Pastoral

Pastorals have been a bit of a struggle for me in the past, mostly because I think I'm missing the point.  I'm still not sure I got the point.  I'm not sure if the problem that the definition of a pastoral is just so loose- relatively speaking- that I find the variety of possibility paralyzing rather than freeing, or just that I'm not entirely certain that I actually understand the definition.

Anyway, I still don't have my text.  It seems to have been lost in that abyss we call the postal service, although whether the problem is on the American end or the Irish.  Fortunately, Google yields no shortage of pastorals, so I had no difficulty finding a number to refresh myself.

I stumbled on this page of Frost and Heaney pastorals that I found lovely, although confusing.  After reading them, I was even more certain that I didn't actually understand what a pastoral was.

I especially liked Heaney's Blackberry Picking, for its vivid imagery in plain language- I vividly remember blackberry picking as a child just the same, and the end is bizarrely depressing considering the subject matter. Unfortunately, it also more or less cemented for me the fact that I have no idea what the message of a pastoral is meant to be/if there's meant to be one.

I tried, though.

The glow of the orange-bright

October leaves, a broken halo

‘round the head of a half-cocked angel: you,

homesick for heartsake.

Your fingers, knotted in mine,

awkward grasp, endearing angles,

numb but unwilling to give.

Someone belonged to the wrinkled smile

that took that photo, I’m sure,

but it’s all I remember

about anyone else.

The world glowed too bold,

blinded me to anyone but you.

Incidental rays of sunlight

blended with the blaze around us.

You carried me across the hill,

my hands tangled through your hair –

I was never, never letting go-

as we squinted in the sunshine,

spectors of crow’s feet

and smiles lines to come:

collateral beauty.

Ode

Like I said in my last post, I've used The Making of a Poem before, for a poetry class in undergrad.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize I was going to be using the book again and left it in the States.  My lovely mother kindly went burrowing through the entire contents of my former apartment, currently housed in my bedroom at her house, and dug it out, so it is currently en route from America, and I still don't have it to refer to at the moment.

I do vaguely recall the odes from the text, however, and I did a bit of my own digging around online to find some other odes for reference.  I love Allen Tate's Ode to the Confederate Dead regardless of its clearly coming down on the "wrong" side of the American Civil War; the language and imagery of the monuments and cemeteries erected post war are haunting and lovely, and helped get the ideas for my own ode stirring.

When I began the ode, I seriously considered an attempt to write it in accordance with one of the more traditional ode forms.  In fact, I wrote a full stanza of a Pindaric ode before I realized that it was in no way capturing my feelings about or any real sense of the topic.  It was too clumsy, so I stopped and started again.

I'm much more satisfied with the mood of the retry, but I'm not certain it's done/ended in the right place.

Ah, and just as a final bit of fun... an Abecedarian, expressing just a smidgen of my exasperation with semi-current American politics.


ARIZONA

All belong, can dream (except fools).

Go home, immigrant joke,

knowing little- meaning nada-

of patriotism.

Quietly relinquish

sweet time united.

Very wary-

xenophobic, your zeal.

Sestina

So... I've written a sestina in the past. Actually, not only have I written a sestina in the past, I've done it with the help of The Making of a Poem in the past.

The first one I wrote was rather more successful than the second, I think, but significantly more difficult, both because I was unfamiliar with the form and because my tutor- yes, I did this for another class in the past, not for fun!- forced us to do it in iambic pentameter. Not amusing. It was definitely easier to start with the sixth stanza, all one word lines forming a sentence, and work backward from there, than to try and choose six words with no real sense of how they worked together. If I was ever to do it again, even if I didn't "cheat" with the six-word sixth stanza again, I think I'd try to assemble another collection of six words that were somehow related to each other even outside the context of the individual stanzas.

I was glad to have Seamus Heaney's "Two Lorries" recommended, as I didn't find any of the poems in the text particularly inspiring, having read them previously. I love the variation in the use of load/lode; it's interesting enough with, for example, the two/too/to variation, but to use a word that doesn't lend itself quite so easily to such wordplay is quite clever.

All that said... I find such restrictive forms very difficult not just because they essentially logic puzzles on one level, but because sound plays an enormous role in my experience and writing of poetry, and the repetition of end words really doesn't appeal to me.  I found myself struggling against my natural instincts to force my thoughts into the pattern.  Looking forward to the- relative- freedom of the ode next week!