Tag Archives: memorable words

RHL, ‘On a Modern “Poem”’

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The thoughts are fresh, the images are good;
the style is clean, the tone both wise and terse;
the whole thing would be memorable, it would…
if only it had been expressed in verse.

*****

I’m always embarrassed if I have an idea for a poem, and I fail to find an expression of it in rhyme as well as rhythm. That’s because, of the hundreds of poems or pieces of poems in my head, all but a tiny handful are remembered because they are expressed in verse. You can remember the gist of an idea on the strength of the idea; but if you want to remember its exact expression, word for word, it’s far easier if it’s in verse. For this purpose, blank verse is better than prose; but rhymed verse is superior.

You may have lots of partial memories of Winnie the Pooh from childhood – the Hundred Acre Wood, Eeyore’s moans and groans – but actual word-for-word memory is likely to attach to the few snippets of verse in the book, such as:
Isn’t it funny
How a bear likes honey.
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!
I wonder why he does?

My little gripe above was originally published in Light earlier this year.

Photo: “Al declaims” by jovike is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Heterometric verse: Susan McLean, ‘Teaching to the Test’

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I know you have no use for them,
poems with their sly quicksilver words
that won’t just speak their minds,
but carom through your head like startled birds.
Is that despair or longing in their cries?
Their dolors make no sense.
They’ll never buy you larger-screened TVs
or seats at sports events.

But someday, as you watch a pair hold hands
and leap from a burning tower,
as you wait for test results or hear
your phone ring at an unaccustomed hour,
what you feel will circle wordlessly—
tense, accusing, gaunt.
You’ll find that you are tested and found wanting,
and these are what you’ll want.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “As a professor myself and a person who once worked on writing standardized tests, I am familiar with the complaint of teachers that they are often forced to “teach to the test,” i.e., teach only the sort of knowledge and skills that students need for passing that sort of test. But as a poet, I know that we are tested in life in all sorts of ways. Most people think that they can get through life just fine without poetry. They tend to find poetry annoying and impenetrable, something that needs to be decoded, that has no practical use. Yet in tragedies, when all hope and comfort are gone, there is some comfort in hearing that others who have been in similar situations were able to put into words the feelings that you can’t. And the most memorable and condensed of those responses are often poems.
This poem is rhymed and metrical, but the lines are of different lengths in unpredictable patterns, a form called “heterometric,” and the rhymes occur only every other line. That unpredictability is meant to mirror life, in which the bad news always seems to come out of nowhere. The poem originally appeared in Able Muse and later in my second poetry collection, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “When Young Children ‘Hate’ School” by wecometolearn is licensed under CC BY 2.0.