Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
The third of our recurring opportunities — currently, every other Thursday — to learn what your fellow readers are reading and writing
Two considerable poets have independently mentioned something to me in recent months — something I’m not sure what to do with. They both described overflowing with ideas for poems while they were young but lacking the technical skill to pull those ideas off. And then, in old age, possessed of endless technique, they seemed to lack much to say with that all that technical ability they had trained up in themselves over the years.
A common phenomenon, I suspect. For every poet who — like Yeats in his Last Poems or my beloved Rhina Espaillat — can explode in new verse in old age, there are probably a dozen who have little new to say beyond the fact that they are old, and death is near, and not much seems new. They do tend, however, to say it very well.
So, what are you thinking about? Reading? Writing? This is an open-mic thread, available to both free and paid subscribers, where we learn what’s in your mind these days. Sally Thomas and I have tentatively decided to keep going with the new layout of putting the poem first in our postings, but do let us know if you strongly approve or disapprove.
At the risk of sounding pompously pious, I am having the opposite experience. With age, I find God making all things remarkably new. Mercies new every morning and practically every afternoon. I am finding grace capacious and often entertaining. So I got lots to write about, making no claims for any
beauty beyond that of intemperate gratitude for this surprise. Finding at the end, it is as we have long suspected: It's all gift. It's all gift.
This is interesting. I'm not at all at the point of feeling like my technical abilities have o'erleapt my subject matter, but I do find that I have certain technical "tricks" now that I'm lapsing into. I need to find some new technical challenges to push me out of a voice rut, I think...
To be specifically, I have been working on a contemplative, keen-eyed narrative voice for a few years, and now I find that's all I can do (that or the absurd Rabelais voice from my verse plays, but he's his own problem). Now I want to write things that need a sharper edge, and I don't know how. I'm experimenting with syllabic verse, which is a major disruption for me, and I'm moving away from pentameter to tetrameter and even trimeter, just to try to get different notes into my work (anger, malice, resentment, jealousy, not things I've been able to render believably). The current verse drama project is helping because it has a lot of bitter people in it!