Tag Archives: semi-formal verse

Semi-formal verse: F.R. Scott, ‘Old Song’

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far voices
and fretting leaves
this music the
hillside gives

but in the deep
Laurentian river
an elemental song
for ever

a quiet calling
of no mind
out of long aeons
when dust was blind
and ice hid sound

only a moving
with no note
granite lips
a stone throat

*****

F.R. Scott (1899 – 1985) was a Canadian poet, lawyer, intellectual, and constitutional scholar. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). Born in Quebec City, he was Dean of the Faculty of Law at McGill; UN representative in Burma (now Thailand); and a member of the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism. A lover of the Laurentian wilderness, he was a member of the ‘Preview’ group of Montreal poets… and… with A.J.M. Smith he co-edited The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective, and Disrespectful Verse.

Photo: Simple Living – Flickr – Malcolm Carlaw.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

Semi-formal verse: Ann Drysdale, ‘Dialogue’

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He might be coming tonight, said Heart to Head.
No he won’t, Head replied, firmly. You heard what he said.
I know, said Heart, but still he didn’t exactly
turn me down flat.
Well, he wouldn’t, would he? said Head,
you know him better than that;
what he said was ‘barring a miracle’–
I thought you understood.
Granted, he did, said Heart, but he also said
he would if he could.
If he’d meant to come, said Head, he’d have mentioned trains;
he’d have confirmed the time.
So he forgot, so what? said Heart.
Since when has that been a crime?
Go on, said Head, firmly but gently. Pick up the phone,
ring and un-book the hotel.
Not yet, said Heart. But I will.
Why do you carry on playing, said Head
when there’s so little chance of winning?
Poor Head–am I ‘doing you in’? said Heart, grinning.
Death, even by a thousand cuts, said Head,
is still, ultimately, Death.
‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’,
said Heart, under its breath.
That was unworthy of you, said Head,
it’s a cliché, and it’s ugly.
‘L’espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans l’étable‘,
said Heart, smugly.
Straw doesn’t shine in stables, said Head,
it just lies there, soaking up shit.
That’s right, said Heart. That’s it.
Face it, said Head, not unkindly; he isn’t coming tonight.
I know, said Heart. But he might.

*****

Ann Drysdale (née Corrigan), 1942 – 2024, was a celebrated poet and editor, known for her wit and humour. Her work won the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance and numerous awards in competitions including Manchester, Cardiff, Peterloo, Bridport, and the Housman Society. Born near Manchester and raised in London, Ann later lived in Birmingham, the North York Moors, and South Wales. ‘Dialogue’ comes from her 2009 collection, ‘Quaintness and Other Offences’.

Here is the bio that she chose to represent herself with: “Ann Drysdale still lives in South Wales. She has been a hill farmer, water-gypsy, newspaper columnist and single parent – not necessarily in that order. She has written all her life; stories, essays, memoir, and a newspaper column that spanned twenty years of an eventful life. Her eighth volume of poetry – Feeling Unusual – came together during the strange times of Coronavirus and celebrates, among other things, the companionship of a wise cat and an imaginary horse.”

She was a much-loved member of the world of (especially formalist) poetry, and there is a tribute (and an enormous selection of her verse) in The HyperTexts. She was a truly good person.

“head over heart” by i_gallagher is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal poem: Mervyn Peake, ‘To Maeve’

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You walk unaware
Of the slender gazelle
That moves as you move
And is one with the limbs
That you have.

You live unaware
Of the faint, the unearthly
Echo of hooves
That within your white streams
Of clear clay that I love

Are in flight as you turn,
As you stand, as you move,
As you sleep, for the slender
Gazelle never rests
In your ivory grove.

*****

‘To Maeve’ is the final poem in ‘Mervyn Peake, Selected Poems’ published by Faber. Peake and his wife Maeve Gilmore were both artists and writers – after Peake’s death in 1968, Gilmore fleshed out a fourth book for the Gormenghast Trilogy from Peake’s notes and ideas, eventually published as ‘Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast‘.

Using form: Bill Bowler, ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man’

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Most of the time I’m zonked
maybe more often than I might want
here between high and dizzy
tired of looking busy
waiting to see what comes my way
9:11 comes twice a day

Look in the mirror: what do you see
a distinguished gentleman, what’s left of me
a formerly handsome young man,
gray hair, gray beard, wrinkles, laugh lines,
crow’s feet, bags… Why go on?

Grunting, groaning, ache all over,
Moving slowly, bent and stiff
No use trying to ignore
that throbbing, shooting pain
in my elbow, in my wrist,
there it goes again
in my ankle, in my hip

I’m occupying space,
not doing much at a steady pace,
treading water, riding it out
for Now, which is all we’ve got

Most of the time
in bed at nine
reading time
conk out by ten
sleep till eight
lounge in bed
get up late
and start again

No goal, no productivity,
drinking vodka, smoking weed,
writing verses, cooking dinner
anchovies, butter, cheese and cream
garlic, capers, medium heat

I don’t expect you youngsters here
to understand, but if you can,
my bladder’s shot, the plumbing leaks
an endless stream or more a trickle
with brief pauses in between
marking out my territory
or so it seems

It’s not what you expect to hear
but never fear!
Money’s not a problem
we have plenty
our friendly neighborhood ATM provides
an unlimited supply of twenties

*****

Bill Bowler writes: “Portrait of the Artist…” is one of a long series of poems called It Never Gets Old that I’ve been working on for a while. They’re all up on Bewildering Stories. The poems all explore from one angle or another the weird sensation of one’s parts wearing out, and one’s friends and loved ones disappearing one by one. Some of the titles are: “Death can be so inconvenient”, “At day’s end, nearing sunset”, “Circling the Drain”, “The Party’s Over”, “Poopie and PeePee”, “No One Seems Alarmed”, “Into the Bubble”, etc. I find that humor goes a long way in alleviating despair. (Смех сквозь слезы – laughter through tears)

“What I try to do in my verse is to use casual idiomatic vernacular, complete with slang, i.e., natural spoken speech, but to render the lines using meter and rhyme, so that the patterns are hardly noticed, though they hold the whole structure together. It has to sound natural even if it’s rhymed trimeter, which is fun to do. I’m fine with approximate rhyme, approximate rhythm (like mixed dactyls and trochees), and approximate meaning, but it has to be smooth. One forced rhyme blows the whole thing.”

Bill Bowler was born in New York City in 1950. He graduated from Columbia University in 1972 and received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Michigan in 1981. He has a wry biography at https://www.bewilderingstories.com/bios/bowler_bio.html#biblio, with links to his poems and stories.

Photo: “KELLYS IN KCMO” by roberthuffstutter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (2)

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And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

*****

This fragment is the response to the previous excerpt from Matthew Arnold’s ‘A Summer Night’ that I blogged two days ago. As a teen in a well-regimented boarding school I found that previous fragment terrifying with its prospect of living as a bored wage-slave forever, and this second fragment exhilarating in its freedom despite the expectation of catastrophe. Altogether a very subversive poem, and I thank my schooling for including such works. For the next couple of decades I followed the wild path, failing to earn a degree at universities in three countries, never holding a job for more than 18 months, frequently moving. Eventually I found an occupation that was constantly changing, where Eliza and I were our own bosses, and that took us to dozens of countries to teach business seminars. So that successfully combined the wage-slave and the freed prisoner, and it all worked out.

Arnold originally ended his poem:

Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave must man be one?

But ten years later he added a much more wishy-washy piece about learning from the pure heavens and seeing what a nice life you could make for yourself. I always thought he should have stopped with the original “madman or slave” view of life: much more dramatic! But his later addition was probably justified…

“Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” by hyperion327 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. (Note: the painting is by J.M.W. Turner, of course.)

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (1)

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For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

*****

I’m very grateful to my schooling for putting Matthew Arnold on the curriculum – this subversive little passage seems designed to undermine the office and factory culture which has flourished since his time, to undermine even the student writing endless essays. Arnold was an inspector of schools as well as a poet and social critic, so we can assume he knew what he was doing. But isn’t it suggesting that a dissatisfied person should just drop out? More on that in the next post.

The other thing I like about the piece is its easy, flowing style. Every line rhymes, but without pattern. The lines are iambic, mostly pentameter, but a scattering of them are shorter. It feels very conversational, and it is certainly very easy to learn by heart (which is one of the reasons that poetry evolved in the first place). The only hiccup to natural speech are the displacement of ‘live’ and ‘give’ to the ends of their lines for the sake of the rhyme and even that, though artificial, is done conventionally enough to read smoothly. The rest of it is in normal speech. When T.S. Eliot came out with ‘Prufrock‘ some decades later, though it had a different, Imagist sensibility, the only real difference in style was in dropping the thou’s and thee’s that Arnold still clung to.

Photo: “Office workers in Executive Building Room No. 123 prior to alterations, Brisbane” by Queensland State Archives is marked with CC PDM 1.0

Steven Clayman: ‘Enmeshed In Pure Feeling’

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I spied her entwine an out-spiraling net,
each jittery stride trailing radial spans
before coming to rest
astride her last strands.
 
Still-standing and idling
then inching and sidling
till centered she sits, wind-wafted and wheeling,
unhearing, unseeing, enmeshed in pure feeling.
 
From above, a tableau of flutter and flop;
from within, she awaits the faintest pin drop.
A gnat mid-air, full stop, enstranded;
arachnid sensed where it had landed.
 
She swivels right
to eight o’clock.
One silken vibe
betrayed the spot.  

*****

Steve Clayman writes: “The poem’s content was inspired by a remarkable book on the sensory systems of animal species (An Immense World, by science journalist Ed Yong).   Reading the book gave me vertigo, the good kind that arises from being drawn into the “alien” perceptual worlds that other species inhabit.  In a chapter on tactile senses, Yong writes that many web-spinning spiders are nearly blind and deaf, but are extraordinarily sensitive to vibrations.  Thus the web is far more than a trap for prey:

It’s also a surveillance system, which extends the range of the spider’s senses well beyond the reach of its body….  It is as much a part of the creature’s sensory system as the [sensors] on its body. Most orb-weavers sit in the middle of their webs and rest their legs on the radial spokes that funnel vibrations toward them.  From this position, they can distinguish the vibrations generated by rustling wind or falling leaves from those created by struggling prey.  They can probably work out where those struggles are coming from by comparing the strength of the vibrations hitting each of their legs….  If the prey stops moving, they can find it by deliberately plucking the silk and “listening” to the return vibrational echoes. 

“As for the poem’s form, I came up with the first line and the rest emerged organically, in the course of dealing with the possibilities of that starting point.  So the overall form was not planned, although after the first line I was determined to avoid using the word spider or web throughout the poem.”

*****

‘Enmeshed in Pure Feeling’ was first published in Lighten Up Online, edited by Jerome Betts.

Steven Clayman is professor of sociology at UCLA. He likes to think that his light verse is at least loosely related to his research specialization in conversation analysis and the study of language use in everyday life.  His scholarly work appears in linguistics, communication, and sociology journals, and in the books (co-authored with John Heritage) Talk in Action (Wiley-Blackwell) and The News Interview (Cambridge University Press).  His poems have appeared in Lighten Up Online, Philosophy Now, Better Than Starbucks, Light: A Journal of Light Verse, and Asses of Parnassus.
 

“Spider and Web” by kendoman26 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal verse: Rachel Hadas, ‘Ides of March, MMXX’

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New York, March 2020

Nothing new,
but it feels like an end.
An end that’s new.
This end is now?
No, I said new.
But who
could hear me through my mask?
Don’t ask.
Love
wears a glove.
I want to touch my friend.
.
This fear feels new.
We’ve all forgotten how
to live with it, to live it
day by day. And each
day begins anew,
begins a new
now we do not know,
oh no,
do not yet know.

*****

Rachel Hadas writes: Mid-March 2020, as I look back, did feel like both an end and a beginning.  Any moment in time is that, of course, but one’s sense of discontinuity was certainly heightened then.  A lot of familiar features of life just stopped, and an uncharted period began.  The confusion of trying to wrap one’s mind around all this at once is echoed in the overlapping  and echoing words “no, new, knew, know…”

“Ides of March MMXX” is collected in my 2022 volume “Pandemic Almanac,” a book in which, contrary to my usual practice, I append date and place of composition to each poem.  In 2020 we were in Vermont from early April until late November; “Ides” was written before people who could began to leave New York City in large numbers.

My 2025 collection “Pastorals” groups together texts written in and about Vermont over a period of years, certainly including the years of Covid but also extending both before and after the pandemic (if indeed there is an after).  I mention “Pastorals” because in one of its pieces (they’re all prose poems), “Blue Book,” which was  written sometime later during the pandemic, I do something similar to the play  in “Ides” on “no, know,” etc:   “We were elsewhere; we travelled back and forth, here and there.  Now mostly here.  Now only here.  Now here: nowhere.”

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

https://www.rachelhadas.net/

Photo: “Not Available Hand Sanitizer Gloves Rubbing Alcohol Face Masks” by Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Children’s poem: Isabel Chenot, ‘What to Take for a Walk in the Woods’

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A very sensible story full of very, very, very, very, very good advice

Always carry crumbs 
when you are wandering in the woods 
beside the waters – 
just in case 

you need to mark a trail, 
like in a fairy tale. 

And always have a piece of tape 
in case a butterfly breaks 
off its wing while fluttering, 
and always 
take a pitchfork 
just in case 
a cow 
is also 
wandering. 

And always carry
extra food
like
roasted beef
or chicken legs
for escaped
crocodiles,

because they like to gnaw on legs,

and always take a mongoose
to defeat the snakes,
and always take a violin
for when
the birds are stuttering.
And always carry
party hats
and birthday cake
for any sons and daughters
of destitute woodcutters
who might be having
lonely
birthdays,
and always carry
an umbrella
because –

you know why.
An elephant might fall out of the sky.

And always take a shovel
just in case
it rains –

so you can dig a little hovel
and stay dry,

and always take a potted plant
to brighten up that cozy space,

and always take a duck
in case
of lakes,

and always
carry otters.

*****

Isabel Chenot writes: “This was originally written and illustrated as a letter to the most magical six year old girl.”

‘What To Take For A Walk In The Woods’ was first published in Story Warren.

Isabel Chenot‘s first poem as a little girl was about marrying her cat Tig when she grew up: she married a good man instead, but kept scribbling poems and stories. The Joseph Tree, a collection of poems, is available from Wiseblood. For a preview of West of Moonlight, East of Dawn, her retelling of an old fairy tale, visit westofmoonlight.art.

Semi-formal villanelle: Peggy Landsman, ‘Light Villanelle’

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Look at all the work the universe has done.
It makes the most of ordinary light
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.

It does the work of all the worlds rolled up into one
mind-boggling miracle of space and time and light.
Look at all the work the universe has done.

Will we ever know for certain how the universe was begun?
Will we ever learn the reason for all this lovely light
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun?

Much of what we think we see, we know in fact is gone.
Stars do die out long before we catch their traveling light.
Look at all the work the universe has done.

Now look at all the works of man, the wealth of our creation.
There are still no substitutes for heat and light…
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.

I’m ready to quit my day jobs now; to leave them, one by one.
All I want is to make the most of ordinary light,
to look at all the work the universe has done
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.

***

Peggy Landsman writes: “I had been up all one long winter night with a group of friends in Buffalo, NY, in the mid-1970s. At one point, sitting around the kitchen table, I suddenly noticed daylight coming through the window. I had a moment of epiphany and blurted out: “Look at all the work the universe has just done!” After I went home and got some sleep, I started the work of writing the poem.”

“Light Villanelle” was first published in a now defunct online journal, Bringing Sonnets Back.

Peggy Landsman is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2024), and two poetry chapbooks: Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021) and To-wit To-woo (Foothills Publishing, 2008). She lives in South Florida within a short drive of a good library and a beautiful beach. A selection of her online publications is available on her website:  peggylandsman.wordpress.com

Illustration: “HAPPY NEW YEAR ~ Welcome 2014 ~ love letters from earth ~” by Cornelia Kopp is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.