It’s not like I’ve seen it all before
When I was 20, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was all the rage and it was 1974
That was when I first discovered it and bought a vinyl album
I was discovering it all and everything was new to me
I was carrying it out of my suitcase, which would have warped it
In the Detroit Greyhound Station and was talking with a girl, a music student
On her way to Oberlin College in Ohio and a young black man came up,
He sang some notes, and asked, “Is that how The Four Seasons goes?”
Everything was all new to me, like how different Toledo, Ohio is from
Livonia, Michigan, I thought, gazing absently around in the cavernous
Toledo Amtrak Station, the winter wind moaning though cracks in the doors
As I waited to ride the train’s sway and rhythmic clacks across America
East to Boston, also different from Livonia and the family I grew up in,
Discovering the big city. I’ve heard The Four Seasons in three movies.
In my mid-40’s, I discovered the Heiliger Dankgesang an die Gottheit
In Beethoven’s A-Minor String Quartet, which I also heard in a movie.
Way back I’d asked Jimmy, a jazz sax player, about Beethoven’s string quartets
When I didn’t know much about things, and was hungry to discover it all
And was figuring things out. Jimmy and I disagreed about Mozart;
He said Mozart was a real entertainer, but to me Mozart was all tights,
Powdered wigs, silk slippers, gilt palaces and effeminate, effete nobles
I’ve since discovered Mozart’s startling harmonies and I’m with Jimmy, now
And bought a Compact Disk Recording box set of Mozart’s “Hayden Quartets”
And heard the orchestra play the Hayden Quartets at the exec’s party in Die Hard
Or was it The Four Seasons, or both—I haven’t seen Die Hard again for a while
In Thor, the orchestra played The Four Seasons at that Embassy ball Loki crashed
I wonder why no one else has noticed that John Williams’ Superman music sounds
Exactly like Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung or Bernstein’s “There’s a Time for Us”
In West Side Story is the Adagio movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5
Which they both studied either in conservatories or in later professional life
My eyes welled up with tears which I blinked away in the public concert hall
That evening I heard the whole Messiah for the first time and I didn’t know why
Everybody stood up when the choir sang The Halleluiah Chorus to conclude
Part II of the whole Oratorio, not just the soundtrack to so many commercials
It’s not like I’ve seen it all before. I poke around in Auden and Stevens, authors
I don’t know, and play The Rolling Stones on my keyboard and learn about rock,
Entertain myself with Thomas Wolfe and even Shakespeare, sometimes, and
Not really watch TV. It isn’t that I keep learning, nor like I’ve seen it all before.
More a matter of why it doesn’t feel like everything is new to me
VIVALDI’S FOUR SEASONS IN 1974
01 Jan 2021 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: Auden, Beethoven, Bernstein, commercials, Four Seasons, free verse, Halleluiah Chorus, Handel, poem, poetry, Rolling Stones, Stevens, Superman, Vivaldi
BRONTOSAURUS HEAD
27 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: Albertasaurus, Apatosaurus, art, Brontosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Frost, muse, oil, painting, paleontologist, poem, Stevens, syntax, Tyrannosaurus, Tyrrell Museum
The head of the Brontosaurus erupted in debate spewing money
Sufficient to make some paleontologists’ living for a generation
Disputes between Diplodocus and Apatosaurus founded careers
Like echoing museums and marble floors endowed at great expense
By Foundation money dug up from trusts held of bones in marble mausoleums
Bequeathing Jurassic skeletons cast in plaster (priceless petrified bones coffered)
Camarasaurs and Albertasaurs petrified along with zooplankton and algae’s
Fossilized extract fueling the Canadian economy in that same province holding
The Tyrrell Museum’s complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton with its detached head
Heavy as unintelligible words detached from syntax and evacuated of the themes
Wallace Stevens faulted Robert Frost’s poetry for—poetry made neither a living—
Who spilled words on paper like colors on an abstract painting’s canvass evacuated
Of recognizable content, more art history than paleontology, also palaeontology—
Unrecognized by spellcheck as an extinct word dug up and displayed in a muse
Poetics: Proving Your Rhyme
23 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: criticism, essay, free verse, Frost, poetics, poetry, rhyme, Sandburg, Shakespeare, Shelley, Stevens
The submission guidelines for a journal I looked at read, “No rhyming poetry.” I feel that rhyme is nevertheless justified in poetry, but that rhyme must justify itself. In writing rhyming poetry, it must be clear why the poem is rhyming. I’m not referring to hip-hop conventions.
I recently read Shelley’s EPIPSYCHIDION. Shelley assumed by means of poetic convention that his epic must rhyme. In fact, while I’m no Shelley scholar, I think that most of his poetry, maybe all of his poetry, did rhyme and employ metrics. Wordsworth considered Shelley a master of style, perhaps the greatest stylist of the English Romantic period. But in reading EPIPSYCHIDION, I found the language tortured in order to unite rhyme, metrics, and sense. I’m afraid to say the same of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But a baroque use of language is proper for a Renaissance poet. It would not be appropriate for Frost, and Frost masterfully writes rhyme so liquidly that it reads like prose.
On the other side of this discussion is Carl Sandburg. He privileged immediate expression and despised the reworking of an original impression in order to form rhyme and rhythm. So we get a massive collection of insignificance.
Making a poem rhyme for no reason is a recipe for insignificance, too. But then, there is sense that wants to rhyme and beat. Blake’s THE TYGER has to be in rhyme and rhythm. Otherwise the poignant line, “When the stars threw down their spears/And water’d heaven with their tears” wouldn’t be such a dramatic shift in voice. And the energy of the tyger wouldn’t be there without the rhyme and beat that make the tyger burn. I started to write a poem about flowers a while back, not that I’m a Blake or Shelley by any means, and realized that a poem about something pretty and delicate should be pretty and delicate, too. A loose set of lines wouldn’t be as formally structured as a flower is. So the flowers spoke in rhymed stanzas of meter.
Rhyming doesn’t go in poems that exhibit a deconstruction of language as do those of Wallace Stevens and others. (I know that Stevens wrote before deconstruction was invented.) In his poems, any word he fancies could be called into the mix of his abstract arrangements of language. So rhyme would be meaningless. Even if Stevens wanted to emphasize a couplet with rhyme, it would fail, since there is essentially no emphasis anywhere in his poetry. That’s the whole point.
So I didn’t even consider submitting to the journal that prohibited rhyming poetry. Rhyme and rhythm are as important to poetry as are free verse, deconstruction, or any other style persons prefer. But today, rhyme isn’t a convention–perhaps the opposite. And a poem must prove its use of rhyme.
David Fekete 