New Poems #4—CORRECTIONS
Erev Rosh Hashanah
Note: I previously sent out a version of this email that stripped the lineation from the lines by Phillis Levin. I have fixed that in this mailing. Apologies for the inconvenience.
New Poems is a series of poems written or revised in the past five years. For me, that qualifies as “new.” Poems in this series have not been published in journals or even submitted to journals. It’s unclear where they stand on the continuum from first draft to finished. All I can attest is that they exist as files on a computer.
Erev Rosh Hashanah As the cantor intoned the first prayer tonight, my mind/body reached for your hand, I wanted to take your hand, hold your hand— which is not to say I still loved you; rather, it meant you were a craving, a kind of habit, something I wanted even though it was bad for me, something I did even though it hurt me. I had decided on you for the long haul— for the duration, to use the phrase my mom used of my dad’s army years in the Pacific. He enlisted and they got married in October 1941. She would tell me the story of how they rode on a train together, three days and four nights she would say, from New York to El Paso, where my dad was doing basic training at Fort Bliss. And how, after Pearl Harbor, they shipped him off to Hawaii for the duration, which proved to be four years. So in 1942 she came back to New York, 20 years old, married, alone. When my dad died of colon cancer in 1972 my mom said she would pretend he was in the service, away for the duration. Funny, how duration means as long as it lasts, but is related to endurance, which means something like sticking it out despite. Despite—just like that, standing by itself, no object complement, not despite the rain or despite the crowds. Just sticking it out despite. That’s the only way I can think of it. That’s the only way it feels true.
This is the first new poem I’ve written in verse—and kept in verse, rather than switching to prose—in about four years. I talked about this issue of verse versus prose in the previous edition of New Poems. Over the past three or four years I may have drafted quite a few new poems that were lineated—but the way I feel poetry in my bones, lineated and verse are not necessarily the same thing. Lineated means you hit the return key once the line has reached a certain length. Verse, to me at least, means their is a certain musicality to the lines.
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, I consider myself a poet with a musical temperament in the Gregory Orr sense; but my music is not a matter of any regular meter—with the exception of some metrically traditional sonnets I have written, some of which I have published in journals or in books. I don’t know if there is a standard technical term for the way I use rhythm. I might call it irregular meter or irregular rhythm. It can certainly be scanned; but the scansion does not amount to an established, predetermined form, such as iambic pentameter or the trochaic octameter of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Rather, it is what I might call loose or even jaunty, depending on the poem.
The first person that comes to mind when I think about other poets who write this way is my beloved friend and teacher, Phillis Levin. Here are a few lines from her poem “An Anthology of Rain” that appeared in Poetry in March 2017.
For this you may see no need, You may think my aim Dead set on something Devoid of conceivable value: An Anthology of Rain, A collection of voices Telling someone somewhere What it means to follow a drop Traveling to its final place of rest.
In the lines above you can find loose patterns of iambs, anapests, and spondees, among other types of metrical feet. But they do not assume any regular pattern, and I suspect the rhythm arouse rather spontaneously and organically as Levin drafted these lines—Which is not to say she may not have revised these lines a thousand times before they took their current form.
But in my own writing, in recent years, any first-draft verse I went back to, intending to revise, felt hopeless to me. I could not hear any music in it at all, and I started revising in prose instead of verse.
But then, ever so recently, at services for Rosh Hashanah, in fact—the Jewish New Year, just seven or eight weeks ago—I had a thought about how I wanted to hold my ex-husband’s hand, and I pulled my phone out and entered the following into my Notes app:
It could be summed up in five words: I liked holding his hand.
Oh my! It was like Samantha Stevens twitched her nose and Darrin stopped being a frog and turned back into a man! And when I returned to that fragment in the following days, the rest of the poem poured out, more or less in the verse form you see above, with its characteristically loosely metrical prosody.
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
This is a good one Michael. Thank you for sharing it.