Sound & Sense: Terra Firma
An open thread for notes on what you’re thinking, reading, and doing
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Terra Firma
by Julie Steiner
Yes, you’re right. I’m sure Armageddon’s coming: wars, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, locusts, killer flus, et cetera. Yes, I’m awed by all the destruction. I concede your point that the world might end, and all your puny labors will be as nothing. Still, you can’t go out with your friends until you’ve folded the laundry.
The recreation of classical meters — the various attempts to render the vowel-length basis of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry in the stress-based sound of English — has been in our minds, here at Poems Ancient and Modern for some while now. Last week we looked at Alcaics in the hands of Robert Louis Stevenson, and we have some vague plans to indulge other meters: hexameters, sapphics, hendecasyllabics, elegiac couplets, and so on.
I even had the idea that Sally Thomas and I might record some panel discussions on this kind of topic, although my abulia and acedia — in short, my well-cosseted laziness — have thus far kept me from gathering myself enough to organize them. But I thought I’d ask whether that was the kind of thing you’d like to have us host at Poems Ancient and Modern. Panels, reading sessions, classes on sonnets and terza rima and children’s verse — what interests you?
Meanwhile, for you amusement, we offered today a 2010 sapphic verse from our friend Julie Steiner — in proof that sapphics need not be grim and humorless. Here she uses the pause at the end of the third line, and the dying fall of the shortened last line of the sapphic stanza, to fine comic effect.
Let us know, here on this open thread, what (pre-1930) poems you like us to cover — and, as always, what you’ve been reading, or thinking and writing about.
I'd really enjoy some deliberate practice in verse for very very amateur poets. I want to one day write my husband a sonnet (he's written me three) but I have a lot of scaffolding skills missing.
I'm finally getting around to writing a blog post about Sally Thomas and Micah Mattix's excellent anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. I'll put the link here when I post it.
Just finished the The Burning Bush, the second volume of Sigrid Undset's duology set in modern (early 20th c) times. It's not as good as the big medieval works, but definitely worth reading. I kind of wonder if she set out to write a trilogy, as she ends with this guy in middle age, not seeing him through to the end as with Kristin and Olav. I'd like to know how his children turned out. There seems to be something close to a pattern of the children of Catholic converts abandoning the faith. Anyway Undset's stature in my mind continues to grow. I especially enjoy, in this book, her skewering of the then-contemporary cultural-religious progressives. She must have been a formidable personality.
I have to admit, brutally perhaps, that I have near-zero interest in poetic forms borrowed from other languages, especially those with only distant connections to English. Maybe if I were much younger, but "seeing I am an old man and look not long to live" (St John Fisher), I just don't want to spend much time on it. (I don't expect to die soon, btw, I'm just going by the numbers.) I really don't have that much interest in studying form *as such*, though I prefer poems with traditional formal techniques. But if I can't hear the meter, I don't care. Today's poem, for instance, is very enjoyable, but if I heard it read aloud I think it would sound like prose to me.
That said, I did find the analysis of Frost's "For Once, Then, Something" quite interesting. I never would have suspected that it was so formally strict.