The Garden of April Poetry: Morris Dancers Kicking Up Their Metrical Feet

          The prompt for April 17 by the napowrimo.com website, a site dedicated to encouraging poets to write a new poem every day in April -- National Poetry Month -- calls for writing a poem relying on neologisms.
          Here's how the site put it:
               Today, I challenge you to write a poem that incorporates neologisms. What’s that? Well, it’s a made-up word! Your neologisms could be portmanteaus (basically, a word made from combining two existing words, like “motel” coming from “motor” and “hotel”) or they could be words invented entirely for their sound. Probably the most famous example of a poem incorporating neologisms is Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, but neologisms don’t have to be funny or used in the service of humor."
[http://www.napowrimo.net/]

               Well, not to put too fine a point on it, "Jabberwocky" (which appears in "Through the Looking Glass") is pretty funny, and Lewis Carroll sets a pretty high standard as a model.
              The poem I'm sharing here attempts to capture some of the stylishly antic fun exhibited by the Newtown Morris Dancers, who ply their deeply traditional art of folk dance on Easter morning on Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay directly after the Easter service at Emanuel Church. 
             They definitely slow down traffic. 
             The photo above gives a good idea of their costumes and suggests something of upbeat, open, yet carefully prescribed style of their art. Morris Dance dates back to a region of England from a long time ago. The dance is traditional, the costumes and music traditional, the Newtown Morris Dancers a Boston tradition, their appearance outside the church on Easter a pretty long-lasting tradition by itself, and Easter itself -- well all sorts of connections spring up there. 
               Here's my attempt to pack it all up in a poem with made-up words. 

        The Morris Dancers on Newbury Street

Twirl updown and crownaround

Your stickles brain percussion, your ankledings make sound

You have a rather handy look,

your brawn is rather shandy

You eyes flow from the babelbrook,

Do you feed them naught but candy?

You music goes a circle bend

Comes back to make a neverend

What churchkey fellow found a brew

To bottle up the likes of you?

Twupsy-doo and jarl about

Your feet choptime and rabble out

Your beaks remind me of the rout

Who tear my cherry blossoms out

Twirl updown and crownaround

Your stickles brain percussion, your ankledings make sound

No mankey man can Morrisleap and dare to wear a frown

 

The Garden of Verse: Melancholy Evenings Recollected in Tranquility

     It's still April, and we're back at it. The prompt for April 17 by the napowrimo.com website, a site dedicated to encouraging poets to write a new poem every day in April, called for writing a verbal nocturne.
          Here's how the site put it:

"Today, I challenge you to write a nocturne. In music, a nocturne is a composition meant to be played at night, usually for piano, and with a tender and melancholy sort of sound. Your nocturne should aim to translate this sensibility into poetic form! Need more inspiration? Why not listen to one of history’s most famous nocturnes, Chopin’s Op. 9 No. 2?"

      I listened to Chopin's Nocturne, Op. 9 No.2. I listened to a lot of other piano music loosely described as "similar" -- including Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," which is not melancholic, but romantic and just generally inspiring.  My poem probably owes more to the enlivening effect of listening to good, strong music than to the delicacy of sentiment required by the Nocturne, nevertheless here it is:

                                   

           Not Songs of Spring, but November Moans

Rain at dusk and steely gray all afternoon.

I'll finish off that Dubonnet and straighten up,

After all I may die soon.

Darkness falls at four o'clock, time for a cup

Of bitters with a little gloom.

Do I dare to twist a dial and hear the latest cover-up?

Some silence settles on the room

Now please get dressed and get some din

Before la tristesse barges in...

Oh no I fear, the darling fiend's already here

I feel him stretch his hand for me

To bind me up in weightless coils of SAD and subtle tears.

I'll trace my nights on leaves of tea:

The moon, the rain, and the restless sea.

       And if you're truly interested in learning more about nocturnes, not the parody but the straight gin, see Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Nocturnes," which (wholly coincidentally) appears on this month's Verse-Virtual.com at:

 http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-wexelblatt-2017-april.html

 

National Poetry Month: Between the Beginning of Things and the End

  On Day Fifteen (which this year happened to be Easter) of National Poetry Month (also known as April), with the month now halfway behind us, the prompt from 
NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo
asked us to write a poem on what it means to be in the middle of things. 

          Here's a quote from the
NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo site on today's theme:

"...write a poem that reflects on the nature of being in the middle of something. The poem could be about being on a journey and stopping for a break, or the gap between something half-done and all-done. Half a loaf is supposedly better than none, but what’s the difference between half of a very large loaf and all of a very small one? Let your mind wander into the middle distance, betwixt the beginning of things and the end."

  
          My poem is titled by the Latin phrase meaning "in the middle of things":

                                   In Medias Res

Nick made it home just in time to meet the Easter Bunny.

Devils were lurking in the trees. Pamela summoned a special potion.

Down on Cemetery Lane, the little people were choosing between fortune and fame.

When the plague arrived in our district, many of us recollected old debts we had either forgotten to pay -- or to call in.

On Project Hill people were coming and going with brows similarly furrowed.

The story began small, dithered at the first turn, lunged forward unexpectedly, then retraced its steps.

The intermezzo...

            ... the intermezzo.

Behind the curtain the leading lady, larger than life, paced back and forth, glaring at anyone who came too near. She's always like this, her handler remarked quietly, when she's about to swallow a snake.

I'm not looking for lukewarm praise, the artist said. Ordinary expressions of pleasure will do fine.

Fear crept into the town, like a disappointed lover with a score to settle.

We have to stop meeting like this, Lila said, resting her back on a tombstone.

Pamela waited. It was her last trick. Would it work?

It was not the Easter Bunny. And it was too late to close the door.

National Poetry Month: Let's Start in the Middle

 

         Here is my poem for Day 14 of National Poetry Month. It's written in response to a prompt from the NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo! site that provides encouragement, support, and community for people who are trying to write a poem each a day through the month of April.
The site also provides a different kind of prompt each day, examples, places to find for more examples, in addition to its other features. [Check out the site at http://www.napowrimo.net/]
Here is the site's prompt for April 14:"Because it’s Friday, let’s keep it light and silly today, with a clerihew. This is a four line poem biographical poem that satirizes a famous person."
The site offers this example:

Emily Dickinson
wasn’t a fickle one.
Having settled in Amherst,
she wouldn’t be dispersed.


Here's my offering, titled "Hell of a Time":
 

Hieronymus Bosch

Grew a garden of squash.

Dealing with black spot, Beelzebub fly, and weather sub-prime

By the evidence of art he had a hell of a time.

The Garden of 'ArtSake': What Is Your Greatest Need?

 I'm flattered to be included in an online publication hosted by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, my state's arts agency, called "ArtSake." 
ArtSake publishes a moderated blog in order -- in the council's words -- "to carve out a space where we celebrated art and art-making for its inherent merits. We’ll use this space to celebrate our state’s innovative and creative minds, highlight new projects, and feature ideas and content straight from the artists."
ArtSake's project officer Dan Blask was recently seeking comments from artists and writers about issues they face in their work and lives. He posed the question What is your greatest need, as an artist?

The resulting blog included my response and also mentioned my upcoming public programs, including my talk about "Suosso's Lane" Thursday, April 13, at 7 p.m. at the Ventress Memorial Library, 15 Library Plaza, in Marshfield. 
So here's me quoting myself, courtesy of Art Sake: 

Robert Knox, writer and poet
I’m a fiction writer and poet. My greatest need is ways to connect with readers. Happily, I’m in a stage of life when my most pressing needs are no longer time or money. But I want to see the books that I finally have time to write get into print, or get read, or even noticed somehow. Commercial publication of fiction is a narrow funnel, except for certain formulaic genres, and agents look to meet specific marketing needs. Newspapers, a declining industry in which I’m partially employed, review few books. After my novel Suosso’s Lane was published a year ago by a small independent, I find most of its readers myself through public programs at libraries. Many of the fiction writers I know publish their own books and sell them on Amazon. Poetry is an even more self-contained universe. I’m not proposing any solutions here, just stating a need: How do we get read?
 
Robert Knox discusses his novel Suosso’s Lane at the Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield (4/13, 7 PM). He’ll read from his poetry collection Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty at Plymouth Public Library (4/24, 7 PM). Currently, he has poetry published in Verse-Virtual.com, where he is a contributing editor.

Here's the link for the full discussion of the question What is your greatest need, as an artist?
http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/

The Protest Garden: If Winter Chilled Our Souls, Can Spring Renew Our Hope?

            Here's the beginning of my poem entitled "Salute to a Winter," which appears in the April 2017 issue of Verse-Virtual:

Where did you go when we were not looking?
Did we leave you in the boarding area for the airplane to take us away
to some milder place where the headlines did not show us the ugly masks
donned by D-list actors bumbling through a remake of The Great Dictator?
Or in the florist shop choosing tropical blooms the size of small bedrooms
to hide us from the ugliness outside,
when goons with flag pins seized house cleaners to send them away from their children
and protect for our native countrymen the honor of cleaning toilets and picking fruit?
...

        Though I wrote the poems that appear in the current issue of Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal, before National Poetry Month (April: that annual celebration of poetic-self) began, I am encouraged by Bill Moyers' timely linkage of poetry and national memory. Moyers quotes Czech writer Czeslaw Milos on the dangers of  "a refusal to remember" and argues that "memory is crucial if a people are not to be at the mercy of the powers-that-be, if they are to have something against which to measure what the partisans and propagandists tell them today."

            So this month I am offering more "measures" to apply to the current state of national affairs. Having exhausted rational analysis and pure invective, I am working my way through dystopian comparisons. When I consider the entire year-plus election season and the miserable first months of the new so-called administration, it seems to me that the entire country has plunged into an episode of "The Twilight Zone."
           One knows from experience that these scripts don't end well. 
            Anyway... my other offerings in April's Verse-Virtual glance directly, or somewhat indirectly, at our current situation, by way of debts to the most political (and radical) of English poets, Shelley. 
The first of three, titled "From 'The Grate America' Victory Tour," was inspired by the opening stanzas of Shelley's poem about a massacre of political opponents (titled "The Mask of Anarchy"). 
My offering begins: 

We traveled down to old LA
and met some killers on the way
dragging Lady Liberty to the dump
They all wore masks that looked like Trump

On either side the chains they bore
Drove women from the homes they saw
Their uniforms were dark and bright
That screamed of anguish in the night 
... 

           The second of these poems borrows its title ("Spring Not Far Behind") from one of the most quoted of Shelley's lines: "If winter's here, can Spring be far behind." This line is taken from the conclusion of Shelley's famous "Ode to the West Wind."
           Spring, for Shelley, meant a fresh start for human society: reform, recognition of human rights, shared wealth. My own short poem's final line ("New seasons bloom on Western gale") alludes to Shelley's faith that a new hope for humanity arrives on that vernal west wind.  

            The most widely read of Shelley's poems -- it's a short one, a sonnet -- is probably "Ozymandias." My comparison ("Goddess") imagines the contemporary trashing of our nation's most famous monument, the great image of freedom installed New York harbor. "Goddess" begins:

The shattered crown full fathoms lies
Of antique form and freedom's fame
That boasted of one country free
And proud, days past, to wear the name
Of Liberty....


You can read these poems, and find many others by many fine poets, on
http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2017-april.html

The Garden of Verse: Every Day Poets in the 'Cruelest' Month of April

           It's that wonderful time of year when people who write poetry and read it (or do either; or both) ask themselves why they do it, and perhaps not surprisingly find plenty of reasons to explain why they do. 
            April, National Poetry Month, stimulates many gardens of celebration and explanation. 
             Here's a quote from Bill Moyers' website:
             Democracy needs her poets, in all their diversity, precisely because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another’s lives.

[http://billmoyers.com/story/celebrating-civic-poetry-national-poetry-month/#]


             Moyers then quotes the poet W.S. Merwin in this statement:
Against the sybaritic images of advertising that daily wash over us, against the sententious rhetoric of politics, poetry stands as “the expression of faith in the integrity of the senses and of the imagination.” (W.S. Merwin’s description).

               Finally, he turns to Czech Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz on the dangers to free society posed by "a refusal to remember."  Memory is crucial, Moyers argues, "if a people are not to be at the mercy of the powers-that-be, if they are to have something against which to measure what the partisans and propagandists tell them today."

Hmm, what about 'today' can he be thinking about?

          The case for the civic value of poetry is also made by a story in Salon magazine by Alissa Quart, who writes that poetry can appear to be "suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.  (Some of this is true, especially the bourgeois part.)"
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/dont_give_up_on_poetry/

           It's always good to hear a little constructive criticism, don't you think?
           Nevertheless, Quart argues: "Yet we shouldn’t give up on poetry, if only because we need a different public language to describe our country. Conventional public discourse is boring, too familiar and brittle: the spray-on-tan blather of pundits on CNN, the coo of commerce, the drained, template-like rhetoric of political speech."
            Some colorful language in that final sentence; I wonder if Ms. Quart has turned her hand to a little of this poetry stuff. 
             David Graham also turns to the question of poetry's value in his column "Poetic License" in the April issue of Verse-Virtual.com. The discussion here turns to the personal value. Here's an excerpt from his discussion: 

"... [M]y love of poetry grows directly from my practice of it. As with many basic enjoyments, repetition deepens rather than dulls the pleasure. That’s why I keep writing and pondering this art. In a way, it’s like the reverse of the old joke: “Why hit myself in the head with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop.” I keep at it because it feels so good when I don’t stop." 

             I don't think anyone is stopping. Though whether poetry is a useful weapon (or tool) in our species's struggle for survival, save democracy, combat meretricious speech, preserve societal memory, or retake language from the hands of the traders in facile, deceptive, or self-serving or merely boring wielders of our common speech -- arguably humanity's greatest strength -- remains to be seen. 
             Still, if it's 'Celebrate Poetry Month,' I'm up for the party.