Well Bottom Blues

How do I define myself? I’m not a new formalist although I love to attempt strict forms and play around a great deal with the American sonnet.  Like a number of poets my age I fall almost too easily into tercets and quadrains, into an accentual verse. Rather than a strict line end rhyme scheme I love to play with a sonority of words within the line or across lines. If I rhyme it’s often in the middle of the following line in concert with the sounds around it. In concert is an apt phrase because I’m very conscious of the musicality of poetry. The first poet to seriously capture my attention was Wallace Stevens (thank you Raeburn Miller) who could roll those vowels around like the gods’ own thunder and Krupa those pine wood bantam tom toms from here to  Azcan.  More from here to  recently I’m drawn into Donald Justice and early WS Merwin. I can no more escape the influence of Yeats than I can the consequences of childhood. Formalism is in the formula but it’s not the tonic.

That damn American sonnet: I get hooked on it from time to time. Fourteen lines. ,maybe six-and-eight or all together. A solid frame of stretched canvas on which you can Petrarch or Pollock to your heart’s content. Just remember to turn not just the line but through line or you failed Shakespeare. All of it, including all the okays but especially the comedies. Twist it into shape like a Christmas cracke. Make that twist pop.

Poetry is equal parts tradition and revolution. Ginsburg stands on the shoulders of Whitman. Berryman is Shakespeare’s most tender and  biting speech coarsely blended with the sonnets worn  as a lampshade. Olson unwound the ode. I wonder if Petrarch would have found Shakespeare as radical as Gerald Manley Hopkins’ experiments with the sonnet. I cannot imagine Olsen’s projective first without a study of sonorance in all forms of speech like the study of all the forms of sonnet. Can one master field composition without having been drilled in diagramming sentences so as to visualize the mechanics of language? While I have a revolutionary social and political outlook, I don’t think you can step outside of the tradition of poetry without first studying it deeply.

Sun Ra relentlessly rehearsed his musicians on big band arrangements, particularly Fletcher Henderson. Write a recognizable sonnet in open field leveraging space instead of metrics. Write a Pindairic Ode with a clear beat to Bad Bunny’s conquest of the NFL and American television entirely in black and Hispanic vernacular. Master Henderson’s tune “Queer Notion” until you can play it flawlessly without a chart  at 3 am 10 minutes after you are woken up before you embark for Saturn.