Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
The second of our recurring opportunities to learn what your fellow readers are reading — and writing
There has always — well, maybe not always, but for millennia, at least — been poetry about poetry. Take Horace’s c. 19 B.C. Ars Poetica, hexameters about the writer’s art. Along the way, we’re told ut pictura poesis (l.361): “as painting, so poetry.” That’s a theme that will run through the centuries, reaching a peak in the eighteenth century with the formal sensibilities of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in English and Gotthold Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in German.
Or take the famous sonnets about sonnet-writing: Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, etc. But then we start to get to villanelles about villanelle-writing, haikus about haiku-writing — limericks about limerick-writing, for that matter — and one might be forgiven for thinking that the vast majority of poems about poem-writing have been written in recent decades.
Even while admitting there exist some great ekphrastic poems (poetry describing another work of art, typically a painting), I’m not as big a fan of the genre as my fellow founder of Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally Thomas. Still, something peculiar has taken place when poetry spirals inward toward an ekphrasis of itself. And that’s what we’ve seen for some while now. Here’s a typical online list of poetry about poetry, with (at quick glance) only three out of the sixty-six poems from before 1900 and even only three more before 1929 (the current cutoff for copyright protection in America).
That may reflect the failing of historical memory in the presentism that Sally and I decried in our opening manifesto for Poems Ancient and Modern. But I think it also has to do with a failure of nerve in contemporary verse — and an effort to find a purpose in versifying when verse no longer arrives in a poet’s hands with a sure sense of the unity of truth: the complicated, difficult, but abiding connection of reality, thought, and language.
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.
I penned this bit of whimsy, and included it in my collection "Born to Blush Unseen: Collected & Rejected Poems." Fair-minded readers will recognize the difference between plagiarism and homage.
THE SONNETEER
by Eric Chevlen
The sonneteer is writing sonnets still,
Though well he knows the sonnet is passé,
A scholar's musty relic. Yet the thrill
Of fourteen lines of rhyming interplay
He can't resist. He may alone beweep
His outcast state, to have been born too late
To write this style, but nonetheless he'll keep
His antique tongue, content to promulgate
More sonnets still. He has no use for verse
Of modern lilt, and less for unrhymed lines
That smack of prose. This modern age -- it's worse
Than ages past for poems, he opines.
When asked if he's convinced all else is sham
That's not a sonnet, "Yes," he says, "Iamb."
Oh, I completely forgot about some poems about poems three of us perpetrated at our satire journal. Hester Fester-Münsterfenster and Pumptilian Perniquity are two of my noms pour vers, and the other two versifiers are part of our British contingent. https://specgram.com/CLXXIX.2/03.linguimericks42.html