding that poets would, indeed, continue to rhyme, "crop" their lines, and count meter in the future. However, unless it is with poets like me and my poet/friend Patrick Gillespie (https://poemshape.wordpress.com/), traditional forms seem that they may be lost. I have read all of the explanations of why "change" was called for by the Modernist/Postmodernist writers, but none of what they said or continue to say makes any sense to me. Now, I suspect that late 20th and early 21st century poets are incapable of writing in traditional forms. The simply don't have the training. However, there is some hope. As current critic Dana Gioia writes, "They (poets who work with traditional forms) seek to reaffirm poetry's broader cultural role and restore its parity with drama and fiction." Yep, that is me. I want poetry that is not a one act play. I want poetry that is not written like lines from a recent pop novel--and there are some good novels out there, but poetry and prose is different. We should be able to see and hear that difference. Anyhow...
Please note that while lines thirteen and fourteen have the same syllable count of the other lines, they lose the meter and rhythm. They become conversational and meterless like the very prose poems to which they call attention. Yes, I can write that way on purpose, but who wants to do that?
If you have any questions about rhyme, rhythm, meter, or traditional and non-traditional forms, let me know. I will answer any question as best as I can.
Next week, we will have a special guest poet, my Aunt Marty. We started working on one of her poems before Christmas, and I put it aside and forgot about it. Sorry, Aunt Marty!
Stay tuned! Don't forget that the book I've labeled Essential Words is in one of the two previous blogs. I still have no name suggestions. Where are you, folks?
Don't forget to email me at mbt1966@yahoo.com rather than try to use the messages here in WIX.
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