The Sound of Emptiness Revisited

Back in June of ’09 I remarked on poetry that seemed to be all flash and no substance. I want to revisit the concept because a book-length manuscript came across my desk that embodied it. Out of the sixty or more poems only two or three moved me. Those seemed to build their images around a recognizable theme; the others seemed extremely unconnected.

In fact they reminded me of the “Where’s Waldo” puzzles, you know the themed scenes populated by a multitude of human figures. The trick is to find which one has all the recognizable tributes of the “Waldo” character. Imagine how frustrating play would be if there was no Waldo included! That’s how I felt about those poems. The fact that they were devoid of any customary rhythm or rhyme scheme only emphasized their meaninglessness.

There’s nothing wrong with setting down words or sounds without a precise, discernable meaning. “Sound” poets do it all the time. But they will admit that it works better on stage than on the page. The flow of words/sounds creates a mood enhanced and emphasized by poetic devices: rhyme (both end and internal), other repetition, defined even if changing rhythms. The fundamentals that please the ear and mind.

It reminded me of a poem I wrote some years back; it was never published and was never meant to be. It’s a piece I liked to perform live on stage because the way the sounds driven by rhythm and repetitions connected with the audience. If it established a sentiment, a mood, all to the good; if it didn’t it was still a sequence of pleasing sounds. I’ll publish it here so you can see what I mean.

5ntwenty

when craven vultures songbirds be
new babes laugh hanging in each tree
through ruby filtered light you see
one trail is free

radiance crowns the powdered rack
fishermen mourn their linen sack
and oil now burns the broken back
the clabbered hack

promises mend a shirt of snow
and buttered railways slide below
the trees fall off the wheels to know
these weights won’t go

all frozen lobsters on a kite
sing for a nose to free the night
we vanquish chip-shops in delight
and leave to write

so shine the copper lilies round
run with the growling shaded hound
the magic ice flows underground
while we resound

The poem as it exists has no obvious meaning. Its “poetry” hangs on the well defined frame of rhythm and rhyme scheme. For me the joy was in the movement of the mouth, the embouchure, as vowel slipped toward vowel and consonant shaped to the next consonant.

If that joy is not there, what are we left with? Ink spots on a page? Or from the stage a cacophony?

I have written other poems that had no obvious meaning but because the way images interacted, complimented each other, and were held by a common structure, they carried a discernable meaning that could be touched. Several of these have been published and well received.

So, does meaning have to be obvious? No. But a way must be shown that can lead to a satisfactory conclusion by the reader/listener. Otherwise you are pumping darkness into a place where there is no light.

In Performance

I went out the other evening to a concert, just to treat myself to something different for my birthday. There was a duo, the Undesirables, who performed mainly narrative songs. (Imagine a novel turned into song, or was that a song based on the novel?) They were enjoyable enough but were only the intro for the main attraction of the evening, C. R. Avery accompanied by the Legal Tender String Quartet. I had never heard of either act but went because the promo mentioned Tom Waits with both of them. C.R. Avery was a truly joyful birthday surprise!


Now those who have nuzzled through this site before know how I love performance art in all its forms – music, theatre, storytelling, and especially poetry. Let me tell you, Avery was a combination of the best of them all. I will try to describe his performance, but my words may be inadequate.

First of all, he is a poet, and has won the Great Canadian Poetry Face-off. He works in the poetic tradition, with rhythm, rhyme, imagery and various devices. He’s also one-third of T. O. F. U., the Tons Of Fun University group out of Vancouver that recently gave us Shane Koyczan, the poet who performed at the Winter Olympics’ opening ceremonies. He brings a beat/hip-hop sensibility to his presentation, both physically and aurally. And then the music.

Aside from the vocals and beat-box scratching and rhythm sounds with his voice, he played marvelous blues harmonica, using each to compliment the others. He was accompanied by a man who played a fine guitar with his hands and rhythm instruments with his feet. His sound was filled out by the Legal Tender String Quartet, a classically trained foursome of cello, viola, and two violins.

And now the problem lies in how to describe it. Let’s drop some performing beat (preferably Ginsberg) in a pot with early Bob Dylan imagery from his talking blues numbers. Add some Springsteen/ Mellencamp and a heap of Bukowski. Leave room for a lot of Patti Smith and enough Tom Waits to color the mixture. Don’t forget to season with Little Walter’s harp. And press it all through the best of hip-hop.

Damn. That still doesn’t do justice. That’s a poor approximation of what I experienced.

Excuse me, I’ve got to put his CD in the player. Why don’t you try it for yourself.

Rhythm and Rhyme: an Example

Every now and then I hammer away at the importance of rhythm and rhyme to poetry, the cadence and tone of language put to a special use. Although I don't usually post poetry, and almost never a new poem, I want to share this recent one (the last revision, an hour or so ago, escaped accompanied by a satisfied sigh) because of its use of these fundamentals. It's not a great poem, but it works for me as a poem and a prayer.

PRAYER FOR DIZZY

May in your new existence every whisper
that touches you be filled with a soft light
that carries in the rhythm of soothing murmur
the promises and mysteries of night.

May grass grow ever taller than your shoulder
and fall away from your approaching face
as you explore the clean expanse of meadow
and know that you belong in that new place.

May life again turn in familiar cycles
unfettered by the linear chains of days:
action and rest, hunger and satisfaction,
while all the words you hear are words of praise.

May simple dreams become their own fulfillment.
Rest on those cushions where St. Francis sat.
And when you sing out in the heavenly chorus,
let every angel know that you are cat.

Basic iambic pentameter. The alternating lines of each stanza (2 and 4) rhyme; the other lines end in feminine rhythm with an extra unstressed syllable. And those are the obvious devices; you can find more if you try.

The poem is not only a fitting memorial, it helps me deal with the loss.

Foundations of Poetry

Free verse and its variations have been around long enough that every person believes he (or she) can write poetry, granting that some may be better than others. With this comes the idea that any poem written in form and meter is old fashioned and out of date. Not so. I always stress that you can not write “free verse” until you understand what verse has been freed from, and that to be good poetry it needs to retain its roots, its foundation.

Part of that foundation is rhythm. All of our speech consists of syllables that are either stressed or unstressed; it is by arranging them in a pattern pleasing to the ear that we begin to create poetry. This is the basis of the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, rhythmic but without rhyme. The measure of this rhythm is expressed as feet. There are a limited number of such feet; a poet would be well served to acquaint himself with them.

To build such pleasing patterns is the craft of poetry, the work that comes after the inspiration. Words and phrases that seemed so natural but will not fit into a pattern, a rhythm, need to be replaced by something that doesn’t completely alter the proposed meaning. English is a language rich in such words.

And free verse? Free verse is not constrained by such tradition, is it? Here comes the distinction between prose and poetry. Prose, whether in a novel or the daily newspaper, has never had to follow such patterns. Verse, whether free or formal, must or it may lapse into prose. The least measured of free verse must have a cadence that the ear recognizes as pleasurable even if the mind does not.

Then what about the claims of rhyme? Modern poetry, especially free verse, doesn’t rhyme so why should a poet concern himself with such an outdated concept?

True, rhyme at the endings of lines is not as prevalent or obvious as it was when it was used as an aid to memorizing poems. Most of us no longer memorize but read poems stored on the page. However, rhyme and all its many fascinating variations are such an integral part of poetry that it can not be denied its place.

We spoke of rhythm, of the patterns that make up a good poem. One of the most important ways to emphasize the recurrent patterns of sound has always been through repetition. When the repeated sound or combination of sounds came at the end of a measured line of poetry, we had “end rhyme.”

But to emphasize the pattern the poet can also repeat the sounds in other, related ways that are equally pleasing. Internal rhyme is like end rhyme but doesn’t occur at the ends of lines. The repetition of consonants at the beginning, the end, or even in the middle of words can give a sense of that pleasure the ear is listening for, the repetition of vowels more so. All these and many more go to enhance that basic pattern.

It is my belief that the poet who completely ignores the basics of poetry that have always worked is doomed to lapse into writing that no ear will recognize as poetry. Rhythm and rhyme is to poetry what time and tone are to music, what heart beat and breathing are to the body: essential.

A mastery of these fundamentals can lead you onto many new roads in language and poetry.

A People's Poet

"The lonely sunsets flame and die;
The giant valleys gulp the night;
The monster mountains scrape the sky,
Where eager stars are diamond-bright."

Just a short stanza from "The Land God Forgot" by Robert W. Service, still one of Canada's best known and most quoted poets.

Service was a Brit who came to Canada at age twenty-one looking for adventure. He worked at odd jobs in the West for some time; he found it not as romantic as expected so he returned to his first line of work as a bank clerk. The bank posted him to Whitehorse, Yukon several years after the gold rush where he became enamored of the people and their tales. He took snippets from stories and real experiences, formed them into verse that lent itself to being recited.

It's this love of the people and their lives, the ability to reflect their joys and concerns that made him both famous and rich. His poems put on no airs; they ring true to the folks he is writing about, and those he is writing for. He had no need for obscure or classical references in what he wrote. Like Kipling, his mastery of hearing and speaking the rhythms of language are the foundation of his poetry.

That expressiveness using the rhythms of words and lines, that music that is the heart of recitation is a great part of what keeps his poetry before a continuing audience. To memorize and recite works like "Thee Shooting of Dan McGrew," "The Cremation of Sam McGee," or even "The Bread-Knife Ballad." ("Please, Mother, don't stab Father with the bread-knife. / Remember 'twas a gift when you were wed.")

From pole to pole, anywhere the English language is used, you can find someone reciting Service. This entry comes as the indirect result of a friend of mine giving to me a copy of Service's complete poems that was a gift to his Aunt Mary in 1951.

And you? Pick him up and enjoy. You'll find a way.

The Inherent Rhythm of Language

The other day a lady friend of mine brought a new poem to a workshop we both attend. Her poem surprised me because it was not in her usual style, longer lines with almost no sense of a cohesive rhythm. This time she had done something completely different.

Not only were the lines short, almost all the same length, but she had marked (and left those marks on the page inadvertently) each line with the number of syllables she had used. Most lines were four syllables, with the occasional use of five or three.



Now I'm not one to advocate counting syllables in poetry instead of using and playing with established rhythms, but in this case it worked. It helped that she used a four syllable line, most usually of two words; in English it seems difficult to put four syllables together without ending up with an iambic dimeter or a close variation thereof with a trochee or spondee. There seems to be no way a unit of four syllables can stand without at least one, and more comfortably two stresses. And this becomes a natural iambic rhythm, pleasing to the ear and to the mind.

This started me reflecting on the natural rhythms of languages, especially Indo-European languages with which I'm familiar. For me, iambic feels so right for English, (much more so than for Old English and even Middle English.) daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM seems to roll so fluently from the throat. On the other hand, German, Dutch, etc. seem to come into being as a stream of trochees: DUMda DUMda DUMda DUMda.
French, again, has another and separate rhythm pattern expressed (to my ear) in anapests, dadaDUM dadaDUM dadaDUM dadaDUM (see Gilles Vigneault's "Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays c'est l'hiver.") The foot my ear finds most often in the Italian language, and I believe also in Spanish, is amphibrachic, with the stress on the penultimate of a three syllable foot, daDUMda daDUMda daDUMda daDUMda.


Ah, marvel at the subtle intricacies of the rhythms of language! Truly it is a reflection of the music of the spheres, the sound of all things working and singing together!

Theatre and Poetry (2)

As I mentioned in a previous entry, several of this year's Fringe Festival productions involved poetry. Sunday afternoon I went to see one that caught my attention.

"The Portrait," written and produced by local people, was described in the program blurb as "a play written almost entirely in poem form." The theme: murder and haunting and suspense.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, perhaps a Shakespearean performance in iambic pentameter or something equally solemn and dramatic. What I got was a narrator, the spirit of the niece of the man whose portrait comes to ... however, this isn't about plot intricacies but about the advertized "poem."

The lines were in a less conventional form; the complete play consisted of an extended ballad delivered in quatrain stanzas with lines of three or four feet and alterate rhyme. The marvel of the experience was twofold. Unless you were listening carefully for it, the rhyme and rhythm was almost unnoticeable. And even if you made yourself aware, there were enough changes to ensure that it wasn't repetitive or boring. The metric flow would often jump naturally from one character to another.

Although at the end I felt unsatisfied and wanting more, I left with a sense of amazement that the language had been so well-used.

The flow of narrative carried by rhyme and rhythm in this piece, contrasted with a segment of a performance I had seen the evening before. "Tell Me Another One" was a retelling of three fables. 'Little Red Riding Hood' was delivered as an interprative dance.'Fox and Girl' was a newer puppet show which, for me, didn't cohere. The center of the presentation was the Grimms' 'The Juniper Tree,' but it was done as a folk ballad. What could have been a brilliant concept in the hands of a true balladeer or singer/songwriter was turned into tasteless pap. I hadn't heard the story before; I don't remember it now. I couldn't tell you what it was all about and it didn't interest me enough to look up the original. The accoustic guitar accompaniment was uninspired and forgettable.

All I remember is a strumming guitar and a bearded face. That is neither poetry nor drama.

A Different Task

I have taken upon myself a task that is becoming quite a challenging project.

I'm involved in the activities of a group promoting Hamilton as the "Waterfall Capital of the World," the city with more waterfalls within its boundaries than any other. Some of the earlier background research found a poem concerned with a legend attached to one of the more spectacular waterfalls. In a poem written in about 1900 and called Na-Go-She-Onong, a J. L. Lewis tells the story of a native princess who died with her lover in a leap over Webster's Falls.

The story is straightforward, a tale of love and jealousy that ends in tragedy. However, the original poem consists of 216 lines, 27 stanzas of eight lines each. Since I'm a poet and most of the others photographers, I was challenged to turn it into something that could be read or recited at gatherings without boring the audience with length and detail. I accepted that challenge.

Because of the non-literary nature of my primary audience, I have decided to rewrite it in "poetry" they know, structured with rhyme and rhythm. I am approaching it by using a ballad form. The problem now is how much of the narrative can be left out, only hinted at; how much of the description is necessary.

So far I have a framework in mind and the first several stanzas have been written as tetrameter quatrains. Now to touch on the important points of the "story" and keep it all simple and succinct.

Honour the lady, the legend, and the place!

Pain and Art

It's commonly accepted that art can often be the result of pain, whether it be physical or emotional. Artistic expression may come in response to pain or as a way to deal with it. Painters and photographers, musicians and writers, no matter the medium it has been used to convey pain, its effects and consequences.

My question comes from another angle. Has art and its expression ever been used to deliberately cause pain?

A few evenings ago I was at an outdoor concert of reggae and other Carribean music. To emphasize the beat, the rhythm, the promoters and/or the musicians turned up not only the volume but also the bass. I found it necessary to leave.

I used to laugh at my wife when she refused to stay at a concert with a pronounced and heavy bass because it hurt her. Not her ears so much as her bones, she said. Myself, I would joy in the vibrations of my own body to the rhythm of the pounding beat. Pain, no; discomfort, maybe but the excitement was worth it.

That night, the bass vibrated my bones: ribs, breastbone, collarbones. What's more, it hurt. After several minutes the pain throbbed as constant as a toothache and I had to leave.

It made me wonder. Has sound as art ever been used to destroy its 'consumer'? Has any other art form? I know good writing has been used as fuel for political movements, but has a combattant ever been killed by a poem? A barrage of poems?

Art is an antidote to war, anger and negative behaviors but can it ever stop it without the bodies of the artists?

Buffy Sainte-Marie's Universal Soldier is as strong as ever. Over against him is the Universal Artist. But, may sounds and looks and words never kill. It's more than enough that they hurt.

A Pound of Modern Poetry

For those still lamenting that modern poetry doesn't rhyme and has no rhythm, they can find the reason in the ideas and work of Ezra Pound. Don't blame the man and his "madness" for everything; too much of what is coming out today comes from misunderstanding and misinterpreting his ideas.

Sure, you can blame him for the ubiquitious "free verse" that he promoted in English poetry. He and his bunch began that thing about presenting "images" to say things rather than using good old flowery words and phrases arranged in metronomic feet and all that good old stuff. Read Shakespeare's sonnets along side Pound's Cantos: you'll have no idea what he's on about.

But already in the first decades of the twentieth century, the times they were a-changing (sorry, Bob.) Literature and poetry in English were stuck in a Victorian rut; what was happening was happening in Europe: wars and rumours of war, but also slashing decisive movements in art and literature. With the influences of French symbolism in poetry, Impressionism and Cubism in art, and Dada in everything, Pound and others began to work the new ideas into the English language, shaping some to their own use and creating others. The "Imagists" and the writers reflecting the crumbling of society began a new look in literature and the understanding of it.

He encouraged and supported T. S. Eliot's poetry. Eliot's "The Wasteland" became the premier example of modernist poetry, using all the techniques and rationales the writers proclaimed. In the field of the novel, James Joyce worked these into Ullyses and later Finnegan's Wake.

Pound would use images to say only what they could. He used quotations in other languages, footnotes, other techniques foreign to poetry. He took these images and, instead of arranging them in nice orderly rows that fit together the way poetry had for ages, scattered them seemingly haphazardly on the page without any evident relationship. Instead of writing in accented feet, Pound wrote his phrases like musical phrases, holding true to a cadence and flow. What it ends up as seems to be an interlocking mass of words, hiding any sense and meaning.

But with a critical look, the jumble of stones, the collage of different ideas and phrases, become more that what is first apparent. They point at and even carry a beauty of their own. Words and phrases, ideas and concepts, they begin to connect, to form random patterns as if tossed for the I Ching. Perhaps this is partly due to Pound's study and work with traditional Chinese poetry.

Cadence and pattern. These become for Pound and the moderns the antidotes to stale phrases and metrics. And this is where today's poets make their mistakes. Free, they proclaim, is free from those old ideas and they leave it there. They forget to use the replacements. Their jumbles of words have no connections or no cadence. A framework must exist or all will be washed away to be forgotten. Those who count syllables may carry on for a time; they have established a pattern. However, unless that pattern is translated into a discernable cadence (which does happen in the best) such poems too become unmemorable. And unmemorable is not what a poem should be.

The Hip and the Hop

Right from the beginning, I never liked hip-hop: the breakdancing, the clothing, the graffiti "art," the music and its "poetry," the sideways ball cap attitude. It seemed vain and meaningless to me, rebellion for the sake of rebellion.Before I could let things settle in my mind, the music and song became nothing but (to me) shouts and epithets about crime, sex, violence, and gangsterism. What's more, the practitioners seemed to live it out in the media.

My attitude and acceptance are changing.

It began with an East Coast artist who calls himself Buck 65. I heard him on the radio one day and his lyrics, though delivered in true rap style, made sense in a way the rap and hip-hop thing never had before. But, I figured, that's just an abberation. Then at the Skydragon Mayday celebration a group calling themselves "Rhyme Travellers" performed on the stage and I got the whole thing live and in my face.

Four guys swapping rhymes among each other on stage, an easily discernable line of protest running through their words and their actions. Movement, language, attitude, all carefully orchestrated into an almost flawless presentation over a prerecorded rhythm track. It was more than enough to send me to find out what hip hop, rap, etc. was really all about.

A little research: hip hop as develloped among black urban youth has much of the same basis as Dub poetry from Jamaica; that began when DJs would rhyme their own words (dub) over the B sides, usually instrumental versions, of popular reggae songs. Take away the music but leave the rhythm and rhyme, especially when it has been taken away from extemporaneous and become finely honed set pieces. You have an accepted and understandable form of poetry that is immediate and vernacular.

So American black youth appropriated rhythm and rhyme for their own use, their own manner of expression, and built a culture around it. Sometimes money and ego cary it too far and produce that over-evident "gangsta" facade. But I believe in the poetry. I believe in the protest. I believe that hip hop is in some way a part of every artist in any medium.
With the beat in my blood and the rhymes in my mouth and the cry for justice in my heart, I too am a part of hip hop.

The Ballad: Poem and Music

In those days when we relied on word of mouth to transmit stories about our forefathers, the bard played an important part in daily and ceremonial life. He was the one who remembered and repeated the old stories. But as with all customs, things change. By the time of the middle ages we had court troubadours and minstrels who would wander, all trying to maintain themselves with their words and often with musical accompaniment. The stories they recited or sang were no longer the great epics of heroic deeds or the passions of the noble classes. Instead, the poet/performers turned to everyday concerns that were familiar to the common people, that were a part of their lives. The story poem or ballad, with or without music, became an important part of our language and literature. With it came a form, a simple method of construction, that is still very much in use today.

The story-poems as delivered were usually about happenings some distance away in time or place; they usually dealt with unknown people. Because they were not written, the facts and contexts often changed in the telling, until it no longer mattered exactly how and why the story/song-poem began its existence. A good example of this lies in the stories of Robin Hood. Some of the oldest written copies of ballads we have are about him. They seem to be based on and to incorporate parts of much older material. Still, the stories continue to be told and sung.

The attributes that made the ballad so versatile continued into the period of greater use of written language. Probably the most important was its form. The ballad was usually arranged in four-line rhymed stanzas; there is such variety in this form that it seems to become a natural pattern for poetry and one which is not difficult to master and employ.

The ballad stanza usually consists of four lines: the first and third are tetrameter (four feet) while the second and fourth are trimeter (three feet); the rhyme scheme is often a b a b. It would read:

a-dum, a-dum, a-dum, a-day,

a-dum, a-dum, a-do.

a-dum, a-dum, a-dum, a-day,

a-dum, a-dum, a-do.

This simple stanza can be easily and effectively changed. The quatrain can become four equal lines. The rhyme scheme can be changed in several ways, e.g. by not rhyming lines one and three. Or two and three can be rhymed to become a rhyming couplet between the lines of another couplet. Several other variations are easily formed. An extra line can be added. All this with a simple, four line formation, the ballad stanza. Coleridge used it in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Tennyson effectively makes it the basis of his In Memoriam; Oscar Wilde deftly uses it to condemn the penal system in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

But about this time it becomes the foundation of another manner of expression. Poetry begins to move away from the strictures of the formal stanza. Because it has such musical and rhythmic characteristics and harks back to the ballads of the minstrels and the songs of the common folk, songs, and especially folk songs in America, use the form extensively. When used to tell stories in country music the ballad stanza is powerful.There is certainly no reason why a poet should not write in the "common measure" of the ballad stanza. In fact it should be an integral part of his knowledge and experience before he attempts to write "free verse." Without a deep understanding of rhythm and rhyme, structure and form, his writing so often becomes "free" without any hint of verse. And that can be a great loss.

To the Beat of the Beats

Last night I attended the fiction authors' readings put on by gritLIT, Hamilton's literary festival under way this evening. Two of the novelists, with whose work I am acquainted, didn't surprise. The third author Ray Robertson, whom I hadn't read before, did.

Part of the subject matter of his novel What Happened Later is a trip by Jack Kerouac to Quebec in 1967 to explore his own background. Sick and alcoholic, he persuades a friend to drive him to Canada, to go "on the road" one last time. This journey is offset with a boy's first discovery and search for Kerouac. The two contrast each other throughout the book. (Young Ray. a decade or more later, knows the author is no longer alive; it is not a quest for the person.)

The subject in itself could have held my interest. I am a long time admirer of the so-called Beats, especially the poetry of Ginsberg, Snyder, Corso, Ferlinghetti, McClure, and of course Kerouac himself, since I first read and heard them in the early sixties. Aside from language and subject matter, I was struck by their use of the rhythms and improvisations thereof that I was discovering in jazz at the same time. They wrote and read in beats and breaths, cadences I could follow and fix and hear when they were long gone. Whenever I opened a work to read for myself those cadences resounded through my mind.

Imagine my surprise when Robertson began to read from his book. No, that wasn't Kerouac's voice. I know it. I have in my collection nearly all of his recorded work. But the tone and the cadences were almost, to my ears, indistinguishable from the best and most satisfying of Kerouac's writing. Here was someone who had absorbed his subject and in some way assimilated and now expressed him.

That kinetic, pent-up energy was there, coiled as if barely controlled. The music of a bebop jazz group hummed around my ears. The stacatto bursts of words whipped around the room. And I sat there with my metaphorical mouth wide open in amazement.

I sat through the rest of the program, waiting to purchase the book to take home to discover if that magic was really there. Believe me, it is.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus revisited

Several weeks ago I was straightening up some of my older books (i.e. trying to figure out what I had) and came across my highschool text of Latin poetry: selections from Catullus, Vergil, Horace, and some Martial. I also looked up my Penguin Classic translation of Horace, since my Latin is more rust than iron, to rediscover what I found so fascinating about him.

Horace, after fighting with the losing armies of Brutus after Caesar's murder, ended up becoming almost the unofficial poet laureate to Augustus. Virgil introduced him to Maecenas, a friend of Augustus who became his patron; he had a position with the government if he wanted it. With all that time and financial support, all he needed was talent. He had that.

Let him explain what he did. He claims to have taken the old. staid and solemn Latin forms and rhythms and urged them into older but more elaborate Greek lyric stanzas. He also shunned as much as possible the solemn poetry praising battle and empire that Augustus asked for, praising instead the little things he knew and held dear. In that way he was a forerunner of modern populist poets.

So. Instead of armies marching to war he wrote about country life, village and farm. Instead of triumphant generals celebrating victory, friends and acquaintances having a few drinks, joking around, talking about girls. Such a welcome change from Vergil's solemn Aeneid. With irony and self-deprecation he kept his personal life out of the poems. Rather than beg for emotional response, he presented the image; he was the first to claim that a poem must make the hearer "see" what the poet had in mind, the image of the imagination.

After two millenia, Horace still speaks with a voice that resonates today. His images captivate; his forms and metrics intrigue. Now to search for that Epistle, his "Ars Poetica."

Poetry to Music

Some time ago, in a conversation among a group of writers, poets all, the topic of music and writing came up. Many confessed to listening to music while writing, in the sense that music played in the background but not in any way that would interfere with their focus. One lady said she loved to "mindlessly" hum show tunes at her keyboard. A man claimed silence worked for him; he wanted to write poems not songs. Following up on that, I asked if anyone had ever written a poem with a specific song in mind, noting that poems and songs are not interchangeable, and that early poetry was meant to be accompanied by music. Sadly, most looked at me as if I were an alien; no one tried to seriously consider the question I had raised.
In truth, I was disappointed because moments like that keep happening for me. Even in my teens I would write "alternate" lyrics for a popular song the way "Weird" Al Yankovic has used to build a career on and which a country music duo, Homer and Jethro, were doing at that time. It felt right to fit my words to an established and recognized pattern, a rhythm.

I grant that such endeavors were not the best poetry, that rhythm and rhyme were more important than expression and meaning, but that's the purpose of a song. However, I still find myself doing it. Back in the sixties when I was still feeling my way into poetry, I heard Leonard Cohen at a protest rally sing "Suzanne." He fumbled with the chording on his guitar, then apologized: "I'm a poet, not a singer." He recognized the difference, and went on to write poems with rhythm but only a limited tone and delivery. At this time, I wrote a poem to the rhythm of Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero - No Limit." The end result was very satisfying for me, although I never tried to sing it publicly, nor have it published.

A year or two ago I composed a poem that uses the rhythm patterns of the song "Two Hundred More Miles" by the Cowboy Junkies. It has been published; whenever I read it, I feel the rhythms re-establishing themselves under my voice. I don't attempt to sing it.

Even more recently I wrote a poem in memory of Irving Layton. Its rhythm isn't based on a specific song or piece of music, but uses the lilting 3/4 waltz time as its basic dactyllic rhythm. (You know, dum dah dah, dum dah dah .) I do sing this one, but never yet in public!
Every pattern of sounds, whether in music or in poetry, carries a sense of order and freedom, a sense that reaches above the common human experience. To blend the two, whether it is the musician composing to the written or spoken word or the poet writing with the sounds of music, is an ability that can only enhance both art forms.