Posts Tagged poetic space

Yours truly at Remembrance Rock

Some long-time readers of MontanaWriter may remember that last summer, coming home from a family vacation in The Smoky Mountains, Sue and I visited Carl Sandburg’s birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois. Moved by the experience I purchased a volume of Sandburg’s complete poems the following week.

A year later, Sandburg continues to delight me. The more I read, the more I am certain that he is the most overlooked American poet of the 20th Century.

It has been awhile since I reviewed a Sandburg poem here. Sandburg has been on my mind again and so I post this one, “The South Wind Says So.” It is from his third collection of poetry, Smoke and Steel.

Enjoy!

The South Wind Says So
If the oriole calls like last year
when the south wind sings in the oats,
if the leaves climb and climb on a bean pole
saying over a song learnt from the south wind,
if the crickets send up the same old lessons
found when the south wind keeps on coming,
we will get by, we will keep on coming,
we will get by, we will come along,
we will fix our hearts over,
the south wind says so.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

we will get by, we will keep on coming,
we will get by, we will come along,
we will fix our hearts over,
the south wind says so.

The melancholy tone of this poems is palpable. It is created primarily by the way Sandburg uses the long ‘o’ sound in the beginning of the poem. Each of the first five lines have one long ‘o’. It is something you notice especially when you read the poem out-loud, something you should always do with every poem.

Sandburg, a musician, understands “sound” as well as any poet. He also understand space, growing up as he did in the flat and open prairie of western Illinois. This is why he does the small poem so well which relies so heavily on the interplay between sound and space.

_____

Continuing November’s poetic theme of poetry featuring stars, today’s poem comes from Ted Kooser’s enjoyable little volume, Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison.

The idea behind Winter Morning Walk is a simple one: a poetic journal of Kooser’s morning walks with his dog around his Nebraska home. The poems and the book are dedicated to poet/writer Jim Harrison.

Each poem in the volume is dated and prefaced with a weather report for that day. You picture Kooser coming in from the cold outside, sitting down at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and quickly scribbling a few notes to himself before heading off to more serious work.

Ted Kooser’s Nebraska is a place of great open space. This is probably why space plays such an important role in his poetry. The 100 small poems that make up Winter Morning Walks are haiku-like in their use of space and silence… each poem sitting on the clean white page like an isolated Nebraska farmhouse sitting on a section of Nebraska’s winter plain.

I love Kooser’s poetry. It resonates. It is spare and straight forward. It is the kind of poetry that I wish more people would write.

Enjoy!

November 17

Clouds to the west, clear in the east.

Older this morning, the moon,
hid most of her face behind a round gray mirror.

In a half-hour’s walk, I saw
six shooting stars. Celestial notes,
I thought, struck from the high end
of the keyboard.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Older this morning, the moon,
hid most of her face behind a round gray mirror.

I saw
six shooting stars. Celestial notes,
I thought, struck from the high end
of the keyboard.

These separate lines/images have come to my mind often since first reading this poem. They are those kind of lines. The alliterated ‘m’ of morning, moon, most, and mirror and then the alliterated ‘s’ of saw, six shooting stars, Celestial, and struck. Subtle but effective writing… pure Kooser.

____

Beaverhead Rock (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

As a poet,  I have often used syllable counts to provide a form or structure to my poems. My baseball card poems predictably use a 9-syllable line-count… “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″ uses a structure of an 11-count line. As I have said elsewhere here, the odd-numbered line-count attracts me because it is naturally anti-iambic, less likely to become sing-song.

Predictably wanting to push myself and the boundaries of what is possible, I have “experimented” with ever-higher syllable counts. The challenge, of course, is to create a line denser in consonants and vowels without increasing space. Space provides the silence in poetry necessary for sound. Without space you have prose.

Readers of A River Runs Through It will recognize the reference to the “four-count art” of casting with a fly-rod. Maclean’s title story, a reminiscence of his brother Paul, his Presbyterian minister father, and his Montana boyhood, remains the single best story about Montana ever written.

A final word on syllable counts: A careful reader will no doubt let me know that I quite often “stray” away from my “announced” structure… that I am quite “loose” in how I count. Let me say up front, “Guilty as charged.” Ever uncomfortable with rules and authority, I even rebel against my own authority… my own rules.

Enjoy!

Reddo 

The poem that once 
appeared in this space
is being re-drafted
and re-typed.

It will be re-posted
someday soon
at MontanaWriter.com.

Stay tuned!

____