Yes, thanks for the Sapphic verse! The sentiment is elevated (I wouldn't say 'snooty' though I was tempted). A more romantic poet would find the furrowed brow of the beloved in the ceases of the sheets. How to blend the two, the classic and the romantic , there's a trick.
I wonder if the poem wouldn't read better for you, Zara, if you took it as a mother respounding to a saucy teenager. The child had said the world is coming to an end, so I don't need to do my chores. And the mother replies, sure it's the end of days, but you still have to fold the laundry before you go out with your friends.
I must add how very much I love what you are doing on Poems Ancient and Modern, and thank you for it. The details of the commentary are always inspiring, as well. Many, many thanks, and never mind my occasional grousing.
I’d never considered writing Sapphic verse and had no idea it was so popular. See what I’ve been missing!
This poem is terrific, and I’m fascinated at how a form intended for another language can be a scaffold and work successfully in English. I so appreciate the insightful analysis, which drives me back to study this little gem of a poem and ask, what makes this work? “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.”
That documentary I edited about Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona just went out to festivals. Apart from cutting a couple of trailers for it, I've got a lot of time to read lately (when I'm not watching baseball, which, Go Dodgers!). So I've doubled up on the Meetup reading groups: The one that read Paradise Lost (which I loved, more than I expected to) is now reading Purgatorio, bc everyone's read Inferno (altho' not since the 90's for me); the other group is grappling with Proust, en français. And latest Mick Herron (Secret Hours) was terrific.
I love this poem -- a great laugh this afternoon! For me, I'm not looking for any further content here (I have enough trouble keeping up with reading the poems each day!), but I'm sure that classes on various forms of poetry would probably go over well.
Well, I've taught some of the more common forms, like the sonnet, so I'm interested in, for example, the ghazal (which is completely new to me recently) and the haiku (what makes a truly good haiku besides having x many syllables a line); also, while I've taught the sestina, how does one make it "work" truly well (the villanelle, too, though I find that easier).
I have been reading EAR's Collected Poems (I am up to Lancelot, which is roughly about a quarter of the way through), alongside AE Stallings' Hapax and a selection of the verse of the Australian poet, AD Hope. Alas, both Stallings and Hope are post-1930s (and the latter is uncontactable at the moment), but both are metrically quite interesting.
I know Sally likes Robert Southwell, and you haven't done Southwell as yet... Nor Robert Bridges.
Oct 29·edited Oct 29Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
I'm studying Mastering Poetic Sound and Meter in an eight-week course with Ryan Wilson through Catholic Literary Arts, and loving it. I studied poetry writing in the 1970s when technique was not taught. Although I've had a few poems published in recent years, one anthologized, one set as an Advent hymn, I feel I'm close to drowning as we get close to the end of the class, and I would love to take it again when all the techniques and terminologies introduced in the beginning have settled into my brain enough so I can do the complicated assignments with confidence. Dear Joseph, for those of us still trying to get steady about all the different types of verse, it would be helpful for you to review what is meant by each type of verse each time you publish a poem, maybe even just a phrase, for example what makes this poem Sapphic.
P.S. I would love classes on how to write each type of poem! Fun and enriching and a chance to connect with others of like mind.
Good thought about explaining the form of each of Today's Poem. I usually do, but wanted to keep the Open Thread post short. A harmful parsimoniousness.
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.
Maclin, some many years ago I read The Burning Bush. It felt like reading through smudged glass. It occurred to me that it might have been a clumsy translation. What translation did you read & would you recommend it?
It's by Arthur Chater, the guy who did the original Master of Hestviken translation. As far as I know it's the only one. I definitely wouldn't give Undset-Chater any prizes for prose style but I found it clear enough. The occasional obscurity seemed to be in the thought rather than the language. But now that you ask...it could be in the translation. I'm thinking of places where some spiritual or personal insight is being expressed and I'm not totally sure what it means. I figured my intelligence was the problem.
Oh, and I did have a problem keeping track of the place names. Not the names themselves but their physical relationships. I should have consulted a map. A little Tolkien-style map would be very useful.
I still need to read her "modern" novels. I finally read Master of Hestviken/Olav Audunsson a couple of years ago, after meaning to for over a decade. And I recently read Aidan Nichols's critical study of her life and work, Sigrid Undset, Reader of Hearts, which I thought was good and which put those other novels back in my line of vision (not that I've yet done anything about it . . . ).
I meant to say in the reply above: you *really* need to read The Wild Orchid first. Much of the The Burning Bush, especially the end, would make less sense without it. The two books are really one continuous narrative, like Kristin and Olav.
I saw that Nichols book mentioned somewhere and then forgot about it. I definitely should read it, so thanks for the reminder.
Yes, I thought the two went together, though I wouldn't have remembered the title of the first one off the top of my head.
The Nichols study does do a good and careful job of constructing her as a person --- and it's definitely not a hagiography, though you come away with a sense of her strong-mindedness, both moral and intellectual, and her courage. And not surprisingly, he expends much care in tracing the development of her thought toward her Catholic conversion. It is a really interesting read overall.
Just finished "The Painter of Souls" by Peter Kazan. Brilliant 260-page novel on the coming of age of Fra Lippo Lippi. Mature metaphors any poet would be proud of. Deeply informed about Florentine painting circa 1427. And you'll learn more about gesso and giornata than you ever thought possible.
Oct 29·edited Oct 29Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
I like the poems that you've discussed recently, some old favorites and some I hadn't read.
In poetry, I've recently read parts of Mary Oliver's West Wind, James Tate's Selected Poems, and a collection of Claude McKay's poems. (The Tate in particular I read at very much the wrong time and was unable to give it the attention I should have.) Besides that, I finished William Browning Spencer's The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and Other Stories (he's the broadly Lovecraftian author I like the most), and Marcus du Sautoy's Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature, which is the best introduction to the history of group theory and abstract algebra I've read. (It was especially fun reading all the stories about John Horton Conway, whom I interviewed for a student engineering magazine far too many decades ago for comfort.) It might be tough going for a very general reader (I would have suggested a bit more detail on how you get from symmetry groups to Galois' work on the [lack of] solutions of polynomials--the basic result is almost pulled from a hat and no further discussion why quintics and higher cannot have general algebraic solutions; the answer is quite sufficient if you've studied abstract algebra enough, but otherwise it's a starkly bare solitary sentence or two), but I found it had an excellent balance of detail and a comprehensive view. Oh, and a couple of mysteries by E.C.R. Lorac and Carol Carnac, same author, different pseudonyms. She had many nice touches of social commentary.
In general, alas, I've found that editing massive amounts (500,000 to 900,000 words a month) of generally substandard non-native academic prose has really butchered my desire to read long prose works. My reading these days is intended to rebuild my stamina, and it might be working.
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.
Two weekends ago I went with 20 or so members of our LDS congregation to do hurricane cleanup in Clinton, SC. Many of the trees were too big or too dangerous for us to completely remove or even to tackle (e.g., a 50+-foot tree lying on a metal roof). We chainsawed and removed most of one big oak. When we had cut away the top three quarters of the tree (including the limbs lying on an outbuilding and piercing its roof), its enormous root ball suddenly flipped back to the ground and re-erected the remaining 15’ of the trunk. At another job we freed a car from the limbs of a tree, jumpstarted it, and moved it out of the way.
We did a lot more, but that gives the flavor of the effort. The weather was beautiful and the people friendly.
Yesterday we returned from a sudden trip to Indiana to attend the funeral of a stillborn child. We’ve known the father since shortly after his family arrived here as refugees from a camp near Kigali. He was 17. He and my wife joined the church at about the same time. We had many adventures with him, two of his brothers, and his mother as they learned how to live here. My wife and I (especially my wife) tutored them in math and other subjects, taught them how to drive, counseled them how to behave on the job, helped them find an apartment in Iowa when they moved there for work. We went to the couple’s traditional wedding in Rwanda last November.
The funeral was a deeply sad occasion, but we got to know his wife a little better and we helped with some of the arrangements. We got to meet more of the extended network of friends and family who have come here from the camp in Rwanda. Many of them have embraced the American dream and succeeded in launching their lives here.
On more literary matters, I’m still shopping around my memoir of my father and a poetry collection. By Christmas I expect to receive the completed illustrations for a short poetico-philosophical picture book, “The Little Mouse and Creation.” I’ve been reading Edward Jay Epstein, "James Jesus Angleton--Was He Right?", Peter J. Williams, "The Surprising Genius of Jesus," Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," and rereading some favorite poems from Larkin's collected works and Horace's odes in translations by James Michie and David Ferry.
I very much enjoyed his memoirs: "Assume Nothing" with its great subtitle: "Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe." I came to him late because, probably like others, I thought he was way out on the fringe
I very much enjoyed his memoirs: "Assume Nothing" with its great subtitle: "Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe." I came to him late because, probably like others, I thought he was way out on the fringe.
I, too, am shopping a book that I really don't like to call a memoir, but more or less is. I get the impression that the market for memoirs has faded quite a bit. I've almost exhausted the possibilities for publishers that might be a good fit and also accept unsolicited work. Good luck with yours!
The Angleton book sounds interesting. I find spy stuff kind of fascinating.
Nor am I--I've already done it, a sort of best-of-my-blog collection. It's called Sunday Light, in case you would like to rush over to Amazon and buy a copy. :-) But though I'm not too proud to do it, I'm still a little ashamed. I never expected it to sell much and it did even worse than I expected. But then I never did anything to promote it except tell my friends about it.
Yes, thanks for the Sapphic verse! The sentiment is elevated (I wouldn't say 'snooty' though I was tempted). A more romantic poet would find the furrowed brow of the beloved in the ceases of the sheets. How to blend the two, the classic and the romantic , there's a trick.
I wonder if the poem wouldn't read better for you, Zara, if you took it as a mother respounding to a saucy teenager. The child had said the world is coming to an end, so I don't need to do my chores. And the mother replies, sure it's the end of days, but you still have to fold the laundry before you go out with your friends.
I must add how very much I love what you are doing on Poems Ancient and Modern, and thank you for it. The details of the commentary are always inspiring, as well. Many, many thanks, and never mind my occasional grousing.
I’d never considered writing Sapphic verse and had no idea it was so popular. See what I’ve been missing!
This poem is terrific, and I’m fascinated at how a form intended for another language can be a scaffold and work successfully in English. I so appreciate the insightful analysis, which drives me back to study this little gem of a poem and ask, what makes this work? “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.”
Thanks, Jody!
That documentary I edited about Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona just went out to festivals. Apart from cutting a couple of trailers for it, I've got a lot of time to read lately (when I'm not watching baseball, which, Go Dodgers!). So I've doubled up on the Meetup reading groups: The one that read Paradise Lost (which I loved, more than I expected to) is now reading Purgatorio, bc everyone's read Inferno (altho' not since the 90's for me); the other group is grappling with Proust, en français. And latest Mick Herron (Secret Hours) was terrific.
Thanks for the note on Mick Herron. It's one I'll want to read.
Freddie Freeman, Pern. He's the Dodger hero this series. Great news on the Ramona documentary. I'll give Herron a try.
This isn’t helpful sorry, but anything you guys do I will gladly pipe in and support as I can! I learn and enjoy so much from your writings here.
I love this poem -- a great laugh this afternoon! For me, I'm not looking for any further content here (I have enough trouble keeping up with reading the poems each day!), but I'm sure that classes on various forms of poetry would probably go over well.
What forms, especially, Beth?
Well, I've taught some of the more common forms, like the sonnet, so I'm interested in, for example, the ghazal (which is completely new to me recently) and the haiku (what makes a truly good haiku besides having x many syllables a line); also, while I've taught the sestina, how does one make it "work" truly well (the villanelle, too, though I find that easier).
Perhaps Gascoigne's Woodmanship.
"Haud ictus sapio," the poem ends — such a useful if too-little-used phrase.
I have been reading EAR's Collected Poems (I am up to Lancelot, which is roughly about a quarter of the way through), alongside AE Stallings' Hapax and a selection of the verse of the Australian poet, AD Hope. Alas, both Stallings and Hope are post-1930s (and the latter is uncontactable at the moment), but both are metrically quite interesting.
I know Sally likes Robert Southwell, and you haven't done Southwell as yet... Nor Robert Bridges.
Do you have a Bridges poem in mind?
My favourite Bridges poem is Low Barometer.
Didn't know it. A good Halloween poem.
It is one of Winters' favourites among Bridges' poems.
I'm studying Mastering Poetic Sound and Meter in an eight-week course with Ryan Wilson through Catholic Literary Arts, and loving it. I studied poetry writing in the 1970s when technique was not taught. Although I've had a few poems published in recent years, one anthologized, one set as an Advent hymn, I feel I'm close to drowning as we get close to the end of the class, and I would love to take it again when all the techniques and terminologies introduced in the beginning have settled into my brain enough so I can do the complicated assignments with confidence. Dear Joseph, for those of us still trying to get steady about all the different types of verse, it would be helpful for you to review what is meant by each type of verse each time you publish a poem, maybe even just a phrase, for example what makes this poem Sapphic.
P.S. I would love classes on how to write each type of poem! Fun and enriching and a chance to connect with others of like mind.
Meanwhile, here's one explanation of the Sapphic stanza: https://classicalpoets.org/2018/11/27/a-beginners-guide-to-sapphic-verse/
I'll look it up. Thanks!
Good thought about explaining the form of each of Today's Poem. I usually do, but wanted to keep the Open Thread post short. A harmful parsimoniousness.
I was doing more of this at first, and linking to explanations of terms, but have become L A Z Y. Time to get back on that particular horse
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.
Maclin, some many years ago I read The Burning Bush. It felt like reading through smudged glass. It occurred to me that it might have been a clumsy translation. What translation did you read & would you recommend it?
It's by Arthur Chater, the guy who did the original Master of Hestviken translation. As far as I know it's the only one. I definitely wouldn't give Undset-Chater any prizes for prose style but I found it clear enough. The occasional obscurity seemed to be in the thought rather than the language. But now that you ask...it could be in the translation. I'm thinking of places where some spiritual or personal insight is being expressed and I'm not totally sure what it means. I figured my intelligence was the problem.
Oh, and I did have a problem keeping track of the place names. Not the names themselves but their physical relationships. I should have consulted a map. A little Tolkien-style map would be very useful.
I still need to read her "modern" novels. I finally read Master of Hestviken/Olav Audunsson a couple of years ago, after meaning to for over a decade. And I recently read Aidan Nichols's critical study of her life and work, Sigrid Undset, Reader of Hearts, which I thought was good and which put those other novels back in my line of vision (not that I've yet done anything about it . . . ).
I meant to say in the reply above: you *really* need to read The Wild Orchid first. Much of the The Burning Bush, especially the end, would make less sense without it. The two books are really one continuous narrative, like Kristin and Olav.
I saw that Nichols book mentioned somewhere and then forgot about it. I definitely should read it, so thanks for the reminder.
Yes, I thought the two went together, though I wouldn't have remembered the title of the first one off the top of my head.
The Nichols study does do a good and careful job of constructing her as a person --- and it's definitely not a hagiography, though you come away with a sense of her strong-mindedness, both moral and intellectual, and her courage. And not surprisingly, he expends much care in tracing the development of her thought toward her Catholic conversion. It is a really interesting read overall.
Here's a brief review of The Wild Orchid that I wrote a few weeks ago:
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2024/10/sigrid-undset-the-wild-orchid.html
The Matrix anthology is exceptional not least for the breadth of writers considered--one of the finest I have read.
Enjoyed the poem and thought its type would do well on any Wednesday.
Just finished "The Painter of Souls" by Peter Kazan. Brilliant 260-page novel on the coming of age of Fra Lippo Lippi. Mature metaphors any poet would be proud of. Deeply informed about Florentine painting circa 1427. And you'll learn more about gesso and giornata than you ever thought possible.
Very cool, Len.
I like the poems that you've discussed recently, some old favorites and some I hadn't read.
In poetry, I've recently read parts of Mary Oliver's West Wind, James Tate's Selected Poems, and a collection of Claude McKay's poems. (The Tate in particular I read at very much the wrong time and was unable to give it the attention I should have.) Besides that, I finished William Browning Spencer's The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and Other Stories (he's the broadly Lovecraftian author I like the most), and Marcus du Sautoy's Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature, which is the best introduction to the history of group theory and abstract algebra I've read. (It was especially fun reading all the stories about John Horton Conway, whom I interviewed for a student engineering magazine far too many decades ago for comfort.) It might be tough going for a very general reader (I would have suggested a bit more detail on how you get from symmetry groups to Galois' work on the [lack of] solutions of polynomials--the basic result is almost pulled from a hat and no further discussion why quintics and higher cannot have general algebraic solutions; the answer is quite sufficient if you've studied abstract algebra enough, but otherwise it's a starkly bare solitary sentence or two), but I found it had an excellent balance of detail and a comprehensive view. Oh, and a couple of mysteries by E.C.R. Lorac and Carol Carnac, same author, different pseudonyms. She had many nice touches of social commentary.
In general, alas, I've found that editing massive amounts (500,000 to 900,000 words a month) of generally substandard non-native academic prose has really butchered my desire to read long prose works. My reading these days is intended to rebuild my stamina, and it might be working.
I don't know William Browning Spencer. Thanks for tip.
All of these interest me, especially if you invite me to teach something! He typed, smiling.
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.
Two weekends ago I went with 20 or so members of our LDS congregation to do hurricane cleanup in Clinton, SC. Many of the trees were too big or too dangerous for us to completely remove or even to tackle (e.g., a 50+-foot tree lying on a metal roof). We chainsawed and removed most of one big oak. When we had cut away the top three quarters of the tree (including the limbs lying on an outbuilding and piercing its roof), its enormous root ball suddenly flipped back to the ground and re-erected the remaining 15’ of the trunk. At another job we freed a car from the limbs of a tree, jumpstarted it, and moved it out of the way.
We did a lot more, but that gives the flavor of the effort. The weather was beautiful and the people friendly.
Yesterday we returned from a sudden trip to Indiana to attend the funeral of a stillborn child. We’ve known the father since shortly after his family arrived here as refugees from a camp near Kigali. He was 17. He and my wife joined the church at about the same time. We had many adventures with him, two of his brothers, and his mother as they learned how to live here. My wife and I (especially my wife) tutored them in math and other subjects, taught them how to drive, counseled them how to behave on the job, helped them find an apartment in Iowa when they moved there for work. We went to the couple’s traditional wedding in Rwanda last November.
The funeral was a deeply sad occasion, but we got to know his wife a little better and we helped with some of the arrangements. We got to meet more of the extended network of friends and family who have come here from the camp in Rwanda. Many of them have embraced the American dream and succeeded in launching their lives here.
On more literary matters, I’m still shopping around my memoir of my father and a poetry collection. By Christmas I expect to receive the completed illustrations for a short poetico-philosophical picture book, “The Little Mouse and Creation.” I’ve been reading Edward Jay Epstein, "James Jesus Angleton--Was He Right?", Peter J. Williams, "The Surprising Genius of Jesus," Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," and rereading some favorite poems from Larkin's collected works and Horace's odes in translations by James Michie and David Ferry.
Edward Jay Epstein was a never-sufficiently-appreciated writer.
I very much enjoyed his memoirs: "Assume Nothing" with its great subtitle: "Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe." I came to him late because, probably like others, I thought he was way out on the fringe
I very much enjoyed his memoirs: "Assume Nothing" with its great subtitle: "Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe." I came to him late because, probably like others, I thought he was way out on the fringe.
I, too, am shopping a book that I really don't like to call a memoir, but more or less is. I get the impression that the market for memoirs has faded quite a bit. I've almost exhausted the possibilities for publishers that might be a good fit and also accept unsolicited work. Good luck with yours!
The Angleton book sounds interesting. I find spy stuff kind of fascinating.
I'm not too proud to self-publish if I don't succeed in finding a publisher.
Nor am I--I've already done it, a sort of best-of-my-blog collection. It's called Sunday Light, in case you would like to rush over to Amazon and buy a copy. :-) But though I'm not too proud to do it, I'm still a little ashamed. I never expected it to sell much and it did even worse than I expected. But then I never did anything to promote it except tell my friends about it.
I rushed over and I bought--the Kindle version, I'm afraid. Thanks for telling me about it.